It's supposedly a dead language, but a Latin course at Harwood Union has stirred up a very live controversy.

A Harwood Union High School Latin teacher appears to have been suspended and then reinstated — administrators will not confirm whether she was disciplined or not — for presenting her class with what one parent called "mildly risqué" quotes of graffiti from the walls of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

The disciplinary action, and the ensuing lack of public information from administrators about the issue, is drawing fire from some community member and has raised issues of academic freedom.

"This is not a personnel issue, it's about who gets to decide what is taught in the classroom," said Susan Taub of Waitsfield, whose children recently graduated from Harwood, and who is herself a teacher.

According to John Cluett of Fayston, whose daughter attends the Latin class, language arts teacher Tami Munford was suspended in early March after she had distributed to her students quotations of ancient graffiti in Latin and English, instructing them to match the originals to the translations. Cluett said one of the students in the class was disturbed by the off-color nature of the quotations and went to the principal to com-plain.

Cornelia Cluett, 16, who attends Munford's class, said, "The graffiti was pretty mild. You could find the same thing on Comedy Central after midnight." She said some of the students in the class commented afterward that the material was "a little 'iffy,'" but no one seemed very offended at the time. "I think it was an addition to the class," she said. "It keeps the students interested."

Her father, John Cluett, said, "This material has academic value. What will we not allow next? Huckleberry Finn because it uses the word 'nigger?', Romeo and Juliet because it deals with premarital sex? Classical painting because the subjects are naked?"

Z. Phillip Ambrose, the chairman of the classics department at the University of Vermont, defends the use of the quotations, arguing they have academic value. Ambrose said he was on the national board that established the standards for teaching Latin in secondary schools under the Clinton administration, and that "the consensus of the report was that the full range of the literature of antiquity, everything we can read, from high literature to everyday vulgar material, should be used."

He added, "Anyone who has taken even French 1, and not learned something off-color, has been deprived."

Ambrose described Munford as "an important teacher," and called her "outstanding."

Although parents of Harwood students have remarked that the disciplinary action against Munford seemed heavy-handed, their concern is also raising a discussion about what should and should not be taught. "This is something the public needs to know about and discuss. It has to do with academic standards," said Cluett.

Principal David Driscoll, Washington West Supervisory District Superintendent Bob MacNamara, and school board chairman Scott Mackey all declined to comment on the situation, even to confirm that Munford had been suspended, saying they could not discuss personnel issues. However, Cluett said that Driscoll did discuss the issue of the suspension with him on Wednesday.

Munford also did not return calls.

Parents and students report that Munford had been missing from the class during the week of March 13, and that she had been reinstated the following week. They said explanations about the teacher's absence were offered to neither parents nor students. Parents report they learned from their children in the class that Munford had been temporarily removed.

Cluett said he attended a regularly scheduled Harwood school board meeting the day after Munford was removed and asked to discuss the issue with the board.

"Some board members wanted to discuss it but the chairman told them not to because they might have to deal with it later as a personnel issue, and he did not want their view tainted," said Cluett. He added that he could understand that position if it was a "… 'he said, she said' type of issue, or if they were a jury in a trial, but this was about what she chose to teach."

Cluett then wrote a letter to the Valley Reporter about the issue, and the paper carried an article about the alleged suspension on March 15.

Jim Boylan of Waitsfield, whose daughter attends Munford's class, said, "The principal got a lot of response supporting Tami."

Boylan said he could not understand why a teacher would be suspended for using the graffiti quotations from Pompeii. "I went to a Catholic high school, and I remember those quotations. Brother Shannon put them out there, we all had a laugh, and we moved on," he said. Boylan added that Munford "is known as a very good teacher."

Angelo Dorta, president of the Vermont chapter of the National Education Association, said the administrators' silence on the issue could very well have been appropriate.

"There's no clear bright line here," said Dorta, who said he did not want to second-guess the administrators' and school board chairman's decision not to discuss the issue.

"Inquiries on school protocol are okay," he said, "… but would they have opened themselves up to criticism and possibly legal action? Wherever the law looms it affects the public's right to know."

After consulting with department attorneys about whether discussion of the suspension should have been allowed on the grounds that the suspension constituted a curricular decision, Vermont Department of Education administrator Richard Armitage referred the question to the Washington West School District's attorney. Subsequent inquiries directed through the superintendent's office to the school's attorney received no immediate reply.

Silence from the administration about that suspension was named as a cause of the public outcry. Harwood parent Robert Yerks was quoted in a Feb. 2 article from 2004 as saying, "Essentially (it's) not knowing why he was asked to leave the school, the complete silence that shut everyone out that was completely upsetting to everyone."

Taub said that the school administration's refusal to discuss the incident reminds her of the controversial suspension of popular Harwood guidance counselor Peter duMoulin in 2004, which resulted in a tumultuous public meeting attended by 300 community members and ultimately the resignation under pressure of principal Robin Pierce.

But Cluett sees the current situation as being very different from the duMoulin affair. "In the duMoulin case no one knew what he was accused of doing. In this case everyone knows what she did, because the kids told the parents," he said. "This is a question of academic freedom. They teach Huckleberry Finn, and Romeo and Juliet, and no teacher is strung up because of that," said Cluett.