The battles dominating America’s headlines are increasingly battles over speech itself. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has set off a national struggle over how to remember him. Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension turned a late-night monologue into a referendum on free speech. And when the United Nations found that Israel’s violence in Gaza has amounted to genocide, that single word gained the power to shape Palestine’s future. These events are reshaping the stakes of free speech: which words can be said, who gets to say them, and at what cost. How do you prepare high school students to live, and to speak, in such a world?

“Our world has so many things happening so fast,” said Dr. Efe Igho-Osagie Shavers, the district’s director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. “You finish one news article, and another one’s already popping up. Students are having a hard time processing, not just because of the magnitude of what’s going on, but because of the access to information with social media.”

Community circles, a project of the department, are meant to slow the rush of reaction and replace it with reflection. More than a response to harm, she sees them as a way of preparing for it. “We don’t want to wait for devastating moments,” she explained. “We want to create safe spaces where you feel heard, where you can be brave and speak up.” The point is not only to resolve disputes but to build a community durable enough to withstand them.

The work also extends to who is leading those conversations. One of her priorities is diversifying Milton’s teaching staff and retaining teachers of color once they are hired. “If you only have one homogenous group, then you only get one way of thinking. But if you have a diverse makeup of staff, the strengths of each group can complement each other.”

At Milton High, 108 of the school’s 116 full-time education staff are white; just 5 are Black, 2 are Hispanic, and 1 is Asian. Across the district, the pattern is nearly identical. According to district records submitted to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 90% of Milton’s 563 teachers are white, with fewer than 60 non-white teachers combined.

The imbalance mirrors the state as a whole, but sits in sharp contrast to the increasing diversity of the students in front of them. For Shavers, those numbers explain why representation is not cosmetic but fundamental: the adults in the classroom shape whether students see difficult conversations as possible, fair, or even worth having at all.

Rob Hale, an English teacher, sees the challenge in his classroom. “We’re living in an age that doesn’t value knowledge,” he said. “It values the rhetorical mic-drop more than it values facts.” Too often, Hale added, students trade evidence for feelings, mistaking personal impressions as arguments.

To counter that instinct, Hale turns to the Harkness method, which makes knowledge a shared responsibility. Students read texts and arrive independently at ideas, then gather in class together around the namesake oval table to discuss, affirming or challenging ideas while both seeing and being seen by their classmates.

“It lets students lead the conversation and practice monitoring their own behavior,” he explained. “Am I dominating the conversation? Am I not listening enough to others? Am I being silent and letting the conversation happen without my contributions?”

That monitoring, he argued, is its own civic training. “It’s easy to be persuaded by bluster, by appearance, and by the vibe of the speaker rather than content.” Hale pointed to the first televised presidential debates in 1960, when television audiences who saw Richard Nixon’s sweaty, flustered appearance swayed toward his opponent John F. Kennedy while radio listeners, who could only hear the debate, stuck with Nixon.

For Hale, the lesson is that style can eclipse substance; people too often reward confidence and performance over the strength of an idea. “I think it’s very human to judge based on appearance or attitude.”

Principal Karen Cahill emphasized restraint when asked about the school’s role in shaping such conversations.

“There’s not one right way to do this,” she said. “We have to be impartial. When those things are happening globally, we have to respect perspective and keep an open mind. And we have to be mindful of our audience – not just students, but staff and families.”

She pointed out that speech stretches beyond the classroom, taking shape in clubs, on the fields, and even at the lunch table. That variety, she added, is a strength in a moment when public schools across the country are facing intense scrutiny.

By staying silent about contentious events, schools circumvent the charges of partisanship. Simultaneously, though, students are left without guidance when the loudest voice dominates the conversation - a problem not so far from what Hale sees when the best-sounding argument can obscure the best-founded one.

The debate club has its own method of handling this neutrality. Asked whether the win-lose format of debate helps or hurts civil discourse, junior and debate captain Ben Neugebauer, didn’t hesitate.“It’s helpful, because you have an endpoint to gauge the validity of your arguments. With a nonpartisan judge, you can reflect on what’s working and what isn’t.” 

For Neugebauer and his team, debate provides the structure that broader culture lacks. “A lot of it comes down to research, because you learn to rely on evidence and facts,” he said. “People say whatever they want. Debate teaches you to support everything you say with evidence. You have to prove it.”

If the national stage offers little room for listening, then a different experiment is happening at Milton High School.

In Mr. Hale’s classroom, the geometry of a Harkness table pulls every student into view and a circle of equal voices. In that class, Hale listens more than he speaks. The spectacle fades, replaced by the rarer, slower work of listening to understand each other.

Down the hall, Culture Cats students sit shoulder to shoulder in advisory period, a talking piece moving from hand to hand. Designed as a community circles test run, Culture Cats was first to reimagine advisory as a place to practice dialogue, where students learn to lead the conversations themselves and where what might have stayed unsaid in the rush of a school day finds room to emerge. It no longer feels strange to speak as classmates.

At the table, in the circle, in the principal’s office, and indeed at the podium, the voices lean toward the same hope this moment scarcely allows: time, patience, and the willingness to listen before deciding what to believe.