It was the incident that explained everything and yet also the incident that couldn’t be explained. Whatever you believed about Albany, about America, about teenagers, racism, sexism, social media, punishment and the public discourse on each of these topics, the story of the Instagram account could be marshaled as evidence.

The questions that the account raised - about fighting bigotry, about the impacts of social media and about the best way to respond when young people in your community fail so utterly to live up to the values you thought you shared - had no simple answer. At the high school, where disciplinary policies and much of the curriculum have been revamped in the account’s wake, teachers deployed competing narratives about how exactly the events should be interpreted, with some seeing them as a calamity that occurred despite Albany’s particular virtues (small, liberal, educated, interconnected) and others as a consequence of Albany’s particular shortcomings (too white, too insular, too wealthy, too obsessed with academic achievement). The divisions remain in place.Īt the town’s middle school graduation in June, parents whose children had been on opposite sides of the chasm opened by the account sat two rows apart from one another and didn’t speak. After the account’s discovery, they were also what wedged it apart. The schools - three elementary schools, one middle school and one traditional four-year high school - are what bind Albany together. That’s one reason the Instagram account was so painful. If you’re one of Albany’s roughly 1,200 high school students, you know you’re lucky to be there.

Parents shoehorn themselves into Albany’s modest dwellings for one key reason: the schools. It isn’t that diverse economically, either median household income is above $113,000 (nationally the figure is about $70,000). You could call it “diverse,” and you probably do if you’re white, but it doesn’t feel as diverse to Black residents, who make up just over 4 percent of the population. The homes are mostly stucco bungalows or shingled with wood, the yards and porches festooned with rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter signs.Īlmost half the residents are white, and more than a quarter are Asian. It isn’t one of those fancy suburbs with gated communities and sprawling McMansions. Bordered by Berkeley to the south and east, by the gray-blue waters of San Francisco Bay to the west and by El Cerrito to the north, Albany is just under two square miles. Albany is so tiny that people who live there call it Smallbany.

Part of the injury was to the town’s self-regard. What happened in Albany happened online, but the repercussions played out everywhere people gathered: in homes and classrooms, at supermarkets and on sports fields, on Facebook and Nextdoor. Yet its discovery derailed lives, shredded relationships and caused families to flee both the town and its public schools. It was a private Instagram account with barely more than a dozen followers.

Because Albany, a liberal, affluent town of around 20,000 people in the Bay Area, is still struggling with the aftermath. “It was a huge relief that this whole thing is done,” she says.ĭone, and yet also not done. Now she put down her coffee and began to cry. A biracial Asian and white woman with wavy silver hair, expressive brown eyes and a silver hoop in one nostril, she had known many of the students embroiled in the Instagram account since they were in third grade and had been personally named in some of the ensuing lawsuits. When the account was discovered, Pfohl was in her first year as a high school assistant principal after spending a decade teaching elementary school. Supreme Court had declined to hear the last remaining appeal from the last remaining lawsuit stemming from an Instagram account that convulsed Albany High School in 2017.

Earlier this summer, Melisa Pfohl, an elementary school principal in Albany, Calif., was sitting cross-legged on a friend’s couch drinking coffee and scrolling through the emails that had accumulated while she was on a brief, end-of-the-school-year vacation, when she opened a message from her school district’s superintendent.

Nytimes magazine