More than you really want to know about Wellesley, Mass.
The Wellesley Civil Discourse Initiative recently held two dialogues on racial identity and racism in Wellesley. Due to the strong interest from the community, the organizers have added an additional in-person session on Thur., June 1, 7pm-9pm. The June 1 session will be held in person; confirmation and location will be emailed upon registration.
Dialogue participants will meet in small groups for the two-hour dialogue. To participate, please sign up by Tuesday, May 23. Space is limited.
You know what Wellesley could use? About 500 tulip trees, that’s what. If we gave every 4th grader in town a 12″ deciduous sapling from the magnolia family with instructions to plant them, it’s possible to imagine that a few years from now we’d see 12-foot high trees with cheerful blooms dotting the town.
The Rotary Club, as it has for the past 25 spring seasons, has asked kids to dig in and help make the dream a reality. In celebration of Arbor Day, and as a way to help keep the town’s designation as a Tree City intact, dozens of volunteers bagged up over 500 saplings for distribution to the 4th graders. The yearly project is done in partnership with the Department of Public Works and has made thousands of saplings available to kids.
Suzy Jordan, town horticultural technician, will next week visit classrooms, set everyone up for success with a lesson about how to plant the saplings, and pass out a tulip tree sapling to each student. “It takes several years until they start forming the tulips,” Jordan said. “They’re a cup shaped flower, just like a tulip. These will be yellow with a little bit of orange.”
With 30 years and a little luck, those skinny sticks the kids take home can reach a mature size of 120 feet, with a 40-foot spread. If the hardy hardwood can avoid pests like aphids, or verticillium wilt, a soil-borne fungus disease that attacks tree roots, tulip trees can live for up to 500 years. Luckily, tulip trees have a good track record of disease resistance, a major factor when Jordan is deciding which variety to purchase.
The Rotary Club donates the funds each year to buy the trees. Last year it was pin oaks. Other varieties they’ve sent out into the world include sweet gum, persimmon, and spruce.
Jordan let me take one home, which I planted right away in the area of my yard I’ve given over to No-Mow May (more on that in future posts). I dug a 12″-deep hole and mixed in a scoop of 3-3-3 fertilizer. The sapling went in to a depth of “bare to the flare,” a good guidepost when planting any tree. I looked for the bulge just above the the area where the roots begin to flare away from the trunk and made sure that the root flare was just above the soil surface. Next, I staked the sapling, securing it with some twine. Because I planted the tree in my No-Mow May area, which is marked off by all the sticks and branches that fell in the yard over the winter, the tulip tree has a good chance of being left to grow in peace.
Thanks to volunteers for making sapling-preparation day a success: Phyllis Theerman, Shabbeer Syed, Vin Spoto, Eylem Plter Shi Shen, Fred Wright, Ellen Korpi, Dan LaRochelle, Daniel Ryu, Tracy Turcotte, Elizabeth May, Gordon Humber, Kim Emerson, Bill Westerman, Pat Hayden, Maria Qaiser, Jeanne Hoerter, Carl Nelson, John Bradica, Elizabeth Zisis.
Have pics of a Rotary Club tree your family planted years ago? Please send pics to us at theswellesleyreport@gmail.com, and we’ll happily post them.
The Rotary Club funds the tree program, and other initiatives, through its major fundraiser, Taste of Wellesley, which takes place on Thursday, May 4, 6:30pm-9:30pm. The event will feature a wide variety of signature dishes from Wellesley restaurants, cafes, caterers, local breweries and wineries, along with live music and auction items that are locally sourced. Only 300 tickets will be sold, and they’re going fast. Get yours here, or at Roche Bros. in Linden Square or The Windsor Press (365 Washington St.).
The idea behind No-Mow May is that by waiting until June to mow lawns, clover, dandelions, and other plants have a chance to flower, thus feeding pollinators. The popularization of the idea is widely credited to Plantlife, a UK-based organization devoted to protecting and restoring wild plants and fungi. The group says that a decades-long increase in habitat loss and pesticide use has threatened the food supply of pollinators such as bees and other flying insects.
We’ve given over a corner of our yard to No-Mow May. Yes, I have misgivings. My worries, and there are many, is that the long-eradicated knotweed will sniff out weakness and come roaring back. And that the area won’t look like a casual meadow, it will just look like a hot mess. And that I’m actually growing a tick farm, and my family will get Lyme disease. And that Mr. Swellesley, my co-editor and husband, won’t be able to cut down the area at the end of May with his push mower, so we’ll have to hire someone to come out and chop down an unwieldy jungle. And that nobody will want to come out for such a rinky-dink problem of our own making, so Mr. Swellesley will have to take a scythe to the area. And because Mr. S. doesn’t know how to use a scythe, he’ll cut off his own foot.
Other than that, I’m all in on No-Mow May. More to come on my grand experiment.
