Action Steps our School District
Can Take to Make Students of Color Safer
- Enlist the help of a racial equity consultant to develop a comprehensive assessment and plan of action to create a school culture where racism cannot thrive.
- Create a Parent Advisory Board of community members of color, like the one that already exists for special education, to advise the district on how new policies and initiatives will affect their children and families. EARLIER THIS YEAR THERE WAS A 12-PERSON BOARD APPOINTED TO REVIEW CHARTER SCHOOL APPLICATIONS BUT NO BOARD HAS YET FORMED TO OVERSEE THE RACIAL EQUITY EFFORTS. The charter school review board is required by law. There’s no such law to protect students of color or oversee efforts for their protection.
- Hire a Full-Time Diversity and Inclusion Representative to serve as a liaison between families and school staff to make handling of all racial issues transparent, to ease the burden of teachers and administrators, and to report all forms incidents of harassment of protected groups to the Office of Civil Rights.
- Equip Teachers and Staff, through professional development, to properly deal with the complex issue of racial harassment.
- Implement a mandatory district-wide tracking system requiring all racially motivated incidents to be automatically reported to the central office and recorded in a local database and reported to the Office of Civil Rights. (A D&I representative could oversee this.)
- Implement universal screenings for giftedness to eliminate racial disparity in AP and gifted programs.
- Assess and eliminate disproportionalities in discipline and suspension rates among students of color. Expert help will be needed here.
- Create swift, certain, and severe standardized disciplinary policy for all hate speech and racially motivated harassment. Hate speech is defined as any kind of communication in speech, writing or behavior, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender or other identity factor.
- Implement a curriculum that includes a robust, non-trauma based Black history component, moving beyond the Civil Rights movement and the history of slavery. Tell the stories of leaders and heroes of color; there are many.
- Build more diversity at central office and on school campuses by conducting an in-depth satisfaction survey of all faculty and staff of color and creating a recruitment and retention plan for employees of color. This absolutely does not undermine the “hire the most qualified candidate” idea. If anything, hiring the most qualified candidates can be a natural inroad for increasing diversity.