Duxbury Football Team Meets With Sen. Finegold: Patch PM

BURLINGTON, MA — It's Monday, March 29. Here's what you should know this afternoon:

• The coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc on higher education.
• The governor's race continues to take shape as a top Boston Democrat considers running.
• Coronavirus transmission remains low in Massachusetts schools, according to the state's pooled testing program.

Scroll down for more on those and other stories Patch has been covering in Massachusetts today.

Today's Top Story

State Sen. Barry Finegold, a Jewish former football player, met Saturday with the high school team that was using anti-Semitic play calls. The meeting occurred after it came out the Duxbury High football team was using Jewish and Holocaust-related terms for play calls, an incident that cost the team's successful coach his job.

Finegold, who represents Andover, Dracut, Lawrence and Tewksbury in the state senate, played football at Andover High School and Franklin & Marshall College.

The Duxbury school district acknowledged last week that the team had "used highly offensive language on the field as part of a play-call system designed to make on-field adjustments" during a recent game. One of the calls was "Auschwitz," the name of a Nazi concentration camp in Poland where over a million people, including nearly one million Jews, were killed. Finegold spoke to the team about the Holocaust Saturday.

"There is a term in Judaism known as t'shuvah (תשובה‎), which means 'return' or 'repentance,'" Finegold said. "I sincerely hope we will move forward, and move forward stronger than before. I believe that we can use the incident in Duxbury as a crucial learning opportunity."

Read the full story here

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A "very painful decision": Becker College in Worcester is closing its doors for good after this spring semester. The college's Board of Trustees announced the decision Monday in a statement. The closure comes after a year of the 237-year-old school struggling through the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to that, struggles with declining college-age students, the heightened level of student subsidy and the increased competition for a smaller pool of students, according to the board.

Will she run?: One former state senator is already running for governor on the Democratic side of the ticket, and now a current member of the Senate says she is "seriously considering" a campaign for the corner office next year when Gov. Charlie Baker's second term expires. Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz, a Boston Democrat and the first Latinx woman to serve in the state Senate, said Monday that she is looking at the race for governor in 2022. Chang-Diaz was a key player in efforts to pass school funding reform in 2019, and helped negotiate a overhaul of policing oversight and accountability laws last year in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. (State House News Service)

Emails didn't come easy: It took Framingham almost three months and intervention by the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office to release three emails related to the resignation of the city's former health director — an ordeal that underscores how governments can use state law to withhold potentially damaging information. The emails released this week showed that Dr. Sam Wong, Mayor Yvonne Spicer and spokeswoman Kelly McFalls were discussing how to describe Wong's resignation. At the time, multiple reports said Wong had resigned and sent a resignation letter to state and local officials during the last week of December. But for weeks, McFalls asserted Wong was on medical leave and had not officially resigned.

Funds come in after tragedy: An online fundraiser for a Bedford mother murdered during an alleged domestic violence incident on a popular Maine beach has surpassed $24,000. Rhonda Pattelena, 35, was killed Friday on Short Sands Beach in York, Maine. Jeffrey Buchannan, 33, also of Bedford, was arrested. Pattelena and Buchannan had a child together, police said. (CBS Boston)

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They Said It

"Not only were we expecting this complaint from BC, but also it is within their rights to make this claim and is not unusual in matters involving eminent domain takings."

Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller talking about Boston College's civil lawsuit arguing the $15.2 million her city gave the school in exchange for the 17 acres of Webster Woods was not fair compensation.

By The Numbers

0.76 — That's the percentage of the 22,679 pooled tests from Massachusetts schools to come back positive under the state's program, which is being extended through the end of the school year.