001good afternoon reuben hello good afternoon i'm trying to get everyone in to the right rooms where they need to be totally chris do you have this slide deck are you going to be able to [Music] do yeah i can drive it uh or rochelle for sure generally likes to drive so let me move people into the right spaces yep good afternoon everybody can you say i just had one of those moments where you see like a celebrity and you're like oh my gosh millie is in the in the panel with me i'm so excited that's right i love you too demetria good afternoon everyone how are you hi good afternoon i really have to stop talking when i see you guys and i haven't joined the panel yet like i'm i'm speaking and i'm not
002on the panel so it's really it's starting to weigh on my nerves and i keep doing it over and over again and trustee smithfolds you are on good afternoon everyone thank you so much for joining us for the academic committee our special meeting on race and equity um we are getting ready to start but before we do i'm going to read a little bit of our opening procedures as authorized by the governor's emergency executive order issued on march 17 2020 the west contra costa unified school district will conduct the board academic committee meetings via video conference slash teleconference until further notice this meeting will be streamed via zoom this meeting will provide public comment opportunities through the zoom app or by telephone to indicate your desire to speak on an agenda item raise your hand
003by clicking on the appropriate icon in the zoom app or by pressing star 9 if accessing the meeting by phone in order to be recognized to speak you must be logged in with your first and last name and your hand must be raised before public comment begins on or begins for the item due to the brown act board members cannot discuss items that are not on the agenda and do not usually respond to items presented in public comment mr aurelio may we have roll call please trustee smithfolds present uh trustee gonzalezoi president paul you're the commander thank you so much trustee gonzalez hoy would you please do us the um honor of reading the land acknowledgement i would be happy to thank you trustee smithfolds good evening everyone we recognize that we are presently on
004the lands of the churcheno mwakma carkin oloni peoples and acknowledge them as the first inhabitants of the land we currently occupy thank you perfect thank you so very much um approval of the agenda trustee gonzalez hoy anything to add or delete no i make a motion to approve the agenda says good i second that and if there is no dissension agenda approved all right approval of the minutes we're doing march 22nd april the 21st and april the 26th trustee gonzalez hoy any corrections to the minutes i did not have any corrections i wanted to just thank um uh miss sherry i just blanked on her last name for taking the minutes riven bark thank you so much for taking great minutes i didn't have any changes uh uh chair smithfold i agree so can you
005uh move that for me happy too i move um all three uh sets of minutes i agree seeing no dissension or hearing no dissension so moved all right so agenda approved minutes approved mr raleo do we have any public comment all right i am going to stop my share that's my i am not seeing any hands raised for public comment for items not on the agenda okay and then can we get a staff update please yeah so good evening everyone um i'm glad you're all with us today i know this is a special meeting um there was not there was no school today uh it was one of our reserved smoke days so our teachers in the audience are principals in the audience uh i thank you for joining us i know it is a
006non-work day for you all and um i did send you an invite and i want to just honor you all for being here and taking some time this evening um as far as updates we are moving along and honestly this is week four of in-person instruction in the spring um with obviously we keep trying to add additional students to our [Music] enrollment we are shifting gears at least from the ed services and in the school site level we're really trying to focus now on summer and really ramping up to get our summer programming going my estimate at this point is that the summer offering will be larger than the number of students we were serving in the spring my rough estimate at this point is that it would be roughly two thousand more students than
007we're currently serving this spring somewhere between the seven eight thousand student range um so we're just ramping up right now sites are securing their staffing for summer we have a lot of interest a lot of teachers who are coming back to in person for summer it's just exciting work really happy and looking forward to that work ahead thank you so very much trustee gonzalez-hoy any questions about the staff update i don't have any questions thank you chair smithfields you're welcome and i don't have any questions right now about staff update do we have any public comment on staff update giving it a second i don't see any hands raised um so no public comment on that we're knocking it out of the water all right so um we are going to go to uh agenda
008item number two discussion about race and equity it is time to get uncomfortable so let's go we want to be we want everyone to get uncomfortable we want the unbridled truth and we want to let's this is it this is time to put it all on the table like a buffet so let's lay it out mr aurelio i will yield to you and uh mr gonzalez toy tracy gonzalez toy same old thing we're gonna do questions um then we'll take public comment and then we'll go discussion and we'll do it as much as we need to do it you know we're we're easy okay right so i am really excited to have this meeting i know we created a special meeting to ensure that we had the opportunity to really focus on this topic at
009hand um as you can see from the panelists we have quite a few of us here this uh the group that you're seeing makes up the small equity planning team that the district uh i think everyone in here has essentially committed to doing this work during this school year and has been meeting on a regular basis trying to ensure that our schools and our organization had the content for for meetings and sessions i do want to introduce our to our we have three consultants on this call with us we have uh dr christopher naus dr rochelle rogers hard emily i don't even know if you're a doctor are you a doctor millie can i call you dr burns no all right millie burns um our three of our fantastic consultants who have worked with us
010this year and really helped us hold this work and there is going to be a presentation and staff members who are also part of this call will have an opportunity to to jump in and introduce and and speak to this work um so i'm gonna ask christopher nels um if he has the slide deck up get going because we want to have enough opportunity for questions and discussion and this is not the uncomfort you were asking for but um dr rochelle rogers art um if i'm driving i actually can't do the slido so i'm not going to ask you to do so oh okay no problem give me one moment to bring that apologies for that see it already starting uncomfortable that is okay my mother just called on the phone and i mean exactly
011clearly she just doesn't understand when i say i'm in a meeting at four o'clock so so it is okay we have plenty of time and while you're doing that we have just a few others to introduce we have will mcgee our director of office office of african-american student achievement um we have lashante smith our director of positive school climate welcome back lashante i know we haven't seen it in a bit uh we have christine hatcher principal at riverside elementary i don't see michael hatcher here we have sado wilson no windows at richmond high um the sado are you president of the black educator network i forget your title exactly or is it chair that is correct president okay great who's joining us as well and did i miss any of my screen [ __ ] shifted and
012i don't see michael hatcher but if he joins us we will be promoting him as well doc all right so okay so hi everybody thanks so much we finally got this uh we share at the screen thanks so much for being here we are going to take some time to share the work i'm rochelle um we're going to share some work that we've done around centering anti-racist authenticity over the past my lord seven to eight months now and so i wanted ruben if you could just share for a quick three or four minutes about why we are here in terms of the context that led to west contra costa reaching out to the uh to us as consultants to help us do this work definitely thank you and actually i went back and did my
013homework um and found the video of the very first session we did back in september um i had a lot less facial hair than um when when watching the video but one of i found the slide deck that we utilized to frame this work um as far as our year ahead and there was a number of different things that really stood out to me um obviously the the country was in a lot of pain at the moment there was a lot of um just challenges i mean i'm looking at chris background right now and that's just a constant reminder of where our country is and where our students were and our families were we had there was really a height of some real tension in our system so that was one thing that we definitely
014named when we started talking about this work but the other things we we actually named a couple policy shifts and changes so the district over the past two to three years um has adopted some policy shifts and resolutions that really named the inequities that our black students were facing particularly we did a resolution on positive school climate where we were really paying attention to and focusing our efforts on reducing the suspensions of black students that is something that i when i came into this district uh that's now three years ago had just recently been adopted um and there was a change in policies and how suspensions were to be handled um approval process for suspending students african-american students when that came up another resolution that was brought was a resolution that passed a year ago
015january which was a resolutions in support of the achievement and success of african-american black students and that resolution was definitely one that um named quite a few different actions including putting money and dollars behind an effort to really curtail the the this just systemic and historical inequities we've seen in education for our black students so those were some things that prompted this work in addition to a commitment from the district at the time that this was not going to be a one and done process this was not going to be a pd you checked off that you then could say okay i'm now an anti-racist teacher or i'm an anti-racist administrator that this was the beginning of work that would need to continue and a wholesale commitment by the district to get behind that one
016of the ways we were able to do that was obviously structurally this year as challenging and difficult as it was it did provide us an opportunity for increased professional learning and adult learning the friday structure which is something we have carried throughout the year is something unique to the pandemic of course but that really allowed for additional time to get behind this work we also made some structural changes partnering with our unions creating the race and equity lead positions um probably one of my some of my favorite times during the week is when i get to spend time with the race equity leads and their training i think it's the most real meetings we have where real discussions happen around progress that we're making or not making and i think that's a really important piece
017so all of that really framed the work that was needed i mean historically we have not served our black students that's just point blank we do not do a great job of doing that as a district we haven't done it in years and definitely no not since i've been here um and so that is the work that this has prompted we committed to not only working with teachers and administrators but really every member of this organization was asked and or to be basically volunteered to come to these trainings was a mandated component everyone from a custodian to a food services worker to a secretary or admin assistant everyone was receiving this training including cabinet members all the way down so those are some the context where this work began um i will be honest it's
018been extremely messy and but that's i think that comes with the territory and it's a necessary mess for us to continue to grow and adapt and change and really focus the attention that's necessary to make improvements for our black students thank you so much reuben that was super thorough appreciate you going back to the very beginning to uh provide context for the work that we are still continuing to do so what i have here is a little chance for us to not just do sit and get it is participatory and i think it works for everybody who has access to the slide deck so what i need you to do is to take your uh phone device access your uh phone app your camera app and then hold it over the qr code it will
019open up um a question for you in slido and the question is uh how does the multiple sustained murders of global majority people relate to our academic mission and so i'm asking that you would write your response and then it will come up into our slido so in what ways is the multiple uh sustained murders of folks of the global majority how is that relates to um to the academic mission for um for wcc usd and also understanding that you can access it from slido.com so i see that no one has responded yet so feel free again take your camera there we go it's not oh it's not reflected ah we can't educate students who are not alive survival is the purpose we are responsible for raising our youth to be allies okay others four
020four responses i'm just going to give a moment for a couple more just in case you can if you don't want to use your phone you can go to slido.com 376-323 our youth are continually traumatized i'm pretty sure is what that was supposed to be there i'm going to give a couple more minutes we need to empower our youth and provide them with tools to navigate absolutely because our youth are continually traumatized anyone else want to throw in there misrepresentation we have to prepare our black youth how to navigate and persevere in the world outside of school especially after navigation and it relates in terms of we having to live with what is seen right or as i like to say chris and i like to say you know the images in our hands that
021we continue to see um have serious damaging effects on our youth and then school can be for some youth their only outlet right to talk about how these issues affect them and if we don't provide that safe space or as we really are saying that brave space to have those conversations then it they may not have them right so i appreciate those of you who did participate in the poll it um you know i i'm i don't do sit and get so uh wanted to make sure that we have that available for you um and then addressing this mindset needs to be one of the highest priority things we do super super important right this is the work i think a lot of times when we think about racial equity it's oh that's what we
022do after we do everything else but the reality is we have to shift our mindset and our framing that racial equity is the work and everything else follows after that so thank you for those of you who participated just wanted to share this quote that you are either choosing to do the work of becoming actively anti-racist and confronting the inherent anti-blackness in education or you're choosing to sustain it you're either choosing to do the work of becoming actively anti-racist and confronting the inherent anti-blackness in education or you're choosing to sustain it and so the reality is kindy says there's no such thing as not racist you're either racist or anti-racist and that's really really hard for us to hear especially when the notion of racist conjures up people in white robes with white hoods but