The Wellesley Department of Public Works has no such anxieties. Last summer the DPW, in partnership with the Natural Resources Commission, conducted an experiment with No Mow May at Simons Park, adjacent to the Wellesley Free Library. One section of lawn was left to nature, while another section got its usual regular haircuts. The unmown part looked like a Robert Frost poem, knee-high grass swaying in the breeze, birds swooping up and down the wide swathe of sunny meadow, snagging insect treats. It really was quite pretty, and I felt a little sad when I saw the shorn results in June. The Simons Park No Mow May experiment continues this spring.
An hour in a Wellesley College professor’s garden—a visit to Little Red
Almost 40 teams faced off at the annual Wellesley Education Foundation’s Spelling Bee in the WHS cafeteria last Thursday. Teams of three participants each listened closely as word-caller Mike Dowling spat out toughies like portmanteau, milligrubs, and zougmond. In the end, it was the Hardy PTO Beehives who took home the trophy by demonstrating the correct spelling of zeusaphone. Definition: an instrument that creates sounds through producing musical tones by altering its spark output. Huh? We’re not quite clear on that either, but it apparently has something to do with Teslas. Such a Wellesley word to win on.
Wellesley Education is a heavy-hitting fundraising organization in town. Almost $224k for school initiatives was awarded via grants to WPS educators in 2021-22, benefitting all ten public schools in the district.
Congratulations to all for keeping this fun tradition going. Good times.
When Wellesley resident and Emmanuel College Professor of Sociology Catherine Simpson Bueker began researching the “multi-directional ways” in which immigrants have affected the town over the past 100-plus years, she couldn’t have imagined just how multi-directional that influence might be.
For example, in looking at Chinese immigrants, influences spanned from restaurant menus to healthcare services and from town policies to national politics. On the national front, the Wellesley Townsman editor urged residents in 1943 to write their senators to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, and in particular called on friends of Soong Mei-ling, aka, Madame Chiang Kai-shek (First Lady of the Republic of China) from her time at Wellesley College. The Act was repealed, and notable thanks to the town came from Dr. Tehy Hsieh, an economist and lawyer from China living in the area who was a major liaison between the Chinese community in the Boston area and established residents.
“This was an example of a small town flexing some muscle in response to a possible federal policy change,” says Bueker, whose research over the years has focused on “the ways in which people engage civically and politically in American society and how they become a part of the public sphere.”
Locally, the owners of Chin’s Village restaurant on Rte. 9 pushed for and won support for changes in local alcohol serving rules. In the community, Chinese cooking classes were being taught in the 1960s by non-Asian residents.
Bueker’s current research focuses on the impact of Chinese as well as Italian and Jewish immigrants and their children on individuals, groups, and organizations—specifically “established” Americans (3-plus generations)—using Wellesley as a case study. Traditionally, these immigrants were concentrated in certain areas of town, such as Jewish residents near the “bird” streets close to the temple, Italian residents near the high school and Italo American Educational Club, and Chinese residents near Hardy Elementary School. Because of this, residents in certain areas of town weren’t necessarily all that aware of what was happening in other parts.
The research tests a theory called “neo-assimilation” which Bueker describes as “the idea that as immigrants enter into the United States, it is not just that they change to become more like ‘established’ Americans (those born in the U.S. to U.S.-born parents), but that established Americans also change.”
Bueker further illustrates the point:
“We often think about our society as being pretty static and closed, kind of like a lake, that individuals enter into. Immigrants swim across the lake and by the time they, or their children, make it across, they have assimilated’ to the waters in which they are swimming. In reality, we know that society is constantly changing, but we don’t think about that day to day. Really, we should think about society, big or small, as more like a river moving through the landscape. The water upstream is different than the water downstream as a result of who enters along the way. The swimmers are changed in the process, but so is the water.”
Data collection has been undertaken by Bueker and 3 student researchers, with Wellesley Townsman archives being a key resource combined with some 80 interviews of lifelong residents as well as community leaders, the local business community, and various organizations (including ours).
Newspaper advertisements have been particularly telling of trends, such as which foods were being promoted in grocery store circulars. Overall, using the archives since the early 1900s has allowed for a consistent longitudinal view of how those immigrant groups have affected the community, whereas the individual interviews provide additional color, detail, and opinion, but rely on people’s not-always-accurate memories.
Here’s a timeline representing the diffusion of Chinese medicine and healthcare practices in Wellesley:
The research is being conducted through a 2-year Russell Sage Foundation grant that goes until the end of 2024, and the output from it will include a book, articles, and a research paper to be presented at the American Sociological Association meeting in Philadelphia this August. Research should be completed by the end of summer.
How the findings might apply to other communities will be nuanced, Bueker says, as immigration varies from place to place, both in terms of the number of immigrants, the level of education of immigrants entering communities, and their income levels. “I do think the findings will be applicable, but with a footnote,” she says.
Author of Give Us the Ballot, by Ari Berman will be speaking on Tuesday, March 21, 6:30pm-8:30pm, at Tishman Commons in the Lulu Wang Campus Center at Wellesley College.
