With Northampton in the midst of its most contentious election in decades, several candidates running against the city’s incumbents under the banner of the Support Our Schools coalition agreed to sit down for an interview with The Sophian, in order to raise awareness of local political struggles and put forth a different voice than the current ones coming from inside City Hall.
The Support Our Schools coalition (SOS) began in 2024 as a Facebook group of parents, educators and community members concerned about the lack of funding for public education in the city’s budget, despite its surplus of $12 million. Since then, SOS has evolved into a broad coalition and political action committee led by labor and progressive forces in the city working to elect a slate of candidates promising to fully fund Northampton’s public schools and reorient the city’s politics toward a more democratic structure.
Meg Robbins ‘82, Ada Comstock alum and former Northampton school committee member, spoke about the major political issues that residents are concerned about and the changes she believes are necessary to make Northampton a city that lives up to its stated progressive values.
Q: When did you graduate [as an Ada]? How was that experience?
A: I was one of the first to graduate, in 1982. It was great. I had kind of stumbled onto it and it was an open door. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to finish college. I had started years before, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to afford to go back… I was a single parent, I had four little kids and [Smith] worked out a thing with welfare moms. I was also really fortunate because I had very good daycare—affordable daycare.
Q: Why run for city council?
A: I had been on the school committee for two years, which was a huge learning curve. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it—so I worked very hard to learn about the politics, to learn about the challenges, the issues, and really work with people. But the legacy politics played a very heavy role on the school committee as much as it does on the city council. The overall atmosphere was that if you asked questions or you said, “You know what, I think about that differently, I wonder if we should have a different decision,” that is unacceptable because you’re not with them.
I got involved with the Support Our Schools group at the very beginning. It was good to have people who shared those concerns. A lot of those were people whose kids’ needs really weren’t being met in school. I also know a lot of the teachers who work in the district, and I know what the challenges are for them to deliver the kind of education they really want to.
So it came around to this election, and a bunch of us just thought, “Okay, we’ll give it a shot, we’ll try to change that structure and have different discussions.” People who live here, unless you agree with the dominant structure, are not going to have a voice. And I believe in community voice.
Q: I’m sure you’ve had a lot of discussions with people as you’ve been canvassing. Do other Northampton residents feel that way? What are some of the major issues you’ve heard from people?
A: I have walked a lot, I’ve talked to a lot of people, and I think that the mayor and the city council are reading the populace wrong. They really do feel unheard, they feel worried. They have real concerns they’d like to be able to talk about, and they feel very shut down. And I’m sorry that it comes directly at the mayor, but when you have a strong mayor charter and you’re the one who makes all the decisions, that’s politics.
Q: And she’s very vocal.
A: She’s very vocal but she doesn’t have an open door. And we’ve always had mayors with open doors, and that’s very disheartening for people.
What I’ve heard from folks is they’re primarily worried about whether they can afford to stay here, either finding a home because you’ve been houseless or… there isn’t housing that is affordable. Residents who have all of a sudden gotten huge increases in their taxes and are on fixed incomes. They get told, “Your house is worth a lot more than it was, what’s your problem? Just sell it.” First of all, where would they go? “I’ve lived here all my life, I want to stay here and this is my home.” And they feel very shut out by that attitude.
Everybody’s upset about the Baptist church, which the mayor has given them no more information on. They don’t know things, so when you don’t know things you start other rumors or conspiracy theories.
And then the Picture Main Street challenge—which, again, they were told, “If you weren’t at the table six years ago during COVID, too bad.”
Q: I want to go back to this idea of the legacy structure. How do you feel that developed? How did this alignment of forces become so powerful in Northampton politics?
A: I think it’s always been that way. When I first moved here, it was all men. They were all Democrats. Mary Ford was the first one to break into that. She’s a Democrat, and that’s okay, but I think that power that comes with being basically a two-party system in this country shows up in local politics all the time. And breaking into that, having that be something that’s open to people who don’t have that backing is difficult.
And I understand, if you’re in power and you’ve gathered the people who are going to rubber-stamp everything you do, you’re going to fight hard to keep that because who wants that conflict, who wants to have different discussions, who wants to be answerable to those big questions that the public’s asking?
Our current mayor, she’s pretty shy about talking to the public. She really avoids it. She has kind of a rote response to everything. It’s not working with the public, it’s treating the public as though they don’t need to know.