023the reality is you are either confronting and attempting to dismantle or you are sustaining so who we are i'm not a fan of reading uh to you what you can read for yourself but what i will just say is i'm rochelle and um 25 plus years in oakland unified and other places and now i am doing anti-racist education full-time chris since 25 years is the magic number 25 years-ish chris canales educating around racism around anti-racism and around our own kind of individual internalization of white supremacy regardless of who and how we are part of my day job is as a professor and much of the work that i do is working with school districts and universities around the world to think about what the colonial education looks like and what it looks like when we
024move from the purpose historical purpose of schools is to silence children of color in particular um yeah uh so our next piece is especially given um so who we are is relevant but i actually think how we move is probably more relevant in our conversation and that's a lot of how we talk about educators modeling the way in which and prioritizing what we think is important the this country is currently in a love affair bashing critical race theory as state after state tries to ban whatever they think is critical race theory part of part of as a critical race theory practitioner myself i find a lot of humor when people try to ban something that they don't know what it is it's a wonderful idea going back to banning books especially by authors of color
025this is not a new thing that the united states does we ban things that people of color especially lead movements and write about it those are the first things that are banned uh so so current events around banning critical race theory just reflects historical silencing of communities of color a really quick um overview of critical race theory uh we we frame criticize theory as applied to schools with having four tenets the first one is the recognition as rochelle started that racism is everywhere and all the time you are either actively challenging this racism or actively engaging in and benefiting from and supporting this racism regardless of your stance racism is everywhere and all the time there is no space and place we can be past present or future so this is a permanent framing of
026racism so when you're surprised that racism happened some example of racism you're like oh i'm surprised that that happened that surprise is a reminder that you forgot that racism is everywhere and all the time the second part is is the historic reminder that the schools have not changed their purpose our schools are designed to silence critical educators of color critical students of color and any sort of essence of culturality that has anything to do with pigmentation color right um the purpose of schools being to silence children of color and rewarding acquiescence to that silence the third part is if we're challenging the silencing then then critical race theory argues that we foster critical voices of communities of color in particular students and educators of color and listen to kind of counter stories or stories that
027illustrate the context of what racism does to educators of color students of color within this context and the fourth piece um is that systems autocorrect so every time we try to center racial justice conversations every time we try to decenter white supremacy every tri every time we do a new initiative a new initiative a new initiative this is why people get so tired systems auto correct and de-center that initiative to recenter whiteness and white supremacy as the normalized everyday way of being so we use critical race theory as an organizational way to think about how do we decenter racism and whiteness so that we can essentially center what it means to be authentically of color strong voice and then you leave school armed with the ability to know how to move in a world that
028is anti-you so um also in terms of how we move chris and i model the possibility of inclusive diverse and equitable collaboration across difference and oppressions chris as a white male myself as african american female we in and of itself the fact that we move together right together teach together if we are modeling the possibility of what it looks like to be inclusive diverse and to have equitable collaboration so here's our theory of action uh we call this the five d's to address racism we must define the elements of white supremacy we can no longer continue to pretend that white supremacy does not exist so we must define it so that we can disrupt those same elements and that will lead to the dismantling of those elements define disrupt and demand dismantle in society in
029schools and in ourselves critically important there so that we can dream and design anti-racist educational structures so that we can dream what is possible so that we can design what is possible that's our theory of action so given that theory of action here's our essential question given unabated public anti-blacks racist violence and this is what this is what we want you to grapple with how does west contra costa create the conditions for black and brown children and leaders to move beyond fighting for survival as our colleague bettina loves says we want to do more than just survive survival is no longer good enough so how do we how does west contra costa create the conditions for black and brown children and leaders to move beyond fighting for survival and that was our essential question as
030we began this work have not answered it still lots of work to do but this is how we we've shown you who we are we show you how we move and now we've shown you our essential question that's guiding our work so allow us to introduce our implementation team i think uh ruben did some of this already um we did i think we entered we did introduce lashante smith will mcgee millie matt duffy who is our superintendent leading this cecedo wilson and michael and christine hatcher so we're going to really quickly talk about some of the racial equity work that we did um we're going to ask the participants of the esi the equity strategic implementation team to contact to talk about the context showing us our local mirror and then the supports that were
031in place so for context uh will all right good afternoon everyone hope you guys are doing well uh good afternoon to our board members our staff and the community my name is william mcgee i'm the director of the office of african american student achievement proud director we've done a lot of work but there's still work to be done and so one of the things that has happened with this race and equity work is that we as a district said we wanted to do something and hats off to mr duffy for putting something out there and as it was mentioned there was still some loose ends that we needed to tie up and this year has been messy but to me it's been a good messy and the reason i say that is because a lot
032of our sites have engaged in the work a lot of sites have been uncomfortable there has been work done where sites will invite us to some of their meetings and they're talking about some real stuff went to one of our high schools pd on friday and they were talking about the black lives matter movement in school and that was off the hook and part of that is off the hook because this shelter in place has really highlighted a lot of disparities especially for our black african-american children and families some of our families have reported that they're doing well in distance learning several of our parents and guardians have stated my child is actually thriving because they're not going to a school where they're oppressed or where they have to deal with the racist and uncomfortability
033of being in that space so in that instance it's been a good thing but on the flip side we do have a lot of our children who are struggling the disparities can be seen by the lack of the internet access by the lack of wi-fi and the availability and so this is why it's important for us to talk about this race and equity work and then how are we really supporting the children and families are we just grading to grade or are we looking at the true learning and so a lot of our sites have grappled with that there's been discussions about race and equity and grading there's been discussions about how do we really know what we're doing as far as teaching and learning so that's been a good thing the other reason this
034is important because these police killings are not anything new the only thing to me that's new is that we're really finding out about it on a large scale thanks to the advent of technology i tell the story when i was younger and i asked my mother when i get to go to jail when was it my turn and i won't get into that now but these are things that some of our black children are seeing when they're dealing with schools and so george floyd was not the first you've got to go back to emmett hill you have to go back to when black people were just brought to this country and what happened and so these are reasons why we're discussing it now we're trying to make meaning of this and so through the site
035or the race and equity leads there's been discussion of how this work gets rolled out and i know we'll talk about that but that's can be seen because some of our sites have undertaken this work but we haven't gone through our personal reflections and so this is where the challenge is then you also look at what's happened in regard to that whole capital as you see as one of our bullet points where white people were allowed to congregate yell curse you know do different things you see white people walking down the street with ak-47s but when you see a black person with that the response is so different overwhelmingly and then that's also can be seen in our schools how a white child can question something and it's seen as inquisitive but a black student
036questions something and is seen as defiant so these are all things that we're grappling with and then lastly the closing and opening of schools how we're supporting our students and this is the greatest opportunity for us as a district to come back and do something different not the same but something different to where we can really engage our students there are some things that we have to look at such as data points behind this work and i believe that is the discussions that we're having now is what data points can we see around the race and equity work to really see how it's taking effect and really for the positive and so one of the things that i'll say is that dr canales and dr rogers aard really came to us in a great position
037i've worked with them before i was actually one of their students and they really impart some good stuff and that's what we're looking to do for our school district inclusive of our students and our parents and guardians and hopefully that's where we'll start to take the conversation thanks so much will appreciate that we're gonna lob it over to i don't know if michael is on the call but i know christine is in terms of let's look at our local mirror holding up a mirror to our own actions um and some of the things that happen within our own local context christina michael i don't know if i don't know that might make it here he wasn't here okay cool i was gonna say he was picking up um one of the children children are important
038it's important that they not be left on the sidewalk yes very important that's super important super important um you want me to start off patcher and then you just kind of jump in okay um so one of the things that's always challenging is when you have a change in not just leadership but even in the structural organization of of of a district um and so mr duffy um tenure has been five years i believe um but during that time we saw some structural changes in terms of our district the the organizational changes of our leadership and sometimes when that happens there's like a shifting of priorities um and it becomes difficult to know who the work is attached to so who we will be accountable to and then who is accountable for for that piece
039or you have conflicting agendas even within the structure of an organization west contra costa unified is not unique in that it happens a lot of places across a lot of districts at various times and unfortunately we find ourselves reacting instead of instead of planning instead of like a really thoughtful planning and so in in the work that we did this year in contracting with the with with our consultants if you don't like tripping over my time and contracting with our consultants what we didn't want to do was just be reacting to things that were occurring but really wanted the work to be meaningful and sustainable across a period of time and not just um a hot topic moment where where folks would get behind it but then as people's interests drifted the understanding the importance
040of why this is necessary you don't want that to go away with it too so that's always a challenge and i think it was one of the challenges that we encountered in the very beginning of our work before before rogers art and canals came in is that there were a number of things that were really important but as when you have a number of things that are really important what becomes really important it becomes it becomes a challenge for people to navigate and understand um i guess i'll take a two minute thing so one of the things we talked about when we were looking at this work initially was language and essential contestedness and like um how can i say it polly seem like you can say what ra you could say race and another
041person could say race because it doesn't mean you guys are talking about the same thing on a bunch of different levels you could say black another person could say black and it doesn't mean you're talking about the same thing at the same level and so what we wanted to do was kind of start working to build a scaffolded consistent language so that when somebody in the district say at one site starts talking about something racial or to do with black people it would be consistent with what somebody at somebody on another site was saying and so we kind of started by trying to define terms we defined where race sat in this work as will and skill most of us are familiar with this kind of work right do you have the will and the
042skill to do the work and if you have the will and not the skill then we define that as benevolent if you have the skill but not the will then we define that as malevolent so that we can start to build a really consistent language and then when we said well if you have the will and skill then you have the legitimacy to carry out the work but then in a leadership role it's about legitimacy and authority and we see sometimes that people have authority without legitimacy so basically just to give an idea we were trying to scaffold up language so that we could have a consistent conversation everywhere in the district we talked about equity race and like chris said last week in our presentation race and equity are often times linked and they
043don't need to be right because you can get equitable outcomes without even dealing with race sometimes so this is where we've been and this is the work we kind of want to push forward to continue next year i don't know i think i'll pause there everybody knows i can talk forever but we and and in that we wanted to dig into the structure of it right and so um because i'm looking at our slide we talked about uh racist violence in school we weren't just talking about the physical act of violence we were talking about transactions committed against students of color regardless of folks intention we were talking about the impact of that on on on bodies in the classroom we were talking about the over-surveillance of black kids specifically black boys in classes the
044regulation of bodies um in class and mcgee touched on the fact that we did have a pretty significant uh response from our parents in terms of the that that surveillance wasn't occurring in the same way which was lessening the anxiety of students for in attending school right they could be successful without that type of surveillance when we talk about systemic racism we are talking about the policies and the practices and the cultural representations or lack of cultural representations that tend to exist in school systems for example when we looked at um who was making those who or who was responsible for making decisions there was not one black or african american person who sat on the superintendent's cabinet to making decisions around the things that were happening which he acknowledged um and so maybe that
