Saugus School Committee member Arthur Grabowski’s name was in the headlines last month, but not for the reasons committee members typically attract news coverage.
His four fellow committee members asked Grabowski to resign after he reportedly ignored a March 11 committee vote sanctioning him for comments he made about workers hired to remove snow from school property.
“We need guys who can speak English to use the snowblowers,” Grabowski is reported to have said in the presence of School Assistant Operations Manager Steve Napolitana and Superintendent Dr. David DeRuosi.
When asked by Napolitana what speaking English had to do with snow removal, Grabowski replied that non-English speakers are not “… mechanically inclined”
The Jan. 27 remark outraged Napolitana and prompted Grabowski’s committee colleagues on March 11 to condition their sanction vote on his agreeing to not visit school buildings unannounced; to take an online sensitivity-training course; and to apologize to Napolitana.
“What he said was racist, plain and simple,” said Committee member Dennis Gould.
Last month was not the first time Grabowski was asked to resign from the committee. In 2016, calls for Grabowski’s resignation came during a public hearing in the wake of felony assault charges lodged against Grabowski for allegedly hitting a man with a bag of frozen fish during an argument.
The assault charge was continued without a finding but Grabowski faced the most recent call for him to resign on March 31.
Grabowski is a classic Saugus paradox. A passionate champion for school causes he embraces, he finished third in the 2019 town election that saw two committee incumbents decide not to run for reelection.
The frozen-fish incident preceded a 2017 incident in which Grabowski was accused of yelling at a school employee and banned from entering school buildings without checking in with DeRuosi.
He may have won the support of Saugus voters in 2019, but Grabowski has lost the confidence and support of his committee colleagues. During the March 31 meeting, they stripped him of his committee assignments after receiving reports that he refused to fulfill the conditions they set on March 11.
Only the voters through a recall petition or in the next town election can remove Grabowski from the committee. But it is worth asking if his January comments triggered sufficient concern with his colleagues to compromise his effectiveness as a committee member.
Pride and apparent affinity for the role of underdog will most likely keep Grabowski from resigning. But we urge him to at least apologize to Napolitana and to the workers he disparaged.
