“I couldn‘t believe that people would really want to dedicate so much time to be sexist in a musician group,” Claire Seo ’17 said. “It’s common for boys to feel like they can say anything not just in music, but school, sports and anything else that’s competitive.”
Staples musicians who saw the comments “were frankly pissed,” Schussheim said. In an effort to alert CMEA, Schussheim emailed Staples orchestra teacher, Adele Valovich, asking her to contact the officials, “in hopes that they would take action to punish the Greenwich offenders.”
However, a week later, the CMEA officials responded differently from Schussheim’s expectations.
“They responded to Valovich’s email with basically blaming me for instigating it,” she said. In their response, they recommended that anyone who was bothered by the comments should avoid the boys and leave the Facebook group.
The CMEA, however, did assure Thomas Scavone, the Westport Director of Music, that going forward, they would be hyper-vigilant.
Staples musicians said that they were most angered when they were notified of this response. Jack Whitten ’18 said that he expected more serious actions to be taken against the Greenwich students, explaining that the CMEA has very strict policies for other transgressions.
“If a student can only miss a festival due to ‘personal illness or death in the family,’ then I would expect far more important matters such as women‘s rights to be dealt with in an accordingly strict fashion,” Whitten said.
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