045leads speaks to this disconnect between central office support uh mcgee and lashante um but this disconnect between what is happening at the school sites what needs to happen what needs to happen with our our educators what are the things that we're going to put forth and provide so that they can get to this point of how do we produce equitable outcomes for kids for us for our students and for our families um and if in the lack of representation in the decision-making spaces continues to be an issue now of course with the hiring of a new superintendent that may or may not remain to be the case because everything cannot fall upon one person one person cannot undo hundreds of years of institutional practices that have marginalized and disenfranchised an entire race of people um
046and just to clarify something uh that that hatcher said maybe just to go a little deeper around something when we talk about race and equity or the way that we have we have spoken about it in this year those two terms as separate terms have been linked we did not necessarily or or maybe like in reflecting back maybe we should have had greater greater clarity around racial equity but that is not initially how it was presented would you you agree with that right hatcher yeah for sure yeah so we and we know that those that it those are two very different things so race and equity two separate terms and racial equity they are not the same thing and we do know that um so i just wanted to clarify for anyone who might be
047sitting and saying what are they talking about it is the same thing it actually is not but we do understand what the difference is but that's not where our conversation at west contra costa unified started at least in my opinion we started looking at two separate things and contemporaneous i like being able to use my big words sometimes with this whole idea of the racialized violence that happens in schools people overlook the non-racialized violence that happens in schools that's even more so debilitating on students and what i mean by that is we tend to look at people who are racist as somebody who's overtly racist like those black people are ends and they behave in a certain way and they all do the thing and they lack certain skills but when the same conversation is
048torqued to where you say hey white people have magical powers that conversation is accepted without any kind of like pushback and what i mean by that is sometimes the people in positions to make the decisions don't know what to do and yet we look to them like they should be making those decisions and that's equally as debilitating as somebody in the classroom telling the kid that they can't do anything they're never going to amount to anything that they're going to be or whatever and that was the language that we wanted to be able to out right if you don't know how to get something done you shouldn't be in a position to make decisions for people who are grossly impacted by these things and so i think that i'll stop thank you so much christine
049and michael um just as a reminder we will have time at the end of this presentation uh to entertain questions to hear from other people so um just wanted to let folks know if they're like i really need to ask some questions there will be time for that um so as a result of the work that you saw here we talked about the context we talked about holding up our local mirror to see all the work that we're doing one to also talk about supports and this is by it's not the the extensive list of supports but so many supports that i think west contra costa did a good job of trying to offer this year especially for their beginning pilot year and so um lobbying that over to millie to discuss some of those
050so since this was the beginning pilot year i think it's important to understand that typically this has to begin with education and sensitization self-reflection because you can't disrupt and dismantle that which you cannot identify a group of district leaders administrators had gotten together over this summer to start their own self-reflection process then worked with mr duffy and some of us to get things started but and that group realized very very quickly that we needed the help of race racial justice consultants so in addition to me sticking my nose in that is when rachel and chris joined the team and we dedicated intentional time to the to this work uh i want to call that out because as messiest things our things were and they were messy we did have time allocated and the control of
051time is one of the ways you can either center work or decenter work when we defined we had to define what white supremacy culture is so in our educational systems uh sessions we had to work on that but that dedication of time was very very significant and it's also very much now at risk we developed an equity strategic implementation team who's here today talking at you and with you and to you uh with the support of our unions we created the newly formed position of teacher equity teacher leads who would work at their site with their principal to help craft and implement site-based initiatives and strategic resources for principal supports michael hatcher christine hatcher and i were all made made ourselves available to provide one-on-one and small group technical support we developed tool kits with
052slide decks supplemental materials uh in response to our sites asking for content and more technical assistance and in that it was so important this year to establish some shared understandings that michael hatcher referred to what is white supremacy culture what are its characteristics how does racism present in education what was the initial initial racialized intent of american public education what does it look like today what are microaggressions how are our students racially silenced this all creates a context for action and this was first year focus we had bi-weekly training for our equity leads uh leadership professional development training that is going on right now and development and support of the curricula for the friday session implementation so each month michael hatcher and christine hatcher developed all district videos and supports and then we had the
053toolkits so now we're we are faced with the threat this cannot be a one and done it cannot be the flavor of the month and we do hear concerns about that we can hear concerns about it being decentralized so we're looking forward to strategy if we start out thinking we have two hours to train some leaders and those two hours are dwindled down to 30 minutes because of other priorities this is how systems defend themselves this is how systems can decentralize or de-center an initiative um so we're we're encouraged to be here it was messy but we're hoping to move forward thanks miss friends thank you so much millie um just want to say that i have thoroughly enjoyed the wisdom uh that you have demonstrated during this time for my own growth and development
054not that i didn't get that from everyone but certainly i gotta hold out miss milly as as the prime example of that um i want to also um give a chance to a couple of our team members who um um haven't spoken yet lashante and aceto i didn't know if you want to speak before we go on to recommendations feel free to share about any of the things that we share the our our racial equity work content context i'm sorry um our local mirror or supports either of you um lashante can go um before me um no i think everything that was said was accurate um just happy to support the work and today i'm a listener i'm actually home with the newborn so i'm just listening in well congratulations i don't think i was
055aware of that no problem oh my goodness okay i won't derail this entire conversation since we're being recorded but congratulations congratulations um okay aceto would you like to just hop in here hey so yeah i agree with what has been shared before but i just also would like to reiterate that this is a process and this is something that cannot be solved by this year so if you have incoming teachers to the district or um teachers that are returning in the fall with the notion that okay so house is not going to work it's a little bit more deeper than that so what my what we've done black educated network is just getting a chance for black educators to get together and just speak about what we're dealing with and how to deal with it
056and not have the guys of just you know having to do it during a staff meeting at our site and it also gives the opportunity for us to talk amongst ourselves those of us that are at different sites that usually don't interact with each other so the main thing is for us you know for us to have discussions about racism and education and racism in our our our school systems curriculum and so on like we have to have those conversations about what we're doing as well and then once we start having these conversations that's going to assist us and help us to even further address and assist our black students in the district as well because that way if i look at it this way if we all band together then that's actually something that
057can be demonstrated for black students as well that okay so they actually know each other you know we have they have each other's back so they feel they would feel more invested so i would again i just i just say um you know we're just setting the table right now i mean this is going to take some time and for folks to think that it's just going to be solved overnight um like trustee smith posted early at the beginning of this it's time to get uncomfortable so next year it'll be continue you know it's still going to be time to continue to get uncomfortable thank you so much sado i appreciate that reminding us number one of the importance of groups of affinity as well as reminding us that this is a long journey as
058i like to say when i'm working with clients uh i'm dope but three months with me is not going to solve racism so like it's imperative that we understand uh the supreme journey that you are undertaking and how this is work you know if it could have been solved by now by just you know six months of people getting in in meetings together i think we would have done it so that lets you know how deeply entrenched uh this work is and as millie said this the way that systems move to self-correct is um is also deeply entrenched and so being able to navigate those pieces uh chris and i are gonna share based upon uh this work this year we're going to share some recommendations uh that we would offer and then we'll have
059time to uh open up for questions and statement and public comment so um first and foremost what um what we're not clear about is is there or has there been a formal clearly articulate articulated public commitment to wcc usd as an actively anti-racist organization what i've seen are some uh some notes around we want to work on equity and and you know i just got to say that equity we define equity as the condition that would be achieved if race was not a predictor of outcomes for students um but also for adults right so um it is difficult to get to um equity without going through the uh tumultuous uh water racial waters right so the notion of becoming anti-racist as an organization which is different from going to equity right it's an additional step
060we want to achieve equity chris and i believe that equity can be achieved if race isn't a predictor so therefore we're looking at how and the ways in which we can become an actively anti-racist organization and the question is have you had that conversation and if you haven't had that conversation then as the board director said the time is now to get uncomfortable to say is this what we're going to do right is this is this what we're doing and if so we need a clearly formal clearly articulated public commitment that is on all of our platforms so that when teachers come to wcc usd you know human resources is like you know we are really working towards becoming actively anti-racist where are you in that right so that that's what we ask our leaders
061uh you're coming to be a principal in wcc usd but we're looking for our school sites to be moving towards spaces that are actively anti-racist where are you in your commitment right when we hire people all of those types of things when we look at our policies and practices so this notion of are we gonna you know are we doing it or are we not super super important one piece that that we often that i would say districts often miss is do students see themselves not just reflected in the language of statements and infrastructures and whatnot how do students feel supported when getting to school is a traumatic experience how do students feel supported when when leaving school is a traumatic experience and then how do students feel supported when coming to school in particular
062classrooms are particularly traumatic right so so where do students particularly students of color particularly black and brown students where do they see themselves not just being represented but seeing somebody say i see you i see what you are navigating right now i see that you are right within this like how do i actually survive and our role and goal is to move you from that survivalism space into a place beyond survival and that language is that's not the everyday language that we use in policy documents that's not the everyday language that we use in how we hire and evaluate and assess teacher effectiveness leader effectiveness and those sorts of things right so shifting to a not just a student centric but a student survival and beyond centric language and conversation throughout and across support systems
063right and one through five we're framing essentially one out of conversation with a whole bunch of equity leads um predominantly um coming up with ideas and talking through barriers and frustrations um but two to get to number six so that we think about the the entire so racism is system the entire system has to be anti-racist at every single level and not just anti-racist because you have a teacher who does that thing there but anti-racist because right we remove teachers who don't anti-racist because we were remediate or have some sort of process or some sort of engagement with challenging teachers that promote racism right and it's not just like that's that one teacher over there that does it right but our curriculum our expected pedagogy the assessments all the metrics that we use rooted within
064a context of racism that means that we then have to look at and really have the obligation to look at right every single opportunity that we use to evaluate to assess students employees is rooted in racism that's a critical race theory lens we presume that it is our role then is to right essentially look at every single piece we can't do that if you don't resource the people who would do this work yeah so that was um that was the way of just going through all of the recommendations so yes chris thank you so much like i mean we could you know people can breathe i'm not going to read them we do want to highlight this notion of alignment about anti-black racist behaviors because that is something that um as will said that was
065where uh there was a huge um outcry and a need for support so anti-racism and then underneath that right this notion of anti-black racist behaviors and disrupting those um expanding your investments you see those there and support systems but the bottom line as you said is number six right our recommendation is that you continue to interrogate identify and dismantle and this is what it takes to dismantle so based upon that i'm going to um i'm going to open this up for q a uh there's our contact information i'm not sure why that's there everybody knows how to contact us but we're going to stop sharing and i'm not sure what happens with public comment at this point i'm going to turn this back over to uh director smith folds and ruben and you guys can
