Residents Engaged for Sharon Excellence and Transparency
Residents Engaged for Sharon Excellence and Transparency
When elected officials make decisions behind closed doors, it hits hard – especially in Sharon, MA where our public schools are the heart of our community.
Over the past few months, the way certain members of the Sharon School Committee handled the search for our new superintendent has left many of us deeply concerned. Instead of the transparent, honest, and collaborative process our town deserves, their actions have instead been irresponsible, gone against their campaign promises, and been out of touch with what Sharon stands for.
Our community deeply values integrity, trust, and active civic involvement, but this recent process has done the exact opposite: it has eroded public trust, and put the well-being of our students and teachers at risk. The central issue is not simply whether Dr. Jocelyn can ultimately be a successful superintendent – it’s whether Sharon used an appropriate process to make one of the most important decisions a school committee makes.
We take immense pride in our school system, and we owe it to our kids, staff, and neighbors to hold our leaders to a higher standard. Join us in telling our school committee that their actions are unacceptable to the
Sharon community.
The TL;DR: what actually happened
School Committees across Massachusetts follow a standardized, highly-regulated process to hire superintendents. Sharon circumvented all but the last standard phase in this process, which is highly unusual for such an important decision.
The Sharon School Committee decided on its next superintendent in a single 24-minute meeting immediately after learning the position would become vacant nearly a year later. This also raised concerns around Open Meeting Law violations, as Committee deliberations must occur publicly.
There was no public interview, structured community input, candidate evaluation, or consideration of alternatives. The appointment also disregarded the Committee’s own superintendent hiring policy (Policy CBB), which calls for broad recruitment, screening, and interviews, and meaningful community participation.
At the next meeting, despite serious concerns raised by the Sharon Teachers Association, the Special Education Parent Advisory Council, a school administrator, and a petition signed by more than 700 people, the School Committee dug in their heels and refused to revisit the appointment. Chair Dan Newman defended the process as legal, and stated that he sought legal advice about the process before the meeting.
Residents have now called for a vote of no confidence scheduled for October 22nd. The question is not simply whether the Committee’s actions were legal, but whether residents have confidence and trust in how the School Committee has conducted itself and exercises its authority.
Choosing a superintendent is perhaps the most important decision in the hands of our school committee. For this reason, due diligence and following standard procedures are critical to ensuring a fair, comprehensive, and transparent search. Our school committee ignored all policy and common sense to rush a decision that will impact Sharon schools for years to come.
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A violation of its own guidelines: In 2021, the school committee voted to enact Policy CBB, a policy that three current members themselves (Avi Shemtov, Adam Shain and Julie Rowe) voted for. Despite the policy explicitly stating that “the Committee will advertise the open position broadly,” and “in no case should a candidate be hired as Superintendent without sufficient public involvement,” the very people who chose to enact this policy violated its spirit by rushing into a direct appointment with no application process or community input.
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Falsely framing this process as “normal”: Some Sharon School Committee members have falsely equated their hasty, closed-door process to neighboring Easton’s recent superintendent hire. When Easton’s superintendent retired, the town didn't just rush through a 20-minute vote – they conducted an extensive, transparent review of nine-year district veteran Crissy Pruitt. Easton's process included a public interview, input from teachers, students, parents, and administrators, and a detailed vision presentation by Ms. Pruitt on culture, curriculum, and budget. Sharon’s rush job lacked the diligence and care shown by Easton, and our committee must stop pretending these processes were equivalent, or that what our school committee did was normal.
When you are faced with a situation where the backlash in the community is this intense, and I have to say, I've never seen anything like this in the 10 years I've been on the Finance Committee. To me, the right attitude would have been to, you know, 'sorry we made a mistake...'
We are all human. We all make mistakes, but once we are confronted with the fact that it was a mistake, what we did, I think we should correct it and not just kind of dig in and keep going.
– Finance Committee vice chair, Anja Bernier
Clear and widespread frustration from the community, as evidenced by social media posts and meeting attendance, underscore a growing disconnect between our elected officials and the community they serve. New representation is critical to repair the broken trust and build functional working relationships with teachers and voters.
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Broken trust with our teachers: It can’t be stated enough how important teachers are to the success of our schools. The statement made by STA co-president, Scott Tarantino at the August 12th School Committee meeting speaks volumes to how, following their reckless actions, this School Committee is viewed by our teacher community.
