For the past few years, the Telling Our Stories segment of the annual Day of Racial Reform and Solidarity (DoRRS) has centered around speeches from students and staff about their personal experiences surrounding race, recited live. This year’s event in January, 2025 will be different: The speeches will be pre-recorded.

The decision to pre-record the speeches has sparked a broader debate around the power and impact of a live speech. Organizers say it was made with the intention to facilitate safety and encourage educated discussions given a speech that divided community members—including staff—during last year’s DoRRS.

DoRRS is an event dedicated to exploring topics related to race and racism through lessons, guest speakers and the stories of community members. It is one in a series of other “Days of,” including the Day of Dialogue (devoted to LGBTQ+ issues), Day of Change (devoted to combatting rape culture) and Day of Disability Education.

The students opposing the decision to pre-record the speeches—like senior Soraya Karimi-Geransayeh, a speaker at last year’s Telling Our Stories and an emcee this year—have worked over the past few weeks to convince the organizers and administration to return the event to its original format. They argue that the new format undermines the authenticity of speeches and sends a message that the stories don’t matter as much.

“Pre-recording it just takes away all the power from your voice,” Karimi-Geransayeh said.

According to an email from Head of School Anthony Meyer to the group of students, however, the pre-recorded format will not be changed this year.

The speeches, recorded on Wednesday, Nov. 20, will be accompanied by a lesson featuring individual reflection, small group conversations and class-wide discussions.

The format of DoRRS has changed throughout its existence, and this school year will not be the first instance of pre-recording.

Historically, speakers during the Telling Our Stories block have read their speeches in the Roberts/Dubbs Auditorium to a full, live audience. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, speeches were pre-recorded, and after that, organizers began gradually bringing viewers back into the auditorium. Last year, speakers read their speeches to a full, live audience once again.

‘A mic drop’

The decision to pre-record the speeches comes after a large-scale controversy following last year’s Telling Our Stories assembly when a student went off script and alluded to the war in Gaza in his speech. Certain sections of his speech upset and divided community members, many of whom found it to be hateful and antisemitic.

In response, the Brookline Coalition Against Antisemitism wrote a Letter to the Editors of The Cypress, arguing that the speech was inaccurate and deeply harmful to Jewish and Israeli students.

Social studies teacher Marcie Miller published a blog post in The Times of Israel in July of 2024, detailing her experiences with the aftermath of DoRRS that year. She described how, after the speech, the email group with high school staff and faculty “blew up” with arguments around whether the speech was antisemitic and whether it had violated the rules of the programming.

“We always say, ‘Oh, this harmed you, this felt this way to you, let’s talk about why.’ But instead, it was like, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ So, it became really divisive in an atmosphere that’s supposed to be about unity,” Miller said in an interview with The Cypress.

Miller said the live format of DoRRS last year allowed the student to go off script and removed the ability to debrief what the student had shared with the school.

“It felt like, you tell your story, and then it’s a mic drop, you’re done. There’s no discussion, there’s no, ‘I have questions for you.’” Miller said. “We have no choice but to hear whatever you might say, and it could be harmful to people.”

The division as a result of the speech was, in part, why Telling Our Stories organizer and Spanish teacher Lindsay Davis, along with other DoRRS organizers, chose to hit the record button this year.

“Because of last year and the destabilization after Telling Our Stories, it was like, how do we avoid destabilization again?” Davis said.

However, some parents and community members have already raised complaints at a Brookline School Committee (BSC) meeting about a student speaker at the upcoming DoRRS, who they fear will spread antisemitic messages in his pre-recorded speech. Many speakers mentioned a social media post that showed the student participating in a pro-Palestinian protest, where he made statements that some perceive as anti-Israel.

According to the student’s mother, who spoke during the meeting, his speech will be about “being silenced as a Palestinian student living in Brookline.”

At the meeting, Davis tried to clarify multiple of the parents’ misconceptions about the speaker.

“I have read each of the speeches of the day. None of them are hateful,” Davis said. “Students are watching and listening to us tonight, and I would encourage us to lead with curiosity and welcome dialogue to support our collective learning moving forward.”

‘A massive ask’

Beyond the controversy last year, Davis said the live assembly format of Telling Our Stories often deprioritized the speakers and left their speeches underappreciated.

“As a teacher, it really breaks my heart when I see kids on their phones in the auditorium talking to each other, and folks on the stage have just bled their heart out, and everyone gets up and leaves,” Davis said. “It feels like this massive ask for the speakers and no accountability on the rest of the school to do anything with what they’ve said.”

To combat this, Davis said the new pre-recorded, lesson-based format is designed to facilitate discussions about each speaker’s story. The lesson plan includes time for individual reflection, followed by conversation prompts such as, “Did you connect with anything you heard in the speeches?” and “What can BHS learn as a community from this story? Now that we know better, what can we do better?”

Davis said she thinks this facilitated discussion is important to be able to truly listen to and understand all speakers.

“The intention is very much: ‘Let’s actually interact with what we’ve heard,’” she said.

The format is also intended to ensure the safety of the speakers, according to Davis.

