“Nobles not so noble – profits before people,” students read as they passed through the front entrance on the first day of school. With no organization listed on the sign, Pine Street commuters could only speculate what drove the three men to stand outside the school promoting such a message.

“I heard everything from ‘faculty are protesting’ to ‘families are protesting,’” Head of School Cathy Hall said.

From Facebook groups to word of mouth, individuals around Dedham accelerated the spread of misinformation.

“I had heard one rumor that we had chosen to outsource our employees to save money. There’s just a lot of misconceptions,” Chief Financial and Operations Officer Steve Ginsberg said.

In conjunction with the Dedham gossip, rumors spread throughout the Nobles student body.

“There was a lot of speculation from kids about what they were actually protesting about,” Christian Weller (Class II) said. “No one seemed to really know exactly what they were focusing on.”

This confusion caused a PR inconvenience for the school.

“You’re in a really tough spot, because you want to feel like you’re on the right side of something,” Hall said.

Shawmut Design and Construction, a general contracting company that is helping with the Shattuck renovation, has been working with Nobles for 25 years, and a majority of its subcontractors are fully unionized.

“[Shawmut] only hires and interviews reputable, ethical firms,” Ginsberg said.

Still, Sheet Metal Workers Local 17, a New England sheet metal union, took issue with Shawmut’s enlistment of a non-unionized Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) firm. They voiced their frustration as the project was already underway.

“They came to us and said, ‘You need to kick your sheet metal company out of here,’” Director of Buildings and Grounds Mike McHugh said. “At this point, all contracts are signed. That was never going to happen.”

With no way to meet the union’s demands, it was only a matter of time before a demonstration assembled in late August, wielding the infamous sign.

“On many levels, it made me laugh because Nobles is a non-profit,” McHugh said. “We’re not putting profit before people because we have no profit.”

Plus, the message promoted a false notion of layoffs.

Ginsberg said, “We chose people. We hired people. They just weren’t members of the union.”

Most striking was that the union’s grievances were improperly directed at Nobles’ administration.

“​​We were expecting an anti-Shawmut sign,” Hall said. “[The HVAC hiring] had nothing to do with us. We sent construction documents to union HVAC companies, and they decided not to bid on the job,” McHugh said.

The Local 17’s spectacle was less the result of poor foresight on the part of Nobles or Shawmut, but a natural product of the construction sector’s present slowdown in Massachusetts. While union workers are too occupied during times of intense job growth to protest a non-unionized worksite in Dedham, the prospect might seem more appealing during a construction drought.

“We’ve done a ton of projects since I’ve been here. Unions have been super busy in those 15 years, so they haven’t bothered us,” McHugh said.

When construction work waned in the mid-2000s, however, there was a short-lived protest of Nobles’ new arts center project. With Shattuck, Nobles once again happened to sync up its renovations with a downturn in the industry.

Today, the gates to campus remain empty, and the protesters have been gone since the start of school. The demonstrators agreed to end the protest on the grounds that Nobles would meet with the union to discuss their involvement in future projects.

“The meeting was very cordial. They were just sharing the benefits of their union and asked us to consider them for future jobs,” Ginsberg said.

Within the meeting, the Local 17 invited Nobles to see their training facility in Dorchester, and Nobles ensured that in the future, the Local 17 will be aware of projects and help make sure that they can influence a union HVAC contractor bid on the project.

While the protesters outside of campus gates spurred chatter at the start of the school year, it seems that the majority of the talk was just gossip, and that the situation was blown out of proportion.

“There’s nothing I would’ve done differently,” Ginsberg said.