Tickets are $5 for this event. Register here.
Ari Berman is a journalist, national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones, and Reporting Fellow at Type Media Center. Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.
This event is sponsored by World of Wellesley, in partnership with the League of Women Voters, Wellesley College and Wellesley Books. You can purchase a copy of Give Us the Ballot through Wellesley Books.
The latest Wellesley Public Schools news:
The Wellesley Educators Association, which gathered on Saturday for another rally at Town Hall, issued a vote of no confidence in Supt. Dr. David Lussier and the School Committee. Members of the union have been working without a contract since July of 2022, and the state’s Department of Labor Relations is now stepping in by assigning a mediator.
The resolution issued by the WEA stated that members voted no confidence in the superintendent and School Committee “due to their failure to support common-sense, student-centered proposals that are critical to preventing the deterioration of the quality of education in the Town of Wellesley…”
The School Committee holds its next public meeting on March 21, and the agenda includes a closed-door executive session regarding negotiations with the union.
School Committee member Catherine Mirick, part of the bargaining team, said in a statement: “The School Committee has been bargaining in good faith for more than a year with the Wellesley Educators Association. We have agreed to 34 of the proposals that the WEA brought forward and, in the month of February, we offered more concessions. Despite all of this movement, including an unprecedented financial package, the Committee has seen no similar movement from the WEA. Negotiations require both parties to find common ground and compromise and, thus far, the WEA has been unwilling to do this.”
Mirick said the Committee is hopeful that working with a mediator will result in a resolution.
The WPS website includes an FAQ with updates on the collective bargaining progress, and says the School Committee has scheduled mediation sessions with the WEA coming up on March 22 and April 6 (the first was on March 17).
The Wellesley Public Schools issued a vote of confidence for Dr. Jorge Allen, who was named director of diversity, equity, and inclusion effective July 1. He’s been serving in that role on an interim basis since June.
Allen joined the school system at the start of last year as K-12 program coordinator of English language learners.
WPS will be seeking a new English Learners director effective July 1.
Dr. Lisa Damour will discuss “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers” at an event on Thursday, March 23 at 7pm at the Wellesley Middle School auditorium. The program is sponsored by the Wellesley High and Wellesley Middle School PTOs. RSVP required.
Hundreds of students gathered to celebrate French culture at Wellesley Middle School’s annual French Fête earlier this month thanks to the efforts of teachers and many volunteers. The event in the cafeteria highlighted the French language and the cultures of the French-speaking world.
Students had the chance to taste a variety of foods donated by local businesses and made by parent volunteers (special thanks to Lisa Sewall for her real pains au chocolat and méringues dipped in chocolate). Entertainment included games as well as flash mob dances to French pop songs (Crepeberry donated gift cards to the flash mob dance contest winners).
The event was organized by parents Christine Bassem, Catherine Cerio, Rebecca Paglia, Kathleen Stevens, and Aisha Usmani, and WMS French teachers Hafsa Abdelmoula, Rebecca Blouwolff, and Susan Ridker, with funding and additional support from the PTO and many families. Wellesley High Key Club members helped out, including several former WMS French students, who weren’t about to miss out on this party.
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Are you retired or retiring in the near future? As an older adult, have you decided to remain in your community, active and engaged? Wellesley Neighbors is a nonprofit, membership organization for couples and singles aged 60 and older who seek new friends, activities and support. Members live in Dover, Natick, Needham, Wellesley, and Weston, with a few from Framingham, Sherborn and Holliston. Join some of us on Thursday, March 23 at 11am in the Community Room at the Weston Public Library, 87 School Street, Weston. Learn about what we offer and have your questions addressed. If you are unable to join us, obtain information from Joyce Wadlington at director@wellesleyneighbors.org or 781-283-0417, ext. 1.
Wellesley College students on Tuesday voted in favor of a non-binding referendum to make transgender men and nonbinary people assigned male at birth eligible for admission.
Students also voted in favor of replacing gender-specific language with gender-neutral language in college communications.
The school administration said it will not change its policies following the college government ballot vote: “Although there is no plan to revisit its mission as a women’s college or its admissions policy, the College will continue to engage all students, including transgender male and nonbinary students, in the important work of building an inclusive academic community where everyone feels they belong.”
Many student groups, from the choir to the newspaper, over the past week have issued statements in opposition to a March 6 memo from President Dr. Paul Johnson titled “Affirming our mission and embracing our community.”
In that memo, Johnson wrote that: “What does Wellesley mean by ‘a women’s college’? In accordance with our admission policy, Wellesley admits applicants who identify and live consistently as women, regardless of the gender they were assigned at birth. Our community includes students from a broad spectrum of racial, ethnic, geographic, socioeconomic, and religious groups. We know that the experience of living and learning as part of a diverse student body leads to better educational outcomes and helps prepare students to be the leaders, changemakers, and citizens the world so desperately needs.”
The college in 2015 updated its gender policy to allow admission for transgender women.
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