066tell us what we do we do board board questions now okay um then we'll go to public comments you so much for your presentation trustee gonzalez hoy you are first thank you uh chairsmith folds um i wanna just start by thanking all of you for being here this incredible conversation uh it's hard going first but also exciting to go first and asking questions um because i want to make obviously a lot of comments but i think it's so critical that i continue to learn more from all of you so i have a few maybe more detailed questions um first one uh and both dr canals am i saying your last name right canals okay and uh dr rogers art did i say that correctly okay thank you uh saying names correctly is is important to
067me because uh my name's said wrong every day so i i know how that feels um so the first one i want to like touch on the recommendations a lot later but um i want to learn a little bit more about the race and equity leads that was that were mentioned at the sites where those started already this year and i was wondering what the role of those leads are currently and what the role and the vision is for them for next year and for future years i'll i'll start um so we do have race equity leads and i want to just clarify i know christine mentioned them um they were initially were intended to be teachers they were um negotiated with utr but we do have race equity leads who are not teachers so
068we do have some uh classified staff who are also serving as race equity leads um and there was a whole nomination process uh to get to the race equity lead and selection process so they've been in place uh this year i want to say these really onboarded around november uh november december and they've been meeting consistently with uh dr nas and dr raj zard and the smaller team here and then they've been holding um in partnership with the the site lead and or if they have a race equity lead team or ilt that they're not the sole person responsible for the training but they're if we work in partnership with the administrative er and or team there we are in the process of discussing this role for next year um as both trustees know we're
069in the middle of negotiations with all our units um but we are looking at the race equity lead as a position that we want to bring back um in some capacity next year where and that's just one of a few different positions like that that we're looking at i don't know if anybody else in the team wants to add milly yeah the challenge going forward is that they were identified and onboarded in november at which time the initiative was always already underway the selection process different in many schools as did their relationship to the crafting and presentation of sessions but from my perspective the biggest challenge was we did not have time to adequately train them to provide for their professional development and with the reopening of schools the loss of time being allocated to
070this initiative we face a very real challenge on how we provide their professional development how we teach them how to facilitate and how we provide them with the ongoing content and technical assistance needed for the for the success cities i think one thing that we heard from them as we surveyed the equity leads um was that the role while conceptually was you know definitely fairly fully baked the way that it was implemented at each school site was vastly different depending upon how comfortable the site lead felt in leading racial equity work so if there was a slightly was like yes i'm all in then the equity lead felt like yeah we can move together as a partner but in the instances where the sightly did not feel comfortable it was sort of left up to
071the equity lead who then often did not have the institutional pull to really lead the work well in other words it became a barrier so to millie's point right if we're going to have equity leads making sure that their role is um well documented and conceptualized with the site leads who did not have the time to really receive the additional training and the feedback that we heard from site leads is some felt comfortable leading that work and some did not which raises quite you know very interesting things um systemically about a district that has said yes we want to do racial equity work but our site leads may or may not feel comfortable about that that's a whole nother uh topic of conversation so where the site leads were comfortable our understanding is things were
072moving along rather rapidly but um there has to be a partnership there and if the slightly didn't feel comfortable or that they had the skill set to millie's point there was not enough time to train the site leads in conjunction with the equity leads but rachel would you say it's fair to say that having sight leads and we mean principles administrators who are not comfortable is fairly typical and it's indicative absolutely it's indicative of how deeply systemic racism is ingrained in our system absolutely i'm sorry some can retire please do not i i thank you millie i did not mean to in any way suggest that west contra costa is somehow different than every other school district that i'm working in uh we don't ask so to the point to our point about a recommendation
073number one doesn't awfully happen right we don't say look this is what we're looking for what we say is we need a great leader who you know understands children and wants to create which is all wonderful but maybe what we're not asking is what's your stance on being an anti-racist leader and how do you create anti-racist classrooms and how do you support teachers towards but maybe that's not part of what we say we're looking for so then when we don't get that we cannot be surprised and i think it's important to to differentiate culturally responsive teaching here from anti-racist teaching often what the default becomes well let's at least try to do culturally responsive teaching yes also that's not necessarily anti-racist teaching right um so so most districts default to that conception i think this
074reflects michael hatcher's points around terminologies if we're if we're not actually using clear terminologies most definitions of implementations of culturally responsive teaching is teaching to the population you have it's not necessarily teaching anti-racism to the population that you have thank you everybody for that i mean this just speaks about how complex this issue is right i mean asking about equity leads led us all the way to to what doctor another you just mentioned right um so i wanted to actually go back a tiny bit and i think that principal hatcher mentioned the surveillance of students of color in in our schools and i was wondering if you all could like define a little bit deeper for me uh and for people who are watching what that looks like in our schools uh for students of
075color and how we especially after last year of work how you'll see that we are still doing that in our schools i hope that question makes sense yeah it does um yeah thank you i think chris has something she's so i'll i'm gonna speak for chris but i'll do this one um so the over surveillance of students in schools i mean if you look at research a simple answer would be you would see that if you track eye movements teachers tend to watch black students more than any other group students in the classroom when they walk and use proximity they tend to stand closer or farther away from depending on who you talk to of the black students more over if you look at instructional strategies and you think about surveillance as the lack of
076privacy that black students can't have any privacy then less higher order questions are asked right because there's no information you have that really needs to take all my fancy i just need superficial information to come from you and you will also see more direct instruction so there won't be as much socratic seminar you won't see as much inquiry based you won't see as much people trying to you know there's knowledge skill and reasoning targets you won't see as many reasoning targets being directed in the classroom even in science classrooms i've gone into science classrooms where a bunch of black and the team no students and it was all direct instruction and i was like have you done an experiment this year and the teacher was a no and the kids were like no we just
077sit here and listen to him talk for 40 minutes um i hope that answers your question but those are those are a couple of just some concrete examples of things you would see if you're looking for surveillance in the classroom yeah thank you that's really helpful and um i know we're asking questions uh chair smith faults registering context i mean we obviously talk about this in a national level right and a lot of the issues that we hear nationally is are probably happening in our district right but i constantly trying to find out what is it that we're seeing that we that we do need to work on right so that was that was really important for me to hear uh i mean trustee smith falls two weeks ago mentioned how in our own district
078facebook page uh we posted a picture of celebrating the return uh to in-person instruction and in the picture you see all the black students sitting in the back um and no student of color sitting in the front right um and i mean i think that obviously it's it's a part of that right so i i want to hear obviously more details about how the challenges that we gotta work through in our in our own district but i i know obviously a lot of them um are what like dr rogers already said what she sees in every district uh but i think that we obviously need to name them so that would then we can actually work on them uh and i see mr mcgee you have your hand go ahead yeah cool no thank you
079and i think i heard your question in there right um but that does underscore what i believe this conversation is right because we do have some highly effective teachers we have some highly effective administrators who are interested in making the change but i think that we have to provide the catalyst trustee gonzalez hoy and what i mean by that is as you mentioned that picture what's happening is that some of our parents especially our black parents and guardians are saying well my child's not going to go back to the hub in person because what they're doing during the school day they can just do at home and so that's where if i understand your question we do have to begin the out of the box thinking we have to figure out how we can really
080engage with our black children and as the adage goes if you can get a black student to become successful through teaching and learning strategies it'll benefit any child and so yeah that picture unfortunately does echo what is happening but then it also shows the change that we need and that's where the race and equity discussion comes into play i believe coupling that with our race and equity leads and then our site leaders and the training and then just not the site leaders also the department leaders because we're an institution that's in the business of educating children and we cannot just state that it's at the site level this is a systems-wide change that's needed and respectfully from the school board level on down where is when you all start to engage in that level of
081discourse then we'll start to see the seriousness of it and then that level of discourse will then trickle down to the central office which will then get to the school sites which will get to our parents and guardians so i think again like i said and i apologize for rambling but your question or what i think i may have heard is this does underscore the sentiment that we need to make the change and the last thing that i'll say is through director christie recigno's department the english literature excuse me i'm stuttering the english learner in early literacy and then with oasis we were actually able to bring teachers and parents and guardians together to look at instructional materials that show black children in a positive way not only for those black children but then for
082other children in the classroom to see them in a positive way so i think i'll wrap up with that is we do need to do the training to re-envision and reimagine what school can look like thank you director mcgee that was perfect and it kind of ties to my next question which is how do you all see the role of the board playing in this conversation race and equity um and to go a little deeper just an example board members never got and that's our own fault for never asking but we never got invitations for the trainings this year right uh but what is that look what does that speak to that the board who's supposed to be setting policy and direction at the highest level in this organization it's not getting the same training
083as people at the sites and that's just i'm constantly concerned right that we're not setting the example of what these conversations should look like at every school anyways now i'm rambling director mcgee but you really sparked that to me on me because i completely agree with what you said and i just want to hear from all of you like what is our role as a whole as a body but then individually to play in this fight against racism and in the fight for race and equity so i'm going to push back a big bit and say the board has held quite a few study sessions this year for as we were working on and trying to open schools it's about priorities i mean we haven't prioritized as a board the race equity work yes the
084board approved a contract and the board you know gave us this direct direction but the board has not asked for that to come back in that capacity so i went my push is as as two of the board members here you have that power to say we want this at our next board meeting at our studies we can make a study session or however you want to approach it i think that's there and that's possible um and i will say we we can invite obviously board members to things i know that trustee smithfold attended the first of the leading with racism and there was an invitation out i'm not sure gonzalez if you saw that but we could definitely open that up again because there's two more sessions um for that training but i would
085say if this is the will of the board we have no problem bringing that to the board i want to also make it clear that in our original proposal because i'm all about leadership and i don't i i've watched initiatives come and go and it's really up to those who are holding leadership particularly at this at the site and the central office to move it forward even when senior leadership leaves so uh part of our original proposal myself and chris was we had to have a board session and we had to meet with the board especially after what i would term a rather contentious meeting with the previous board uh to approve the contract in december of last year so even after we had already included that in the proposal and then we went back
086and said oh no after that like serious late night evening that it will always remain in my memory it is imperative even more so that we get in front of board but again the response was we have all these other things to do which first of all let me just acknowledge you're in a multiple pandemics with reopening and not knowing what's happening so i acknowledge that this was not a regular year but i agree with you wholeheartedly board sets tone board sets direction and then you know and then we are to implement some of those pieces so if we as a district are saying yes anti-racism is definitely important board absolutely needs to have that understanding number one for training so that we're all hearing the same thing to go back to michael hatcher right
087that the terms that we're using are all consistent across you know the entire school district but then number two so that when parents come to you and your constituents and community members that you can speak well about the work that's moving forward as well right um so that's imperative i would strongly urge that in fact um uh and and while i'm putting while i have the mic uh in addition to the board i also ask for senior leadership team right so whatever is your cabinet or whatever you're thinking about that because that provides direction so it can't just be the chief academic officer is holding racial equity that's not how that works right it has to be um i think as will said across senior leadership but then it goes to the site within right
