COLUMBIA — A Tuesday night Columbia School Board candidate forum put on by Race Matters, Friends, spurred several rounds of lively conversation, with all candidates present agreeing that some dialogue was better than no dialogue at all when it came to racial disparities.
Four candidates — challengers Sarah Dubbert and Paul Rainsberger and incumbents Jan Mees and Jim Whitt — sat with about 20 people around six folding tables arranging in a circle at Bethel Baptist Church. Sky Jiménez led the group in a short meditation before the four candidates gave their opening statements. Candidate Joe Toepke did not attend.
Topics of discussion included how one might lead and participate in uncomfortable conversations about race, changes in school curricula, hiring and purchasing practices, and discipline disparities between white and nonwhite students.
Dubbert said a lack of transparency and closed meetings blocked conversations about issues such as race. And Rainsberger said the school board should seek out those kinds of conversations, not wait for them.
"If you want a dialogue that involves all voices in the community, you have to go where the comfort level belongs to the audience, not the government officials," he said.
Forum moderator Traci Wilson-Kleekamp changed the topic for Mees, asking a question she uses when recruiting people for MU's School of Medicine: "How many worlds can you walk in, and walk with grace and listening? How is the School Board walking in other worlds?"
Mees said she has seen a switch flip when it came to the School Board's awareness of race in Columbia Public Schools.
"The light is on right now," she said. "We need to get moving. We can't wait any longer for all of us as a board to address the issues in our community."
She said the challenge lay mostly in the board's dealings with facts and figures instead of the people they're trying to serve. She said she wanted to see the entire board participate in diversity training and poverty simulations to learn how to approach divisions in a systemic way.
"Not understanding everyone who comes into our schools is the most systemic problem," she said.
Tara Griggs asked the candidates how they planned to include in curricula people of color who were less prevalent in textbooks, offering African-American scientist Benjamin Banneker as an example.
Dubbert has taught high school math in the past, and she said she understood because that subject's best-known historical figures were white Europeans.
Rainsberger said the most systemic issue affecting conversations about race is the inertia of privilege perpetuating itself.
Whitt said the board reviewed the curriculum every five years. He said history-making minorities needed to be given more exposure in general coursework and not just in electives.
"You will get pushback. The community has to be involved, has to buy in, but the school system needs to lead that," he said.
John Clark asked the candidates if they would consider establishing alternative hiring and purchasing criteria in the School District.
Rainsberger said he was "a firm believer that public entities need to be the vanguard of HR practices," adding that background checks could act as an invisible method of screening people out of jobs.
Dubbert and Whitt agreed that breaking contracts for large projects into smaller pieces could increase the involvement of small, local or minority-owned businesses while building and maintaining a more inclusive district.
The conversation shifted to how public schools can create a pipeline to prison for minority students who are more likely to be diagnosed with a conduct disorder.
Laura Danforth, an MU doctoral fellow studying racial disparities in public schools, said that black and Hispanic students were more likely to be suspended and arrested in school than were white students. Fewer than 3 percent of black students make up gifted and talented enrollment, compared to white students, who make up about 76 percent, Danforth said, citing
data collected by the U.S. Department of Education.
Whitt said the district had reduced out-of-school suspensions by two-thirds but that 90 percent of the students getting suspended were still minority students.
"Our goal is to keep kids in school. We have programs working toward that," he said.
On top of that, Mees said, the district was making a concerted effort to keep kids out of the juvenile system.
"We're not slapping a kid in handcuffs for something that can be resolved by other means," she said.
Voters will go to the polls Tuesday to choose two of the five candidates to serve on the School Board.
No comments:
Post a Comment