Published in the June 18, 2021 edition.

By MARK SARDELLA

WAKEFIELD — If you filled out the School Department’s survey on the Warrior logo last March, you did so in the belief that your personal information and opinions would not be shared with the public. The School Department assured you of that.

“While the survey requires your full name, physical address and email address, personal information will NOT be shared with the public,” was the explicit guarantee in the survey’s introduction. (The word “NOT” was written in all caps for emphasis.)

But it wasn’t true. Not if you’re age 18 or older.

“We shared this information with one community member and we just want people to know that,” School Superintendent Doug Lyons admitted at a recent School Committee meeting. “We apologize that this mistake was made and we just want to assure everyone that this mistake will not happen again.”

The survey was sent out in mid-March to gauge public opinion of the high school’s Warrior logo, which had long consisted of an image of a Native American in a headdress. The survey was part of a “process” used by the School Committee to determine the fate of the logo. On March 23, the School Committee voted to eliminate the Warrior logo. A month later, Town Election voters favored keeping the logo by a wide margin in a non-binding ballot question. 

Lyons explained that the School Department received a public records request from a local resident for the data from the Warrior logo survey. He said that Town Counsel Thomas Mullen was consulted and he said that, while student survey results were protected, the adult surveys were subject to public records requests and had to be released.

“In the survey, it said that this information would not be released to the public,” Lyons admitted. “That was incorrect.” He said that school officials “genuinely thought” that all the surveys were protected under the student records law. 

“We were mistaken,” he said.

Lyons said it will be made clear in future surveys of adults that the information is subject to public records requests.

School Committee member Ami Wall called the situation “a little disheartening.” She asked Lyons why name, phone number and email were required on the Warrior logo survey and wondered if such information is typically required on surveys sent out by the School Department.

Lyons didn’t answer the broader question, but said that name, address and email were required on the Warrior logo survey as a way to make sure respondents had a connection to Wakefield. He claimed that other surveys sent out by the schools have gotten responses from other parts of the country.

School Committee member Mike Boudreau suggested that people have to be taken at their word. 

“We have to trust that it’s not a person from Seattle, Washington responding to the survey,” he said.

School Committee chair Suzy Veilleux said that the reality is that any data that people supply can be requested as a public record.

“The intent certainly was never to share that information,” she said. She maintained that there was concern on both sides that if names and addresses were not required, people would fill out the survey multiple times.

“How would we know if they’re tied to the community?” she wondered.

She maintained that the personal information was required “with the best intentions” in order to “keep everybody above board.”

“That came back to bite us,” Veilleux lamented.

“We believed it was confidential only to find out that it was not,” she said. “It probably should not have happened. We’ve gotten some concerned emails about this topic. We thought it was time to admit that we didn’t handle this quite right and we’re going to learn from it.”