088and what you have is a disconnect and this is not just west contra costa so i'm not dumping on wcc usd but what often happens with this type of work is a disconnect from the the leadership at central office level and the board and what's happening closer to students right because the closer you get to students the more often you are seeing some of the things that we were talking about before like you know the data that shows that we don't see our african-american students or the data that also shows if african-american students ask a question as you said will it's considered defiance versus curiosity right so we see that more easily the closer we are to students but 110 percent the need for leaders and board members to also receive this training and to
089put it further um we need we at one point wanted a retreat a board retreat because we have to make sure as michael hatcher continually reminds us that we're speaking a common language that our board knows what white supremacy culture looks like acts like sounds like and manifests in education policy is the domain of the board uh once we understand that then every single policy in this district needs review from an anti-racist lens okay that cannot happen though if board members don't have that deep but practical understanding of how racism presents an education we have yet to really look at behavior management and discipline policies we have yet to really look at curriculum we have yet to really look at hiring practices you know why do we have school uh serving special education students with
090maybe one black staff one black teacher schools that are predominantly black and brown but do not have a predominantly black and brown workforce why do we lose teachers who are black and brown are you satisfied with us teaching to a test are you satisfied with us assessing progress and teachers based on a racialized process that has been identified and known for years so we made the offer there's a breakdown in making it happen and accessing board members and i'm the one that always gets in trouble so that's okay thank you uh millie i appreciate that and all of you for for saying all everything you said i mean i completely agree and i'm soon gonna turn it over to uh chair smithfolds because i'm i know i'm going a lot but um i completely agree
091and i think that constantly people believe that because the newly elected board is mostly people of color majority people of color that we are well versed and trained and understand race and equity um i constantly get the comments of like are you speaking on behalf of latinos because you're the only latino on the board um and i come with a lot of privilege and a lot of misunderstandings of race and equity and i i see it lacking in a lot of the decisions sometimes we make now we're three months and feels three years in but so this we still have obviously a lot of time to continue to develop that and and train it and understand but um maybe that's one of some of the recommendations that can come out today from us to the
092full board that we can continue to work on um so thank you thank you so much for for responding to that uh my next my next question um maybe this one i'll send to uh mr uh sado mr sado because you talked about staff voice how come in your opinion um how can we work and then obviously we're going to jump into how can we continue to work to increase the voice of staff of color and always usd well that's i think the first thing that needs to be established is just eliminate in just the fear of speech advocating for someone's self so i'm the type of person i'm gonna call it for what it is when i see it and i know a lot of my colleagues are the same but when you're a
093first-year teacher if you're a second-year teacher if you're a teacher that may not have the greatest relationship with your staff may have the grace with your admin or something capital district you know there may be some fear behind that but i think it's just the fact that i think like this year was important because a lot of people spoke up and part of that is when black around educators may speak up at a staff meeting there's going to be that pushback of like oh well it's not that bad like that didn't happen or like you know like are you sure that happened or they don't you know that that type of things like the disbelief of what's really happened or it may not be addressed or you know you may want to discuss a certain
094item on the agenda and then it gets brushed aside or something else altogether different so i think it's just the fact that speaking out on this you know it's gonna be you know just the pushback between it because it happened you know it can happen in months like you know established staff like parents to get staff like staff against members of the district employees of the district and so on so i think it's just really just pulling into that piece that you know when you have norms and you say everyone speaks their truth you have to accept the fact that everyone's going to speak their truth the norm is not everyone speak the truth but if i don't like it i'm going to get an attitude or i'm going to shut down i'm going to
095dismiss it even so i think that's the big thing is just how to set up when like okay let's just go ahead and have the conversation and not feel that there's any repercussions or pushback on it traditionally what we know is that race and power are linked right we understand that there could be race but the way that we have in our country created white supremacist systems is that there's a link with power empowers created laws and that's you know that's why we have systems that move to self-correct when you have folks of color who are experiencing microaggressions who are experiencing racial aggressions and what have you and they do speak there is often a pushback and that pushback is very negative and could be as sado indicated it could be anything from no that
096doesn't happen to oh you that wasn't race what are you talking about so we call that race lighting where um we are saying something and then the person who is often saying i know i think that was something racial is being told so frequently that it wasn't racial that the person starts to think well maybe it really wasn't racial but really really it was and so what we have to do is create a culture that takes us from white fragility to white accountability where we allow folks to say you know what we're going to a stop saying to folks of color particularly black people oh that wasn't racist you crazy that wasn't what that was so we have to agree to create that type of culture and that comes frankly through time and and shifting
097our cultural response and then as a result we have to then teach folks to say you know what i you know i didn't mean for it to land that way but i could see where that can come off like that and what do i need to do differently right and then that's the accountability piece around wow this is really still happening and it's it's difficult right it's difficult for people who feel like they're well-meaning individuals um this is what robin deangelo talks about as the good bad binary that suddenly we're not saying you're a bad person we're saying this happened we want you to believe it happened so we can make things better for students and when when white folks particularly but people who are in power also who may not be white refuse to
098take accountability for some of the actions that uh folks are calling out then what happens you don't want to call them out anymore and then often you are you know labeled right you're playing the race card or oh you're angry or any of the other stereotypical things and then that then silences so what we have is right this system that um is repetitive at best so it's about creating that culture and so when i think about diversity equity um inclusion and belonging initiatives the belonging piece is the one where we start to shift culture so that when uh particularly black voices back students and adults are saying things that they are believed that they are safe that there's an opportunity for them to say them so that we can make change not so we can
099right this is not a shame blame game it's that we want to do things better for our students and that means that we have to shift culture one of the most difficult cultural shifts i've observed in education you know has to do with to what extent are we going to tolerate demonstrably racist behavior of teachers and staff you know at what point do we shift because right now we have contracts we have customs we have hr policies all sorts of things that mean we have no recourse oh that's a very tough cultural shift that involves our unions union contracts hr policies but it happens too often so we all have you know those of us who've been around the district we've got those horror stories think about it i do just want to add one
100little thing and there's a difference between overt racism and covert racism right so over white supremacy are the things that we see that we all agree are horrible swastikas other things that happen in our school districts and we're like oh no those are horrible but there's a whole list of covert actions culvert white supremacy actions that are happening every day to millie's point we have to first name them and examine them and then agree as a system that we're going to work to dismantle so i'm sorry i couldn't let that go that's why i said just demonstrable thank you thank you for saying all that i'll make this my my last question so that trustee smith full screens will have plenty of time and trust these menthols willing to extend tonight as long as you
101need me to as long as people are able to stay i also want to respect people's time but um i'm really concerned about i've been really amazed of the work that's happened this year but to some extent the pandemic has given a silver lining which is time which we've never had before my concern is what's going to happen in the next few years that we don't have those fridays we don't have that time um have you all had a conversation maybe this is more for uh for mr aurelio and maybe mr mcgee uh but anyone's welcome to jump in what how can we continue to do this work knowing that one of our biggest detriments to really doing this work right is time um and most likely that might not change because of our budgetary
102situation um how can we push back on that and still continue to be in this effort so one i would say prior priorities we have to prioritize the [Music] professional learning adult learning time that we do have and obviously i can't as of right now we know we're in negotiations we're going through that whole process and even negotiating with fall would look like so without going into any real details about that but i think there could be a priority as as we negotiate fall and we talk about professional learning and we talk about the time that in space for that learning we in the back of our minds we should be thinking okay we gotta fit this this and this and whatever those three things might are race equity you know you have to prioritize
103prioritize your list and have that in place so when you do have those conversations with with the different bargaining units there's a there's some alignment to that time being there because if the alignment's not there and from both the district side and the union side you're going to have that disconnect and you're not going to you can you now have to you know give up certain things we know the budget is going to be tight we know that releasing whole staff or schools to do this work would be a heavy lift to get that done um so you're right the the the change in the friday structure it was a gift this year i mean it truly was a gift to have that time um but we also have to be strategic in how we
104approach it so this year as we all said it was messy we started one way changed mid-year and changed things out so learning from that we can begin to develop a plan that's really strategic and has a strong scope and sequence has a process if it's starting with leadership start when you pick and choose where exactly you want to begin that work to continue will i see that you're you're needed go ahead yeah no no thank you and i would just add uh that just because the distance learning may not look the same next year we still do have time trustee gonzalez hoy and what i mean by that is there are the professional development or collaboration meetings that happen at the sites so if we can figure out how to incorporate race and equity
105racism in education into all of our meetings and what i mean by that is that ruben will also tell you i've been in meetings where i'm like reuben why are we talking about this over here when as an organization we're saying this and our school sites are not connected so i think i would just say that there is opportunity and then it goes back to how we do support our site and department leaders to make them become more proficient in this type of discourse and then we have to have honesty with all of our stakeholders and what i mean by that is just as i learned as a teacher i used to always say yes and my child my students clown me they're like it's okay to tell us no and so that's what we
106have to also talk with our stakeholders about and be honest with them but then we also need to bring our parents and guardians into this discussion so that way it can be a holistic approach and not just with our school site um employees but we're bringing in parents and guardians and then students into the conversation so i think i would just say that there is still opportunity for this work to continue it's up to the board and the superintendent to say is this the work we want to do so that's what i would say and and i would say could i add to the policy work needs to continue as well i mean that you know yes we need time to train people but we also can make some systemic shifts by looking at the
107policies rochelle i think you were about to admit yes when i do this work with other school districts i ask this question where is the biggest bang for your buck this year right so um you did have a blessed year this year where you were able to be like we're gonna train everybody um but what we lost was um fidelity of training and we lost um the ability to really get to our site leads because of all the different pieces right so if you have a limited amount of resources but you're like we want to learn from our lessons from your one pilot year one recommendation might be double down on your efforts with your equity leads all right that was a continuous group that while they did not get all the training we wanted
108because the way it was set up perhaps there's ways to systemically set them up for success with not just the training but also on their sites that they know that they are the ones who are doing the that they're responsible and the principals who are maybe not being trained are are going to be able to offer more support and fewer barriers right so like if that's the biggest bang for your buck and then you can have a couple of things a couple of sessions when you have those release days for other groups and that's what you do systemically then you do that right we don't let good be the opposite of excellent what we have to say is where do we go right um if we're trying to get to parents and to stakeholders that
109means how do we create some community engagement pieces across the year maybe there's four of those right where you do those i think it's about strategic planning and um i i don't mean to in any way trivialize any of the planning that happened before but i think we you want to make the decision is this the work you want to do and if so here's the you know here's the container we can only do what we can only do here's the best way for us to do that and then let's back map it and do that work so that like you hit the ground running and it's and it's um aligned and it allows for some on-ramps from some other groups that would be my recommendation so i i want to just real quick jump
110into and while there's strategies that are concretely naming anti-racism investing in equity leads as a conversation should there be any meeting effort movement thing happening in the district that isn't anti-racist and and why i ask that is until there's an actual norming of any conversation that is happening as a officially sanctioned district school site conversation has to center a lens of who is this impacting how am i disrupting ongoing racist impacts that are specifically target right african-american black latino communities and if we're not having that lens a niche in every meeting we we can also do these other things that we that we're advocating right as concrete investments in specific people to resource them so that their influence grows within that context but if we don't normalize every single meeting every single conversation every single