Q: You would think that in a town like Northampton where people promote progressive ideals pretty openly, where there’s not a big pushback from the far right, that that would open doors to more progressive candidates—moreso than there have been up until now.
A: As far as the progressive piece goes, one thing that I’ve seen over the years is that we are very good at having pieces of paper—progressive pieces of paper. We did it for Gaza the other night—we made a resolution. Everybody was great, all the councilors had a good moment in the sun to be able to say headline stuff. It was a piece of paper. When it comes to pieces of paper, Northampton could probably paper all of Main Street.
But following through on those progressive ideals, we’re less good at. And we hide it. We might have said we’re going to do it, but then we don’t make it accessible to say, “What we’ve said, we’ve had to change it, or we don’t feel like it, or a different person is in charge.”
Q: From what you’ve seen as being both a Smith alum and as having lived in the city for so long, how do you feel Smith impacts local politics as an institution?
A: It used to be different, and I think it’s changed. It’s become more of a boutique town… and I think students are less integrated with the town than perhaps they used to be. I think a lot of people in the town see us as just the institution on the hill. And certainly the push for a PILOT program is very, very big. The mayor has met with President Sarah, I know, but because it’s that mayor, we don’t know what the conversations are. And President Sarah herself said, “I will not do a PILOT.”
What we need is recurring money, and we need that kind of support. I know that the college itself is going through some hard times; you have to take care of your own. The idea that more students can come and afford it is, to me, a priority. I want to have educated women out there to make change. But I think not having that public conversation is a poor idea, and it would be wonderful if we could arrange something that does say that the schools can have a guaranteed amount of money. Because the state’s dragging its feet about doing it. And meanwhile our local kids are drowning.
Q: How long did you teach in Northampton schools?
A: I only taught here for a couple years, that was many years ago. And I was pink-slipped when Proposition 2 ½ came in, along with everybody else. So I had that experience. And it was a very different school system then. And then my own children went to school here.
Q: And what have you noticed as a parent?
A: Everybody talks about it being rosy and wonderful all those years before. I’ve worked in districts nationwide, and I’ve really seen some wonderful school systems—I’ve seen some really bad ones—but I don’t think people here have a vision of what our schools could look like. I thought I was a valuable member of the school committee because I have that experience.
Our teachers are really well-meaning, and they’re really quite wonderful. I have enormous admiration for them. But they don’t have the time to teach well, and they have students post-COVID who are really in a different place.
In our school systems, we have right now close to 26 or 27 percent of our children are on individual education plans. Those are kids who have proven data that supports that they are struggling in school, and we don’t give them what they need.
Q: Assuming that the SOS slate were to win the majority, win the mayoral position, what do you think the political landscape would look like after that? What will the struggles be going forward?
A: My personal hope is that there are more young people who see that this is possible, that they can move into becoming leaders in this community and change the dynamic of that [legacy] structure. And that we do represent our progressive ideals… rather than having seven people who all talk the same talk. It’s funny to me to hear people on the city council now who say they have diverse voices. Because they don’t. They all vote the same way. And there’s like two or three people who might consistently vote differently. But to pretend—candidates who are in positions now—to pretend and say, “I always vote with my conscience, I always vote what the right thing is,” it’s just not true. Because there’s a record that shows that.
The other piece is having leadership on the city council that’s responsive to constituents. Several folks on it now don’t. They just don’t. If you’re at-large maybe you feel like you don’t have to.
Ward councilors are responsible for their ward, they go to the ward. They have meetings in neighborhoods, they send out stuff and they get feedback. They come informed, and they’re not just sitting at council meetings saying, “Oh, what I think is…” Which is what they do. And that’s not okay.
We have a strong mayor charter, so we’ve got to change that. That’s a good starting place, we can do some of that this year, maybe. 2026, if we get a supermajority on the council we could change some key stuff.
But getting out and knocking on doors and canvassing is remarkably helpful. And I would say that any of what we would call the “change candidates” would welcome that. Even if people just want to get to know the city better and knock on doors and hear from people, it’s really a good thing to do. There really is a resonant piece of this city that does believe that “We do support public services, we do support change, we do want things to be different.”
This is one part in a series of interviews with the candidates endorsed by the Support Our Schools PAC. After coming in second place in the preliminaries on September 16th, Meg Robbins will move on to the November 4th election, running for one of two at-large city council positions.
