CATSKILL - There is a guy named Bill Shakespeare who probably wishes he’d dreamed up the drama unfolding in Catskill over a high school play.
It’s a musical actually, “Cinderella,” and the Catskill school district usually isn’t within our radar but another reporter, Andrea Macko, has been covering events in the river town and doing it splendidly.
Andrea is the pen behind “Porcupine Soup,” an online newspaper, and a crackerjack investigative journalist who’s just doing her job.
Catskill school administrators haven’t made that easy, not even leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for Andrea to follow to the facts.
She has gotten to them anyway. This all started for our newspaper a couple of weeks ago when I got a phone call from a source tipping me off that students at the school were going to stage a walkout.
I knew nothing about it at the time so I reached out to Andrea, knowing that is her regular beat. She was already on it and brought me up to speed.
We published a story here, at that time, and since then we have been waiting to see the ending before doing any more writing.
It may not be over yet but the two central characters have returned to their respective positions at the school and it seems, in the words of the Great Bard, to be much ado about nothing.
But don’t tell that to high school principal Junait Shah and musical director Michelle Storrs-Ryan who were suspended on February 28 amid the investigation of an incident involving tape on a student’s mouth.
“That student [an eleventh grader] has maintained that no harm was done and said that she placed tape on her own mouth as a joke during musical rehearsals,” Andrea reported.
Storrs-Ryan had playfully suggested she was going to start taping the kids’ mouths if they didn’t hush and one eleventh-grader did it for her, or so the story goes, which sounds simple but somehow it got very complicated.
Before getting into the weeds on all that, the students did their walkout and parents protested in the streets and outside a closed-door school board meeting, demanding Shah and Storrs-Ryan be reinstated.
School administrators were tiptoeing through the tulips, not revealing any specific allegations, not directly naming Shah or Storrs-Ryan and never confirming that either educator was formally suspended.
A light through yonder window broke when Andrea learned via postings by Sara Pickens Verdon, the president of the Catskill Music Parent-Student Association, that Shah was being investigated for alleged “inaction.”
Storrs-Ryan was under district scrutiny for allegedly “harming a child.” It all surrounded the mouth-taping and it was initially looked into, with Shah reportedly determining it was kids harmlessly kidding around.
Life went on and then it didn’t. Shah and Storrs-Ryan, who is also the chorus teacher, were put on the shelf and then life got worse.
Marcus McGregor, a choreographer and contracted employee who stepped in to direct the musical in the absence of Storrs-Ryan, was fired by the district after a TV news interview where he named alleged names.
McGregor purportedly identified the source of the official complaint, the parents of another student who is part of the “Cinderella” production.
Truth or fiction, it has caused many theories to pop up over the possible irony surrounding one of the oldest motivations in show biz.
Which is where the plot thickens related to the complaint-filing parents (who purportedly have close ties to the school district), the Human Resources department (and how it came to its in-house conclusions) and school superintendent Dan Wilson (now being cast as the “villain”).
Nobody is explaining anything. A petition is being circulated and a letter has been sent by other parents calling for a “no confidence” vote from the school board and the dismissal of Superintendent Wilson.
Andrea, meanwhile, has submitted Freedom of Information Law requests to the district and the show must go on. “Cinderella,” originally scheduled for March 15-17, was postponed during the mayhem with Storrs-Ryan.
It has been re-scheduled for sometime in April, and with both Shah and Storrs-Ryan back in the fold, one must wonder why this ran so amok.
Which calls to mind some lines from “Romeo and Juliet,” that little ditty Bill scratched out that contains a scene with Romeo and his pal Horatio.
Romeo and Horatio see a ghost. Horatio is awestruck by the strangeness of it. Hamlet comforts him, saying, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
And when the fairy dust settles on “Cinderella,” it will be interesting to see who the glass slipper fits and who it does not. (And any resemblance to actual persons in this tale is literary coincidence).
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