Pittsfield Council 'Moves On' from PHS Investigation Report
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — A city councilor is ready to move on from his unfulfilled records request on the Pittsfield High School investigation.
Last week, the City Council filed a communication that School Committee Chair William Cameron forwarded from state Supervisor of Records Manza Arthur. Arthur determined that the Pittsfield Public Schools met its burden to withhold public records, and Ward 1 Councilor Kenneth Warren's administrative appeal was closed.
"I think we need to move forward. I'm willing to move forward, so I hope people will support my motion to file this," Warren said to the five other councilors present.
The councilor said he has tried to be a watchdog of city finances and pointed to the cost of legal fees.
"If I appealed, can you imagine the legal fees that would be generated by the School Department? And if you saw what we got for $156,000 with no litigation, you can imagine what it would cost if there's litigation, and the city taxpayers do not deserve that," he added.
Three administrators and two teachers, past and present, were investigated by Bulkley Richardson and Gelinas LLP at the request of the School Committee for a range of allegations that surfaced or re-surfaced at the end of 2024 after Dean of Students Lavante Wiggins was arrested and charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office for allegedly conspiring to traffic large quantities of cocaine in Western Massachusetts.
Executive summaries released in May found allegations of misconduct "unsupported."
Because the investigation's final report was found to be useful in making employment decisions regarding an employee, Arthur determined that the district met its burden for not releasing it.
"Accordingly, I will consider this administrative appeal closed," the supervisor of records wrote.
Warren said he tries not to unnecessarily have a public dispute with another elected body, adding, "I requested these and I followed through the procedure without making a public fanfare of that. You've seen the result in the decision."
He sees "a lot" that could be appealed and thinks "some of the submissions that the School Department submitted to the state were unintentionally inaccurate."
"The main justification, if you really read that letter closely, was for the purposes of pursuing discipline. Well, that's incorrect," he said.
"… Two people were investigated who were no longer employees. Clearly, they cannot be investigated for discipline, and no such action was taken. The other thing is, if you look closely at the summary reports, several of those incidents had already been investigated, which is sort of disappointing, because we didn't know that, and so we see that the city spent $156,000 re-looking into what I count as three to four prior investigations by the School Department."
At the start of the fiscal year, the school district welcomed interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips after Joseph Curtis retired. Warren sees fresh leadership as an opportunity for change, explaining, "When problems arise, people want changes. You want to see that things don't happen again. I see those changes in this situation."
With this, new training materials, and coordination with nonprofit Enough Abuse, he thinks things are moving forward.
"I think this community needs to move forward," he said.
Resident Ciara Batory has had similar outcomes while attempting to access the full report.
In a June communication, she wrote that her requests for documentation related to administrative hiring at PHS and the cost of a publicly funded misconduct investigation were met with an exorbitant charge for labor hours.
"Yet instead of transparency, the Pittsfield Public Schools appear to be weaponizing the cost of access against the public. This is especially troubling given that the records I'm requesting concern hiring practices and a $155,000 taxpayer-funded investigation — the contents of which remain hidden from the very people who paid for it," she wrote.
"This is not just a local issue — it is a warning sign. When public officials use price tags to suppress accountability, we no longer have an open government. We have a closed system designed to protect itself at the expense of the truth."
Tags: investigation, PHS,