111decision making process every single essentially accountability measure metric with an anti-racist lens what we end up doing is asking for example equity leads to address the racism of other folks that don't have to do it right thank you so much everybody for the for that answer i'll pass it back to chairsmith folds um i don't have any further questions thank you so much trustee gonzalez hoyt um there was a q a question um mr aurelio it says um miss burns said that the equity leads were poorly trained this year if their position remains what is the plan to improve their training mr burns do you want to um speak to the because i think you you had said that they were poorly trained you want to speak to to what you meant by that process
112or right i mean i probably wouldn't phrase it as poorly because that's a qualitative assessment uh we started and kicked off the initiative in september we onboarded the equity leads in november so they were brought on to an existing active initiative uh with we had no assessment of their knowledge of content their skill in terms of facilitating there's a huge difference between teaching and facilitating this sort of thing but it was ongoing so they had to just jump in there and do it we all acknowledge that's not the best way so now we're looking at how do we carve out the time to really provide them with that baseline of professional development and then the ongoing technical assistance throughout the year and i can give you an example maybe we can find some time and
113a little bit of money five days of professional development on content and facilitation skills and then each month orient them to the scope of work the sequence and the materials that they have available to them for that month okay it takes planning but it does not sound on that we could not do that thank you so much um actually i think all of you guys answered the questions that i had in your presentation and in the conversation but just some of the questions i had and miss burns just spoke to it it was how are we scaffolding and differentiating the instruction that we give in these larger meetings because someone comes in there may be if we have the race and equity leads there if we have the site administrators there if we have whoever
114there there's different levels that people come in with an understanding of race do you know what i mean and a different level of experience and exposure that they have to race so you guys are kind of talking to me about this and ms burns is saying we gotta have the time we have to invest the time it has to be mr rails it has to be prioritized the board has to take it on as making sure that it is prioritizing the policy that goes along with this and not only are we not only having policy but that policy has to be centered um you i did hear you talk about colonial education system which i was happy to hear an explanation about that that was one of my questions um because people look at you
115like you have your unicorn like with in like a cyclops when you say colonial education system they get mighty offended like i don't know they're a pilgrim but they get mighty offended when you say colonial education system and it's just facts it's it's facts it's a colonial education system um i am looking for the strategies the tips the you know the flags on the play when you guys are not here that our district's left with when they can say whoop nope we're going to the left we got to center back we have to center back on um not just race and equity but racial equity so we have to bring it back center so um i also want to talk to the pac the fact about how have uh have we empowered wcc usd to
116dismantle racism i think a lot of what wcc usd does is it gives a title without the power you just throw people titles out but you don't give them the power to actually do anything with that and it's just a box checking so i want to make sure that race and equity is not just something that we continue to just check boxes off like see look at us we have a resolution or look at us we have a office or look at us we have this but we give those people the power to actually make some change um again these are questions these are questions that i had that you guys have already answered but um miss burns we're talking about the time that we need uh i am curious about did you see every
117school represented in these meetings that we had and if you did not speak to that so i was speaking around race equity leads and department leads um i will say initially i think every school for the most part including some departments were represented because we also have department some department leads as the year progressed there was some shifts and some changes which speaks to honestly the messiness of this work um where there was some shifts and changes where um some race equity leads either dropped out or stopped the engagement piece um but for the most part they were all represented in the work and then we shifted part way through the year as well and we started to invite with the race equity leads the site leaders to those trainees as well now they were
118not represented 100 at those means but it was an invitation not a mandate that they attend and so you had definitely some sites that included their site leader with their race equity leads which allowed for a different conversation to her to happen and and more planning to happen in those sessions so i think that leads to the fact that you know mr rayleigh when i'm invited to a party that i know i'm going to enjoy i show up but if some people are invited to this party and they don't think they're going to enjoy it they may just kind of skip out a little bit that's talking to that idea what we were talking about um uncomfortability has to be a requirement in this work if you don't feel uncomfortable we not working hard enough
119and neither are you you're not reflecting enough because you should feel uncomfortable in this this is this work should make you want to think make you want to have a conversation make you want to self-reflect so i think that we need to stop asking and start telling we tell a lot of i know i had to have my tv shot before i went back to teaching like y'all told me you gotta have a tv shot before you come up here and around these kids so we need to start telling them that you don't have to do some race and equity work before you come around these children before you enter this building i think that's what everybody was saying about set a standard set of standard that this is what it's to have to be
120in this district and i think that was the first recommendation which trustee gonzalez toy at least to what uh mr wilson made a phone call about last wednesday or wednesday before our board meeting saying hey we need affirmative statement we need a affirmative statement from the board saying this is who we are and this is who we are not and this is what we stand for and this is what we don't stand for so i really want us to push that forward that we have to set we have to set the standard like if we're not going to say it how do we expect teachers to implement it how do we expect sites to to talk about it how do we expect any accountability if a majority black and brown board won't say it do
121you know what i mean like if we walk in in fear then everybody gonna be scared so i think that's something that we need to kind of push forward um i didn't really ask any questions sorry those were more just kind of like what i heard like what i captured um i would like us to start um anyone in the audience if you want to make a public comment this is the time to pop your hand up no don't freak out it's not like if you pop your hand up in a minute we're not gonna let you do it like please this is where we are as a committee we let people speak we don't we don't silence um trustee gonzalez hoy you want to extend you want to go ahead and extend yeah thank
122you trustee smithfolds if it's okay could we extend maybe um 15 minutes i don't want to make too many comments but um i do want to make sure we leave with some recommendations we want to that we can move forward to the rest of the board do you think that 15 minutes will be enough maybe 6 15 or should we just say 6 30 to be sure i think i'm sure early has to leave oh you have to go i'm okay there's no class tonight oh great okay go ahead trustee gonzalez what time you want um 6 30 is fine then i'll make a motion to extend till 6 30. if you're okay with that i am so i second that seeing no dissension we will extend to 6 30 um and this is not
123our this is our first not our last conversation in academic committee so please know that this is a commitment of academic committee um all right let's hit it uh so we'll go to farnaz for now as you can mute good afternoon um board members and staff um i want first and foremost i want to appreciate every one of you because the venues that i've been attending with um trustee smithfolds and gonzalez oy have been the most transparent and they lead as an example to our systems as an employee who is going to be going to my 29th year in the district i am very hopeful of the change that we would make as a team and i i'm calling it a team because at grant i lead my staff as part of a team there
124was a lot that was mentioned in regard to how our equity leads didn't receive the training they needed then we talked about bargaining units and this is a discussion we've had year after year after year and um this topic comes with a lot of emotion from me because sometimes my teachers don't realize what their um behaviors are and how they affect young children of color i have 31 african-american students i have 92 percent english learner immigrant latinx students and then i have children that are of different demographics that should not define what my school does it should not define how my students are treated however often they are treated that way because of their um zip code not too long ago we had a board member visiting it was prior to covet my teachers were
125talking about a child who was having a meltdown in our staff room that child was pushed to his limits and as part of triage both my vice principal and i were called to assist him while he was having a mental i want to call it a mental health crisis because that's where he was pushed and if it wasn't because of my play works coach my classified personnel myself and my um vp being trained in trauma-informed practices we would not have been able to manage the situation our esteemed board member just sat in our staff room while my staff proceeded to talk very negatively of this student how his guardians caregivers don't take care of him how his caregivers don't know what to do with him so he's our problem most of the day that is
126not who i want to lead i want to lead teachers who have an open eye and are taking the staff training that i provide to them on staff you know at our professional development and internalize it enough that they're not badmouthing an eight-year-old child where they're encouraging the board member to tell me as a side leader to call the police because this kid's off the hook every day this is just one of the instances of course our board member was listening to everything and i don't you know at that moment i didn't know um where their mindset was however i will say this to you i was not going to let the board member leave my campus until he hears my side of it when board members come to our campus they need to do
127the walk it shouldn't be an hour it shouldn't be 20 minutes they need to start the day when the kids arrive and they should work alongside a teacher an administrator and see what happens on a daily basis when the board member was trying to exit very swiftly i said oh no no no you need to come and we need to have a very open conversation i am and i started i'm an immigrant in this community i came when i was 11 years old i'm a second language learner when you look at me i'm white as can be but i don't identify as white that's not my experience yes i grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth but i know the immigrant life i know how this child is feeling because i've been to
128his house i know what's going on he's been into you know 15 foster cares and a great grandma who was taking care of him just passed away a month ago and he found her can i say all that to my staff without um utr reps on my site um filing agreements are we bringing people into our system who are getting trained efficiently before they go and um present themselves to our most vulnerable groups you know we talk about how our schools are not representative i have yet to find representation of people of color coming through my hr if it wasn't for teach for america i would not have children of color saying uh you know educators of color if it wasn't because my own children are young and resilient and advocates for um everyone i
129would not know young folks to recruit had i not been a teacher in the district who's still in touch with children i taught 28 years ago at olinda who are all professionals who are doing great things i would not know to recruit them to teach at my school so you know we talk is cheap i'm gonna say that at this point in my career i need to speak up i can't go back to the same old same old our board needs to do the talk they need to do the walk i'll bring up something else you know we got trauma and foreign practices at our side we've had um conflict resolution anyway i i want to wrap it up we need to make professional development a priority i'm looking at a bell schedule i think
130we aside administrators shouldn't have to create mous we should go with a four-day schedule in the entire district and dedicate fridays to professional development the best thing that happened to my site was when my custodians were in the same zoom call as every other staff member and little by little the custodians were pulled away this person was pulled away and then what did we have a shell of a training my site leader and i um attended every session with dr rogers and i apologize chris i remember his first name those were the most beneficial professional developments i've had in years when we came back to the site my sight lead spoke eloquently it was because she could say it and i couldn't and i find that a lot of our administrators gag themselves because they
131are worried that utr i will say it i'm sorry i have to say it or teamsters will look at them in a negative light but why are we here are we here for the kids it certainly is not for the pay if we're here for the kids we need to find solutions at the central office through the board that's how we get things done because i'm tired of jumping on bandwagons and getting no results so i apologize i took more time than i should but thank you for this wonderful opportunity let's not water it down any more than we already have since august september so we have one more hand raised uh jamil i'm gonna say sale but i'm not sure if i'm messing up your last name so i apologize uh no problem my
132name is jamel sahali i'm a parent in the district i want to say thank you for facilitating the conversation seems like there is a lot of work to be done my concern is that years later i'll still ask the question of what are we teaching for black history in grade 3 or grade two or grade five and the answer will still be we're working on that we're still trying to figure that out i'm not sure how you train people to be effective in a subject that they don't know about without teaching them the subject we can't hold teachers responsible to teach black history that they don't know so i appreciate all of the work policy-wise but until it's in the classroom curriculum-wise it seems like there's a disconnect i don't want to say that these
133other ends shouldn't be happening but this seems i sit on the school side council professional development is a large chunk of money every year it seems kind of bottomless it's never-ending to propose that we're gonna go to four days a week to train people what what level of training do we need every single year to provide a staff that we've had for decades at some point it doesn't even make sense and so please continue to work but let's work towards the progress of what the children are taught thank you thank you so i don't know what happened to c peter's i don't see them on the call anymore so if they come back i'll hopefully they'll raise their hand because they're oh where am i okay is it a phone number that is really bizarre
