[todaysdate]
By Kelly Mathews
On Nov. 8 at the Davenport Hotel, The Education, Incarceration, and the Courageous Conversation Community Forum Symposium was hosted by the NAACP and the Washington State Commission on Hispanic Affairs.
The three hour discussion was about school suspension and exclusion policies in Spokane Public Schools. Last year, the NAACP held a School to Prison Pipeline panel discussion which resulted in the inception of a Community Action Team by the school district.
The opening speaker, Phil High-Edward assistant principal at Shadle High School, said he won’t accept that every child can’t graduate. He said there needs to be an effort to move beyond myths and phrases from administrators and instructors and students who are white, when they say things like, “I don’t see color,” it’s not helpful, because they aren’t seeing the problem. And before a problem can be fixed, it has to be seen, not denied. He said every freshmen family receives a call from him personally to help with the freshman transition to high school education. He practices being proactive instead of reactive. In other media, High-Edwards has noted that all parents want to meet and have a personal connection and help their children.
Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich’s opinion was that early childhood education and head start programs were the most integral aspects to achieving educational success. Funding for educational programs is always a problem. Knezovich said more reading volunteers are needed with the Head Start programs, so children have more positive mentors and role models. He works with local pastors and other members of the community to find jobs for at-risk youth. If you lose the next generation, you lose everything, Kinezovich said. At risk youth come from at risk parents, Kinezovich says.
Nicole DeVon, coordinator and counselor at the American Indian Studies Program at Eastern Washington University spoke about the program she and some colleagues developed to help administrators as well as teachers be literate in cultural differences as well as respecting the differences and how to facilitate better communication with those differences of culture in mind. DeVon is a self-proclaimed student advocate she says, and the problems in school systems didn’t just spring up over night. The project she is working on with 25 other people will provide a new educational cultural diversity framework, a model for success for all students. It will be a tool for assessing where educational professionals fall within a continuum for understanding cultural difference and diversity. This would lead to more training and re-education of educators and administrators, both, for the benefit of students success.
The first parent to speak was Tia Griffin, community organizer, and business woman. She told Knezovich that her children had great mentors and she’s been reading to them every day since they were little and that she had outstanding family members in the military. Griffin went to school decades ago in Spokane, it was friendly to her and her 15 brothers and sisters. Often, she and her brothers and sisters constituted the only black people most of the other students and their families ever saw. Something changed, though, according to Griffin, because now she has had to deal with teachers in District 81 using “The n-Word.” Griffin says, the Out of Sight, Out of Mind policy the district has adapted regarding the prevalent racism surrounding her children isn’t working for her family. She’s had to go to District 81 once a month for the past 15 years. Griffin has written Arne Duncan the United States Secretary of Education for three years. She is upset her tax dollars go to a district and state that has lost its funding after not meeting the No Child Left Behind standards. She said her son was kicked out of school because his swag fashion sense was interpreted as being gang related by the school. Griffin wants to know who will hold District 81 accountable for not providing a safe environment for her children. If her child had fought with another student for being called the “N-word,” her son would have a record instead of a high school diploma. Griffin’s closing words, were that she demanded safety for her children and accountability for District 81, not someday, not maybe, but now.
Human Rights Activist, Africana Studies Instructor, artist, and writer Rachel Dolezal. She has written in the Inlander about the racial macro and micro aggressions her family through her two sons has suffered being in school. Dolezal said she fears for her 13-year-old son who is discouraged and despondent. When she asks him how he is doing in school this year, he will tell her he is not getting harassed “as much” as in previous years.
“Changes aren’t happening fast enough and proportionately,” she said.
Dolezal wants to know where the data on racial disproportion in the District 81 are and why they aren’t being shown those figures.
“Not having those figures may make the school district look better, but the District is still failing our children. Where is the plan? Read these books, watch this movie, but where is the plan? To save us not just equally but equitably?,” she said.
At Sacajawea Middle School, they asked Dolezal to write a plan, and she says that’s exactly what the district needs — someone with no vested interest in tweaking numbers and someone who can undo racial supremacy in the curriculum. This needed to happen 50 years ago, Dolezal said, and now it’s too late.
