The Moment Anna Griese Stopped Being Ignorable
What the fight over board president reveals about discipline, safety, and accountability in Saugus schools
Some leftist activists have framed tonight’s Saugus Union School District meeting as a personality dispute. In reality, it is something far more serious. What is unfolding is a test of whether the board is willing to confront institutional failure honestly or continue managing decline through process, optics, and deflection.
At the center of the controversy is the selection of the board president, a role that is often misunderstood. Much like a mayor in a council-manager system, the board president does not run the district. The position is largely ceremonial, responsible for presiding over meetings, setting the tone, and acting as the public face of the board for the coming year. Precisely because the authority is limited, the intensity of the backlash surrounding this vote is revealing. Elevating Griese would give sustained visibility to critiques of institutional decay that others would prefer remain muted.
That reaction brings us to the real reason Anna Griese has become a target.
Anna Griese’s offense is not that she lacks qualifications, misunderstands policy, or violates governance norms. Her offense is that she publicly challenged Superintendent Colleen Hawkins when discipline failures and campus violence were escalating. While other trustees avoided confrontation and deferred action, Griese repeatedly pressed for answers, demanded accountability, and insisted that student and teacher safety be treated as an immediate concern rather than a distant goal. In an environment where political careers often deteriorate under pressure, Griese’s willingness to confront district failure has strengthened her credibility in the eyes of many early doubters.
In doing so, she violated the most important unspoken rule in education governance: never confront the superintendent publicly while failure is plainly visible to anyone paying attention. That act alone explains the coordinated effort to block her from any visible leadership role. The goal is not to disprove her arguments, but to ensure the public never seriously engages with them. That pattern helps explain why these controversies recur so regularly.
What makes the attacks on Griese particularly weak is that they are contradicted by the district’s own admissions. In an email shared with this Substack, Superintendent Hawkins outlined the current status of the district’s behavior and discipline initiatives.
The picture that emerges is not one of control or clarity, but of fragmentation and delay, accompanied by familiar assurances that improvement will come with time, once the district resolves basic questions of supervision and enforcement.
Hawkins and most of the trustees have failed to deliver consistent academic and behavioral outcomes. Their expansion into amateur psychology, sociology, and social philosophy is difficult to explain, except that they are doing so with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children. This dynamic is far more common in education than in most other fields; few people would be confident—let alone comfortable—in any other industry, arguing that a lack of self-esteem produces felons or that its presence produces scholars. Yet American schools are saturated with the belief that self-esteem and social-emotional learning must come before performance rather than result from it. The idea that confidence is earned through competence and effort, rather than distributed in advance by institutions, is increasingly absent from American schools.
According to the district, there is no active full Behavior Council. Instead, work has been broken into multiple subcommittees with no unified implementation schedule. Enforcement of behavior strategies is described as “wholly dependent” on individual teachers, with an acknowledgment that some struggle to implement the programs and others refuse outright. Most strikingly, the district concedes that full implementation may take three to five years.
This matters because violence and disruption are not theoretical future problems. They are present realities. When safety issues are escalating now, a multi-year rollout built on voluntary compliance is not a plan. It is an admission that leadership has ceded control. Speak privately with educators inside SUSD, and a consistent pattern emerges: reports of a hostile environment and retaliation toward those who raise concerns. That reality helps explain why increasing numbers of ignored teachers have been speaking out at board meetings to be heard.
Against this backdrop, it becomes easier to understand why teachers began expressing support for Griese quietly rather than publicly. She has been the only trustee consistently willing to press leadership on safety and discipline failures. That persistence makes her inconvenient to those who prefer managed meetings over uncomfortable questions. Elevating her visibility would risk exposing just how thin the board’s defenses really are.
Instead, the response has followed a familiar pattern: information leaks, activist amplification, and a manufactured narrative designed to justify keeping her sidelined. Despite the online noise, however, teacher support for Griese is not ideological. It is practical. Teachers understand what district leadership avoids stating plainly: you cannot teach effectively in chaos, you cannot build “culture” in unsafe classrooms, and you cannot ask staff to absorb escalating behavior issues while waiting years for institutional fidelity.
This is not a left-right issue. It is a working-conditions issue.
Unable to defend the district’s performance, Griese’s critics have instead turned to labeling. The invocation of the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority, combined with guilt-by-association arguments, is not meant to clarify facts or improve governance. It is meant to end the debate. Rather than demonstrating that Griese violated policy, disrupted meetings, or misrepresented the district, opponents focus on tone, “energy,” and associations as substitutes for substantive argument.
The contrast between Griese and her fellow trustees is not subtle. She listens to teachers and parents, even when the feedback is uncomfortable. Others have responded to dissent very differently. In 2018, then-board president Chris Trunkey publicly apologized after the Saugus Teachers Association filed a complaint about actions taken during his re-election campaign, including researching a union leader’s voting record, which the union described as an attempt to “dig up dirt.” This is just one example; a quick search of this substack will give a laundry list of head-turning scandals that were met with Hawkins saying “nothing to see here keep moving.”
When outcomes cannot be defended, accusations replace arguments, and disagreement itself is treated as evidence of wrongdoing rather than a basis for discussion. This pattern did not emerge overnight. As previously documented by AccountableSCV (here and here), efforts to sideline Griese have followed a familiar trajectory: selective leaks, activist amplification, and the substitution of accusation for argument.
That is not accountability. It is social discipline disguised as concern.
Ultimately, the board is not choosing a savior or a strongman tonight. It is about the signal the board chooses to send to staff, parents, and the community. One option says that order, safety, and accountability still matter. The other says that tone, process, and institutional comfort matter more than outcomes.
If Anna Griese is selected as board president, it will not be because of activist pressure or online noise. It will be because the teachers' union has made it clear they are no longer willing to absorb systemic failure in silence. If she is not selected, that decision will also speak volumes—because no substantive justification has been offered for denying her the role.
I don’t know what will happen tonight, but one thing is clear: Anna Griese can no longer be ignored. As the saying often attributed to Gandhi puts it, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Griese is now firmly in the “fight” stage. Whatever the outcome, the record is public. When it mattered most, one trustee asked hard questions while others looked away. No amount of labeling can erase that.
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