“Because speeches were live, some kids in the audience on their phones were recording and then sent that to their families, and it got outside of school,” she said. “And part of what I heard from last year’s DoRRS folk and the administration was, how do we better protect students?”

Within the lesson plan, teachers are instructed to not digitally share the lesson’s slides with their class, even if students are absent, and to not share the pre-recorded videos on “social media or any public or private platforms.”

‘That cannot be real’

Senior Melanie Ho signed up this year to tell her story at DoRRS, assuming last year’s format would carry over. She said she heard about the pre-recording through an email.

“I was like, ‘Wait, what, that cannot be real,’” Ho said.

Ho said she reflected on her positive experiences watching previous Telling Our Stories assemblies live and felt disappointed by the change.

“In the past, the student speakers have had a huge impact on me. You could really feel the raw emotion,” she said. “I remember in some previous years, I couldn’t go to the auditorium, so I had to be in my classroom to listen to [the speeches], and it just didn’t hit the same.”

Thinking about her own speech, she said she wishes she could have spoken in front of the auditorium’s full audience and experienced “the cheering, the support, seeing people’s eyes as they listen.”

Ho is among a group of other students who worked for weeks to convince DoRRS organizers and the administration to allow a live Telling Our Stories assembly. The group argued that the pre-recorded format deprioritizes the speakers, disincentivizes difficult conversations and feels akin to censorship.

Senior Amarjot Ranu was also part of that group. She said she got involved with the effort in order to help future students experience what she did.

“It’s the idea of the next classes of students never being able to see DoRRS the way I saw it, that’s kind of upsetting to me,” she said.

Ranu said the group of students expressed their grievances to organizers and the administration via multiple emails and in-person meetings.

“We told them, ‘We think that the pre-recorded version takes away the emotional authenticity of it, and what we think makes DoRRS really powerful is that you’re talking directly to an audience and you’re being really vulnerable,’” Ranu said.

Despite the group’s efforts, the pre-recorded format will remain this year, according to an email from Meyer. Within the email, Meyer told the students that the administration welcomes collaboration to “figure out how we can best support student speakers—and our larger school community—within this year’s DoRRS format.”

‘We’ve missed all the pre-education’

Even with the pre-recorded speeches, some community members have wondered whether the school is ready to hear Telling Our Stories speeches at all without a proper understanding of everything mentioned. At the BSC meeting, many parents called for the elimination of DoRRS entirely. One parent said he doesn’t “even understand why we’re having it” after the last DoRRS’ “lack of moral clarity.”

Miller said the school has not prepared students with an adequate historical background of many of the experiences mentioned during Telling Our Stories, including the war in Gaza.

“Telling Our Stories is a great idea, but we’ve missed all the pre-education that should come before that,” Miller said. “If we listen to one person’s experience, we’re taking one person’s experience as everybody’s experience of the person who looks like them.”

Miller said the community is unready to discuss many of the speeches, educationally and emotionally.

“I’m just not sure that we’ve done the work and education needed to then have these types of conversations that we’re not ready to have—that some students, some faculty aren’t prepared to have,” Miller said.

Ranu pushed back on the assumption that the school is not ready to have conversations about difficult topics, like the war in Gaza.

“In order to get used to having uncomfortable, scary conversations, we just have to keep doing it and keep practicing it,” Ranu said. “It’s not ever something that you’re going to want to do, because they are really painful events that are happening.”

Senior Layla Noubir, another member of the group of students against the decision to pre-record, said everyone should hear all perspectives, regardless of how uncomfortable someone might feel.

“The message is still being sent that you don’t want to have discussions and you don’t want people to talk, but [discussions] are so important for not having divisions in the community and to actually build a strong community,” Noubir said.

‘Intention versus impact’

The activism on both sides will likely result in changes to the format of DoRRS for next year, according to organizers. Dean of Students Astrid Allen, the supervising dean for DoRRS and a former organizer and participant in the day, said the event is flexible, and frequently changes based on what the community needs.

“This is grassroots, teacher and student-powered, and whatever the goals are for every year depends on who’s organizing it,” Allen said. “And absolutely, that changes from year to year.”

Among the possible compromises is a live-streamed speech in front of a small audience and a subsequent debrief in classes. Even this, Davis said, requires more willingness to listen.

“To do that, we would need to come together as a community and be able to hold discourse in a way that we’re not ready for yet, as faculty,” Davis said.

Throughout the controversies around DoRRS this year, Davis said she wishes she would have consulted more students before deciding to pre-record the speeches. She said that next year, organizers will help ensure that the Telling Our Stories format fits everyone.

“It’s such an amazing, beautiful lesson of intention versus impact,” Davis said. “As sad and heartbroken as I am about this current year of DoRRS, I do think if I can gracefully model learning from impact versus intent, we can learn something from my mistake.”

Two corrections were made on Thursday, Nov. 21. The Telling Our Stories portion of the day will be during two blocks, not just D-block. Also, the protest did not take place on Oct. 6, 2024, even though the social media post’s caption includes that date.