Three Rivers School Board Receives Guidance on Racial Equity Issues

At a work session Monday, members of the Three Rivers Community Schools (TRCS) Board of Education (BOE) participated along with staff and administrators in an instructional dialogue on racial disparities and justice in schools. The session was facilitated by Dr. Brandy Lovelady Mitchell, who is the Director of Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion for Kent Intermediate School District. The session was structured around a key priority identified in the TRCS strategic plan, assuring a safe and secure environment for students, both physically and emotionally.

In a series of conversations this past summer, BOE members engaged in a series of conversations about racial justice and equity in the school district. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the protests that followed, some BOE members worked with TRCS administrators to draft a statement on racial justice in the schools. After a series of conversations that became heated at times, the BOE adopted the statement with the caveat that it must follow through on the letter’s ideals through the structure of the Strategic Plan.

At Monday’s work session, Mitchell reviewed the TRCS mission statement with board members, focusing on its emphasis on helping all students achieve their fullest potential. From there, Mitchell began delving into the ways in which racism can impact students’ ability to reach that potential.

She familiarized BOE members with the term “microaggressions,” which refers to small and sometimes innocuous-seeming comments that people of color can encounter. The comments can be rooted in a variety of cultural assumptions and stereotypes about different groups. Even if a comment can make sense and seem harmless in one context, Mitchell said, “how might it land on someone that is marginalized?” The effect, she said, can be cumulative. “Think of it as a million paper cuts on one finger,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell then led her audience through some of the research that shows how the cumulative effects of microaggressions and other forms of racism can have long-term, adverse psychological effects on children. “The brain treats social threats and social pains like exclusion, being treated unfairly, negative social comparison, those things are treated the same way as a physical wound or significant physical injury,” she said. Later, Mitchell said, “when we experience threats, it kicks us into fight, flight, or appease,” which she said is necessary for survival but not optimal for learning.

Discussing shaping “new competencies and new ways of thinking” on racism, Mitchell expanded on the idea of “unpacking” race and culture and “adjusting our behaviors and mindsets” around racism. Doing so, Mitchell said, “really does tee up a safe and more secure environment so we can reach all students and increase the odds of us accomplishing our mission and reaching the potential and the promise of public education.”

One BOE member, Julia Awe, said she is a parent who teaches her children to have the emotional intelligence to handle abuse from others. Awe asked, “as a district, what could we do to try to teach emotional intelligence in school, like in the classroom.” Mitchell said she liked Awe’s comments. She said handling and addressing racism is a “both/and” proposition in which teaching better responses is useful to students’ mental health, but must come coupled with addressing racist behaviors at the same time. She said it is important to recognize that “sometimes we ask kids and colleagues to not get upset about things that actually are quite harmful.”

Mitchell said, “it’s a both/and in terms of how we help our students and staff show up in a way that calls everyone in, that’s inclusive, and fosters belonging, and also, how do we help them respond?”

Recognizing racist behaviors in the self, Mitchell said, requires such a mindset shift, which she said will take time and effort. She shared a Jay Smooth TED talk video in which Smooth asked his audience to rethink the way they view imperfection. It is common to assume, Smooth said, that a person being less than perfect “is a suggestion that you’re a bad person. So, we become averse to any suggestion that we should consider our thoughts and actions, and it makes it harder for us to work on our imperfections when you believe that you must be perfect in order to be good.”

That tendency, Smooth said, makes it harder for people to recognize and work on racism in themselves. However, he said, when dealing with racism, “we are grappling with a social construct that was not designed to make sense” because they “were shaped for centuries by a need to rationalize and justify indefensible acts.” Because of that, he said racism is “designed to trip us up.”

Smooth said he recommends treating racism like dental hygiene rather than tonsils. “If you’ve had your prejudice removed” like tonsils, he said, a person might never need to consider whether they have unconscious prejudice. “But that’s not how these things work,” Smooth said. Instead, he said confronting racism in the self is more like a habitual practice, similar to brushing teeth.

“We need to think towards thinking of being a good person the same way we think of being a clean person,” Smooth said. “We don’t assume that, ‘I’m a clean person, therefore, I don’t need to brush my teeth.’” A person might, he said, still get things like spinach stuck in their teeth, and a person who is generally a good person might still get tripped up by racist behavior sometimes.

Following the conclusion of Smooth’s video clip, Mitchell said racial disparities still exist in the “unemployment rate, infant mortality rate, incarceration rates, median household income,” and other areas and metrics. “It is worthwhile for us to iron out these conversational issues,” Mitchell said, and reconceptualize how people see themselves as good people, and move toward addressing disparities that might exist in curriculum, disciplinary practices, and everyday school culture.  

Throughout Mitchell’s session, she encouraged comments from BOE members, administrators, and other participants. Going forward, she encouraged TRCS leadership to engage in longer-term learning exercises, study data to see where disparities exist, and ask intentional and honest questions of themselves, and incorporate the lessons of that work into action that helps better serve all students in the district through improved culture, practices, and policies.

Also at Monday’s TRCS BOE Work Session:

  • BOE Members approved a series of Letters of Agreement with the Three Rivers Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, and various principals, administrators, and non-union employees to provide retroactive pay increases for the 2020-2021 contract year. Normal, periodic pay increases had been on hold awaiting the development of financial impacts from the ongoing pandemic.
  • Superintendent Ron Moag said administrators and staff have compiled a plan to help ensure better student engagement with the Lincoln Learning virtual instruction platform. The plan will involve having students with low grades come into schools and engage with teachers and mentors face-to-face. More progress information will be available for the nine-week mark on November 16.
  • BOE President Erin Nowak said two upcoming meetings will focus on Moag’s annual performance evaluation. On November 5, a socially distanced, in-person, special meeting will take place, with a closed-session portfolio review for Moag being the only agenda item. Nowak said public comments will be taken. A second special, in-person meeting to wrap up the evaluation will take place on November 19. Both special meetings are separate from the regular BOE meeting, which will take place virtually on November 16. Current plans are to hold the special meeting at the TRCS administration building unless anticipated attendance grows.

Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.