134does that necessarily i don't see her or him either um i know that's what i'm i'm trying because i see in the comments in the chat it shows she is here this is this carol peters i think yes mr peters could you try to race in your hand because we can't see you anywhere on the call that's so weird you're in some weird zoom limbo right now oh wait there it is wait no oh no that's mr cooper okay maybe she could put her comments on the chat so at least we can capture what she wanted to say um if that's okay yeah we can go to we can go to mr cooper now and miss peters if you want to maybe try to log out log back in to see if i can i
135can't see your name on the participant list all right mr cooper you can unmute yes i just want to echo what the gentleman the parent just said earlier about how are we going to move to changing what takes place in the classroom i don't think his point was answered and i really would appreciate someone addressing it because that's a key point what how are we going to teach our kids so that they're the best that they can be and we need to get away from just the aspirational to actually implementation so if someone could speak to that gentleman's question i would really appreciate it thank you mr aurelio i see miss peters and mr cooper um we will speak to that let's um let's get miss peter's question in and then we will go right
136to that if we can um those on the panel if you we heard mr jameel's question and mr cooper's question if we could speak to that that would be very helpful i do see miss peter so mr raleo do you see miss peters i do it i miss peters now it looks like you can anew thank you mr cooper for yours oh thank you um i just wanted to uh quickly um address a couple of things um i was raised in equity lead for my campus and um the job was very hard in that when the information came out for the position it was um there was a section called you are a lead learner and it really stressed the importance that you're a lead learner and you're not an expert so i really embrace
137that idea that i'm learning and i do not know anything or do not know enough where i feel comfortable um even creating a professional development but luckily on our campus we had the we had a climate team that really we all worked together to really create these pds and i think that was very important for me uh to have support but also just as we are curating experience for the teachers it's not just my level of expertise but realizing that everyone's not on the same page and everyone's not in the same position as far as staff and understanding what anti-racism looks like um and how to even begin um reflecting in that and growing um to become anti-racist and i think i was disappointed when i attended the trainings that it didn't give me any
138kind of real tools to bring back to my campus to address where we were in our need and i really didn't use a lot of it on our campus what i did find very helpful um were the um trainings that the district provided with christine hatcher mr and mrs hatcher i found those great um when we got them ahead of time unfortunately we received a lot of those again thursday before the training on friday and we had already established we already created our training for friday because we wanted to be prepared um so that was um an issue i had as well but when they did come you know in time and we were able to use them the following week i thought that was very helpful i think i agree with um the principle
139from grant that it was great to have all staff members present for these trainings because we have to realize that every single person impacts the students experience on campus and it's not just teachers in the classroom it's not just the aids that are in the classroom but from the office staff to the janitors everyone who is on campus impacts the learning environment of the student and would they all need to be there so they can hear that what they are doing and how they might be behaving can have a huge impact on the student and i think that was um one of the benefits of having these these friday trainings and i would like to see that continue i mean even when schools have trainings on whatever those two hours are after school or hour
140after school when we have those short days we still can't have all of the office staff there we still can't have all the janitorial staff there we still can't have everyone on campus there because people have jobs that that start once school ends and so how do we create that space to make sure all staff members in wcc usd are being trained even the staff that's over there at the district level in payroll in purchasing and everywhere how do we make sure that all those people get that training because in some way or form they're impacting education and i think we need to i think a bold move from the board would be to make a statement saying we are going to continue this and if it's every friday or one friday a month where
141all staff is off and we're having these trainings um regionally or maybe not all at richmond um not all in the richmond auditorium but um figuring out some type of uh system where we can have these type of trainings that because i think they're extremely important i think that um we need to make sure we have experts there teaching it because it's truth be told some of the people in the training i was like i know students who specifically have called you out about your behavior and your uh anti-black uh behavior and so i was just shocked to see some of that happening as well if truth be told so how do we make sure that we are if we are having leads for next year how do we make sure that those leads are
142people who are really invested and not just they're the only ones who volunteered they're the only ones who were willing to even take hold of this work and to take the the lead of this work how do we do that and so those are some things i think you should think about but also i think the last measure is an accountability system we have to figure out how are we measuring growth and progress of our staff are they learning something new are they giving some type of feedback what do we have as a measurement tool to say that there has been some like there's some use in these trainings because even though me individually may have found it useful i definitely have staff on our our campus who have stated in our reports that they
143don't find it useful they don't think it's necessary and they believe that just because of cobit that's why kids are experiencing these things and not because um real student voice is valid and so how do we what are we doing for that how are we measuring it where's accountability with that um and so i think that's pretty much all that i wanted to um mention but i do if the district's gonna hold um lastly if the district's going to hold these district level trainings how they were going to do some fridays we have to be consistent we got to make sure that we don't cancel those a week or two before and then leave it to the staff who's not really well trained to try to create something out of whatever we kind of quickly
144research we want to make sure we have experts who are helping to create these experiences so that way everyone's actually learning thank you thank you thank you so much trustee gonzalez hoy before we go to comments can we just get someone to speak to mr jameel's and mr cooper's question does everyone remember what their question was yes so it was about curriculum and pedagogy and i'm gonna attempt to speak to although it is six o'clock and i've been on zoom since eight so i'm super tired um but i appreciate this conversation i'm gonna attempt to be brief so um i think a question that we've been asking in education forever has been you know what are we going to do to make sure that the curriculum that we're giving to students particularly students furthest from
145power is relevant right so there are a lot of different answers to that california's recently adopted ethnic studies curriculum of course that is mainly for high school and it's rooted in uh critical race theory although it's rooted in critical race theory light i would say um there are a lot of a lot of different curricular um examples that could be cited i know mr cooper asked for some specific examples but i think the essential question for me is can you teach anti-racist curriculum if you're racist in other words i like to say the very best curriculum in the worst hands is a weapon so for chris and myself our theory of action is always not to start with curriculum as educators we want the top three things that we can do to shift and make
146a change this question gets posed to me all the time rochelle i'm meeting with you give me the top three things i need to do so i can go in monday and make a change that is not how anti-racist work happens it just isn't and consistently i keep getting questions from educators what's the three magic bullets tell me the three things today i got a question from someone how can can just tell me what to do on on saturday so on monday i can go in and do this anti-racist work that's not how it works if it was going to work like that we would have fixed it by now if it was going to work like that culturally relevant pedagogy when gloria ladson billings talked about that we would have fixed it by now
147if it was going to work okay so now i'm preaching so my point is that's not what works so maybe we should stop trying to look for the top three things the the best latest curriculum read the best latest book and then we'll have all the answers what has to shift people is us this is people work so back to my question can you teach anti-racist pedagogy if you were racist the answer is no you can teach something but it won't land the same way because you haven't shifted and so we began our work with equity leads telling the equity lease this is about you and your work brene brown says you lead based upon who you are rachelle rogers r says you lead based upon who you are and your racial context leading teaching
148is a form of leading you must do the work and if things aren't working well it's because we've not done our own personal work it is not as simple as finding the right curriculum i do agree that we should be teaching curriculum that speaks to our students yes i agree there should be ethnic studies i agree there should be african studies we need to be able to teach that african people didn't start on the mayflower or whatever right that there was a whole history of folks in africa but curriculum is not enough someone asked what's the difference between curriculum and pedagogy the reality is if you are using anti-racist pedagogy it's because you yourself are working on becoming actively anti-racist because pedagogy is the how curriculum is the what and if you are interested in
149really figuring out how to shift maybe you have a whole group of people who have decided they're going to work towards being critically anti-racist and then you can take the whitest curriculum because i taught during open court and it was the whitest of white curricula but that was not the way i taught that to my students because i was actively moving towards anti-racism so i've been able to take different types of curricula and shift it and move it and teach things so that my students can get it that's what pedagogy is content is what curriculum is so i wanted to i wanted to hit that i want to also hit um you can't teach what you don't know so when we talk about when are we going to teach certain types of curricula to students
150that becomes about a larger systemic issue about what is important that we're teaching to our students and the question becomes out of all the things that the state says we have to teach and out of all the things that like the you know and you know we know what's happening at our state level so that's a whole other thing but of all those things what are the things that we're going to be willing to bring in you know how are we helping our teachers to bring in supplemental materials so that they can do this work and as we think about most importantly as we think about this shift i needed this is gonna okay so this may not be millie says she gets in trouble but i get to get in trouble too the reality
151is this notion that like this one person is the guiding light and if that one person doesn't do it like take off your cape superman's not coming to save us it must be a collective effort of people working together you get in things what you put out of things and the reality is if we are not going into this work saying we want to change who we are as people this is people work this is not curriculum shifts and i'm i if you'll notice i worry less about my teachers to be frank i worry more about leaders so i'm super consistent about that because i feel like there are teachers who definitely don't get me wrong there's teachers who definitely need to be right pushed out but i'm also concerned about my site leads because
152they're trying to do this work and how are we supporting them and doing the work or how are we shifting the ones who aren't doing the work and then finally i'm just going to end with this listen people um the notion that i keep saying this the notion that six months with me and chris and racism is going to be over you know i mean okay that's not relevant and not gonna happen right um and this is what chris was talking about in critical race theory the permanence of racism so you know please don't ever expect that you're gonna hire the best of anybody and in six months it's all going to be over what we are on is a journey to make things better and the notion that we're gonna get like the five
153little bullets that's gonna make it happen is flawed instead let's look at what can we control right here in this area for the next nine months we've got nine months what can we do for the next nine months okay and then we evaluate that not from a place of let's get away from our white supremacist thinking that we have to have white modes of evaluating but let's look at what type of growth we think happened as a result of these engagements as people and then we try to move to the next level on the you know on the agenda so we had a pilot there were some uh growth areas there was some areas of um of real great highs and there were some things that did not work well your job as as the
154board now is to be like okay how do we build on what we learned lessons learned what are the pieces that we need to do better for the year one because you're because our first year was just a pilot right um i hope that's really really helpful i i do want to end with this like listen as a consultant it is always difficult because um and i'm sure millie feels this too there's a sense of people thinking well you know what did you spend all that money for if we didn't get all these answers and what i hope that people will understand is um i hope that you for those who were participatory in some of the equity lay work and those who are participating in the leading within racism work that is still ongoing
155that you understand the shift has to come from within that i cannot possibly when i look at my 16 year old who attend school in oakland and he's 11th grader i can't possibly tell him to do anything different until i model what my difference is and so my hope for everyone in west contra costa is that we're looking at what is our do different first within ourselves and then in how we um how we communicate with each other thank you so much for that gonzalez hoy we um i'm gonna pretend i heard you say 6 30 6 40. because i want to give i want to give everyone on the panel a chance to say something before we say something just as a valuing that voice that's in the room so miss burns of course