I cannot tell you the amount of emails I've gotten from teachers completely appalled by the lack of process, that there was absolutely no process whatsoever, and that you left out not only the community, but your teachers, who are the most important stakeholders – the community and the teachers – when it comes to the next superintendent and who's going to run the school district.
I do have to wonder how the school committee might feel if we started to follow your policies the way that you follow your own. You have a set of policies for hiring a superintendent. Imagine if we just decided to just look at your policies and say that we could do whatever we wanted with them. That would be pretty bad. I think we'd have a pretty chaotic system. I can guarantee you our teachers will never do that because we have a moral obligation, a professional obligation, that we follow every day, and we would think that the school committee would do the same, and it's pretty sad for us that this didn't happen.
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Misleading statements on public record: In his presentation to the community on August 12th, addressing a statement by a community member regarding a sexism complaint, Dr. Jocelyn stated that no complaint of any kind had ever been lodged against him. The chair then elaborated by doubling down, choosing the narrowest legal reading of the matter, while Dr. Jocelyn explicitly denied knowledge of any complaint at all.
Whether the complaint was founded or not, Dr. Jocelyn was indeed named in a complaint filed in 2025 along with two other administrators. This shows a lack of honesty and transparency on both the parts of our committee chair and Dr. Jocelyn that raise significant concerns.
Throughout this process of collecting signatures, filing records requests, sharing information about what's occurred, and attending town meetings, many members of the Sharon community have experienced bullying and intimidation from their neighbors and even members of the School Committee itself, leading to fears of signing the petition or speaking up publicly for repercussions on themselves or their families. The initial actions of the hasty superintendent appointment vote are what motivated this petition, but the behavior surrounding the aftermath, both in person and online, has provided even more evidence that this vote is necessary.
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Inappropriate outreach: once signatures on the petition were certified and released, signers reported being personally called by School Committee members who saw their names listed. Others have faced public, online accusations of lies and acting in bad faith with no evidence to support the claim.
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Doxxing of a private citizen: School Committee chair Dan Newman admitted to leaking the un-redacted response to a Sharonite's open meeting law complaint to the admin of a town Facebook group. The group admin claimed she has her “claws in a lot of information,” leading to further concerns about what may have been inappropriately shared. While Dan apologized and admitted his wrongdoing, his actions were at best, a clear example of careless handling of citizens’ private information, or at worst, an attempt to intimidate dissenters into silence.
Sharon residents should always feel safe participating in public discourse and asking difficult questions of their elected officials without fear of personal repercussions.
This whole doxxing incident is just quite frankly outrageous. This is confidential information, the person, that somebody filed this complaint. You can't just put that out there, it's just not ok. And it's not even a question of legality, which I highly doubt it was legal, but even if it were, it's just not ok. It's not ethical. And so for me, this is what kind of put me over the edge.
– Finance Committee vice chair, Anja Bernier
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FinComm says no confidence, and no to harassment: on September 22nd, the Finance Committee voted 6-2-2 in favor of the no confidence motion at the upcoming Special Town Meeting, and in the process made a strong statement that voter intimidation or doxxing will not be tolerated. A clip of Vice Chair Anja Bernier's statement is below, or you can watch the full meeting recording here, as well as strong statements by the Select Board against bullying and harassment from the 9/24 meeting here.
Why vote YES on 10/22
Our town, students and teachers deserve responsible and honest conduct from its elected officials. Without a major change in our school committee, the future of our public schools is at a clear risk.
Our core principles and commitments
RESET is a group of local residents formed to promote responsibility, community inolvement, and transparency in our town politics, especially our School Committee. We are dedicated to bringing deeper community engagement and honest processes to town operations that lend themselves to a stronger Sharon and seamless transfer of power between candidates moving on and off committees.
We believe disagreement and discourse are healthy and necessary parts of public activism, and we encourage everyone to keep their focus on the issues and decisions made by our elected officials rather than any individual’s character – we do not partake in or condone any personal shaming, or attacks on school employees, elected officials, or community members.
We welcome members from across the spectrum of town residents regardless of political, religious, cultural, or other background. If you think that the “public” in public schools means schools should be working to serve all students, then you’ve found the right place.