“Our kids are growing up . My oldest son is already in college I wish he had a chance to be treated fairly,” she said.
Dolezal went into how she had to explain to the school why monkey is a racial slur, it’s not just the n-word. Dolezal went on to say, “Our kids are suicidal it’s hard to have a job and education if you don’t want to live. Before you can have civil rights, you have to have basic human rights.”
Virla Spenser who works for the Center for Justice in Spokane, is well known for her advocacy against racism in District 81. She brought a Federal Investigation into the District in June of 2005.
“Kids in 81 have been fighting to be heard for a long time. There are times when it has been every day Rogers High School was calling to tell me if my kids are safe or dead. Things were shoved under the rug. I listened and heard, nothing got done. I am here like other parents to demand change. When my kids do what white kids do, instead of it being labeled as horseplay, it’s labeled as disruptive behavior. My daughter was forced out of being a cheerleader by jokes about the KKK. I reached out to the office of the NAACP. I am a single mom of seven and I will fight for not just my children but all children of color. You’ve already got a low income parent and now the school wants me to spend another two hours a day there. I want to know, who hold the district accountable? They’re pushing the children straight out of the door at Rogers. But it looks by the numbers like they’re still enrolled. They’re robbing and stealing to maintain those numbers. Administrators talk down to you. Why aren’t we entitled to the same respect administrators get? Write letters? What do we do? Every day we wait is a day another child is lost in the system. It should never be we have to be here. It should be as easy as going down to the principal’s office to talk about this and fix it,” she said.
Tahlyke Chenevert, a gifted student spoke about his racist treatment beginning in 5th grade and then never ending after that. He had a loving home, with a bi-racial family. But the intense racism he experienced sent him down a wrong path after being frustrated for so long at not being treated equally with white kids. He eventually saved himself by working on his grades. But he learned a lot about the alternative education programs, and said that in the program he was in, no one was learning much of anything, it was more so the district could keep their numbers up and look good on paper.
High School student Khalil Olson Park who lives on the South Hill spoke about how he wanted an Afro-American history class to be taught at his school. A student with a stellar GPA, Park is tired of it people assuming he is doing something wrong even when he gets good grades and studies just because he is black. According to Park, a neighbor called the police to say there was a prowler while he was in his own home just because he is black. Some people think he doesn’t belong on the South Hill just because he is black, he’s says yes he does belong on the South Hill.
Mary Templeton, a director of human resources for the Spokane School Districts, said in reply to the parents, that it’s a classroom issue. Teachers need better training in classroom management. The burden in this case shouldn’t be on the parents and the students. There is a new assessment for teachers to take that will see where they stand on classroom management.
Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu’s asked in his closing speech how high did the suspension rate numbers from District 81 have to be before someone did something about them, when they were already about 60 percent. Would 75 be enough, he asked. It should never be this high in the first place, Dr. Kunjufu echoed the voices of the parents and said their speeches were the best he had ever heard in his travels and advocacy. He cited that there has been a 66 percent decrease in African American teachers since 1954. If the District can’t fix what’s wrong, then the African American community will consider private and African American chartered schools, he said. The so-called racial gap does not exist, Dr. Kunjufu said, adamantly, when African-American children are home-schooled.
Newly elected NAACP President and Professor and Human Rights Activist Rachel Dolezal has shared her strong ally list with Spokane Faith and Values in the hopes those in the community who want to help can get a good idea of where to begin. She also sent the link to her article on the Symposium.
When polled, people of color said they want these things from white allies:
-respect
-find out about us
-don’t take over
-provide information
-resources
-take risks
-don’t take things personally
-understanding
-teach your children about racism
-speak up
-don’t be scared by our anger
-support
-listen
-don’t make assumptions
-stand by my side
-don’t assume you know what’s best for me
-honesty
-talk to other white people
-interrupt jokes
-don’t ask me to speak for my people
-name issues and events as racist, oppressive, offensive
-recognize and make unearned privilege visible
-work to gain self-understanding in order to dismantle internalized sense of dominance and belief in superiority of self