156is going to go first so we're going to have ms burns go we know ms smith is taking care of that sweet newborn so we're gonna go miss burns and then um uh sado mr sado wilson please then mr mcgee uh reuben and then trustee gonzalez hoy and then me if we could do it in that order that would be great and then miss um dr rogers if you have anything else to add please please so miss burns i wanted to piggyback on dr rogers art's comments anti-racist education doesn't begin in secondary school if we can revive the art of teaching if we can have anti-racist learning environments if our teachers feel free to teach our children to think to assess to analyze from preschool on we have a win i get concerned when all
157of the discussion of curriculum and pedagogy seems to go to middle and high school the joy of learning is destroyed in element in preschool kindergarten first second grade so reviving the art of teaching can start with helping administrators leaders teachers understand what an anti-racist learning environment looks like acts like sounds like functions that a racist learning environment is no longer allowed that we're not suspending and expelling preschoolers and kindergartners but most of all we're empowering teachers to teach they have to have the time are they going to have to devote their time to preparing kids to pass a test that has its own racist origins or are we empowering them to be creative to actually teach this is part of the process of systemic change so thank you thank you so much miss burns i
158really appreciate that mr wilson if you have any final comments or any uh action steps or ask of us um sure i just want to address the matter of curriculum for black history so the question i've been asking just for the past year or two or so why is it that we just can't set aside 15 minutes a day for something black starting at the elementary school starting to pre-k level and build upon that what i've been saying is that wait till february and then the expectation is based on black staff to put something together for february and then once february ends we are done black history month is 365 days a year so why is it that like we can't rule out something okay we need to start integrating this and if you don't
159know how to teach this if you are not black then here's what you need to do i don't know why this is not happening right now it happened when i went to school in oakland i mean we were doing assignments and whatnot and we were you know i mean it could even be this matters like you know when you are selecting text for your english classes black authors black artists black literature so when you have february which is already we have only three weeks as uh billy just put in the chat here we only have three weeks and that doesn't really give you enough time and it just basically okay here's what we did and that's why we end up hearing the same thing over and over again so that's what that's what i'm curious
160about we just start incorporating this into all classes and figure out how to do it now if teachers out there thinking well that's going to get made my curriculum then don't teach because you need to make space to educate everyone because you're not just educating black students about black history responsibility to educate everyone about it so how will that work how will that work and the curriculum has to be legit don't just throw something out there like oh i found this online because just because it says black history month that curriculum could be created by colonization as well and false information so there's that too so start incorporating that and just start integrating that in your lessons so you have standards for common core or whatnot should be able to have the same when it
161comes to addressing the needs and education of black history and black students thank you so much mr wilson i really appreciate that mr mcgee yes thank you and thank you for this conversation i mean i know this is just really scratching the surface but this is important and there is a lot of work to be done and there was a lot of talk and things that were touched upon there are things that are happening that we do have to strengthen such as our hiring practices such as the policies and procedures in the district and i mentioned something earlier and it really is about honesty we have to really figure out how we as a district can be honest we have to be honest with our stakeholders our constituents our parents guardians and our staff and
162so this year was a lot of learning we learned what went well we learned what did not go well and so we have to talk about that and then we also have to make sure that this work is not superficial this work really has to do what we needed to do you know the curriculum is part of it the hiring practices is the other part of it and so those are all things that we are looking at strengthening as a district but we just have to not give it lip service and allow people to do this work we do have some effective employees here but if we're going to be handcuffed and we're not going to be able to do this work then it's all in vain so that's the message i would give you
163all as the policy makers is give us that support you know allow us to do what we need to do provide the checks and balances so we can get this done along with our west contra costa administrators association united teachers of richmond teamsters ssa school services or supervisors association there are people that want to do this work but and i'll wrap it up here if we as a people are not comfortable with saying black lives matter or if a family challenges us and says well what about blue lives blue lives matter and if we don't arm ourselves with just the knowledge of blue lives as a choice and once you take that uniform off i don't know if you're a police officer but my black life is not a choice and whenever i walk out
164this house you know i'm black if we're not arming ourselves with that type of discourse and language we're doing a disservice so i'll just say we need the support this work needs to continue we have to figure out how to integrate it and we have to give people the planning time so we can get this work done for all levels of this organization thank you so much mr mcgee mr aurelio do you have anything that you want to add i mean echoing what everyone said of course but i go back to my roots which is i started my career as a second grade teacher and i owned every kid's literacy at that point i wanted to make sure that any kid that left my classroom regardless of the color of their skin or the language
165they spoke at home had the ability to read when they left my classroom and if we're going to make any significant difference is arming our students our black students our brown students with the ability to read and how we we need to triple quadruple our efforts to make sure that every kid in this district is reading by third grade and beyond i mean that's one thing that's access that's everything and we obviously need to examine our curriculum you know because we know the importance of curriculum can't have but i agree with rochelle rogers art about you have to start with yourself and if you're not anti-racist and you're not teaching anti-racist ideas you're not going to reach kids at the level you need to reach them so i'll leave it at that the importance of
166reading in everything we do it gives them access as they move into secondary schools because we know that that has not changed um so i know i'm going to keep my things short because we're at time and i want to make sure you both have time to speak thank you mr aurelius trustee gonzalez hoy your final thoughts thank you trustee smithfolds and thank you everybody for being here and honestly also staying after because i know we're going over our time and uh dr rogers art if that your closing statement was you tired i want to really hear you when you're uh with energy uh that was incredible i appreciate all everything all of you said um i i will try not to take more than a couple minutes because i'm talking a lot but um
167you know i've seen as part of the system uh for a few years and really not that long for only eight years in the system i have seen racism and failure in our system in every level from classified staff all the way to board members uh in those eight years i've seen many many examples and as i was hearing everybody talk more and more examples would pop into my head of things i've seen over time um so you know today as we were heading into this conversation someone asked me why are you all doing this why are you having another study session around this when we've been looking at this all year and i had a really hard time answering that because it kind of caught me by surprise but i shouldn't have because there's
168a reason why every year i see these issues and that question itself answered why why they were asking that um i i've four years ago i saw six a six-year-old boy latino get arrested in a school because staff couldn't handle that he was running around he got handcuffed in front of me he got put in a police car and taken to a hospital six-year-old this is a first grader the data that mr aurelio presented to us in december that's all about race right that 16 of our african-american students are at math grade level is ridiculous 15 of our latinos 29 of our african-american students are reading at grade level 23 of latinos are reading at grade level that is why we need to continue to have these conversations and that's why the work that all
169of you are doing every day is one of the most important things that we should be doing right now so i want to say thank you because this work is not just in the classroom it's at every level and it totally totally trickles down to our kids last year i was serving in a committee before i became a board member and there were three students who served in this committee with me and they saw the chair of the committee tell me that i couldn't serve as committee chair because of my immigration status and two of the three were latinos this was the chair of this committee just a year ago i constantly pull examples and the importance of this work and the reason why i give that example is because of those three kids that
170were there they saw that happen it was not about the adults it's about them and how that affected them they didn't speak the rest of the meeting i actually didn't see them speak ever again in that committee and i connected to that we have to do better because of the data that i mentioned we have to do better and we have to continue this work and we have to lead it from top to bottom i see it as a sandwich work right we have to do the work in the classroom in the sites and we have to do it all the way from the board level i i think trustee smithfield is one of our failures not yours tonight but as a board as a whole is that we haven't had this conversation and that
171we didn't push charter that for our first retreat we should talk about race and equity i think that this is an opportunity though that i think that one of our recommendations is that as soon as possible with new with our new leader we have a race and equity conversation um that would be that would be my first one that i think that we have to bring forward to the rest of the board um we are so heavy on saying things in our board we stand for a lot of our solutions we stand for a lot of grandstanding i think that this is maybe why you trust the smith folks and i are not maybe meant to do this work long term because i cringe every time we create a new initiative a new school a
172new resolution and we don't connect it with implementation and how we're gonna set up how we're gonna set up staff to succeed we never really have that follow-up and that conversation about what does dr rogers and dr uh knotts need to succeed in implementing this long term or miss burns or ms smith right we haven't revisited our policy on uh race and equity a single time since we're on the board but really in how long before that okay i'm rambling but i think that ultimately it comes down to we need to revisit those conversations we need to have this conversation at the forefront um i think that we have to as a recommendation we need to send the budget committee a recommendation to look at how they can fund training for equity and our equity
173and race leads i think that should be a recommendation that comes out of today send it to them and ask them to figure out how to find the funding um but i think for me the first step is to have a conversation as a full board on on race and equity uh and i would love if dr rogers art if you and mr knotts would lead that with miss burns um i would love to imitate this conversation and take it even deeper not in two hours but a full day conversation about what race and equity needs are in the district um i think it's so critical um anyways i just want to thank trustee smith folds for making sure that we had this and i think that our committee is probably one of the only
174ones in the whole district that created an equity statement on purpose as one of the first things that we did so i want to thank you for the leadership trustee smithfolds i'll leave it there thank you thank you so much trustee gonzalez hoy um if you don't feel like you swallowed rocks you wasn't listening if there's not a pit sitting in your stomach right now then you wouldn't listen so all of us who feel emotionally heavy right now you were listening all of you who feel exhausted right now you were listening i remember when i was a kid my mom had a conversation with me my dad had a conversation with my brother my mom had a conversation with me and my mom said i want you to understand something there's going to be a
175time when someone's going to try to control you with control your body control your mind control you economically control you socially you can't let that happen there's going to be a time where you're going to feel like isolated there's going to be a time where you're going to feel exasperated there's going to be a time where you're going to feel as if you are literally in an abusive toxic situation and i'm sitting there and i'm listening to my mom talk about this and my dad was having a conversation with my brother you know the room about the same thing and i'm listening to this conversation at the end of it she says i know you think i'm talking about a boy she said i'm talking about racism in america and she laid it flat like
176that and what i've come to learn is race in this country is an abusive partner we are kidnapped and then forced to couple with both physically mentally socially and economically i am forced to be with you and every time i try to get out or you every time i try to get out you lie to me you buy me flowers you say we're going to counseling you try to make it better and you stop hitting me for just a little bit and then for a short time only for a short time do you stop hitting me and then you become you again that's racism in this country she knew i was talking about it that's my mama yeah um that's racism in this country so those are the conversations that we at a board level
177we had a district level we had a staff level we had a site level we had a teacher level we as a parent level have to start understanding what racism is in this country it is an abusive partner and everyone knows that the hardest time in the most dangerous time when you're in abusive relationship is when you decide to get out that's statistics say it when you decide to get out of an abusive relationship that's when you better have a plan you better have a plan a a plan b and a plan c because that's when that other person realized that power is gone we as a district have to decide to get out we have to decide to get out of the systemic racism abusive relationship that we have been in for over 400
178years we have to make a decision and get out and we have to be prepared to what that getting out looks like and we have to do it with a plan and trustee gonzalez hoy i lay it at our feet because we are the ones who have decided that you're not gonna hit me anymore you're not gonna lay hands on me any more so it's at our feet to make sure that we start getting a plan together for the escape and then the longevity of the escape because you know you can always go back to an abusive relationship because that's where you think your normal is so we not only have to get out of this racist abusive statement that or situation that we're in in this district but we have to make sure that
179we're always checked so we don't go back to the normative of it um i appreciate this conversation i look forward to more conversations i appreciate the fact that this is a lot of work that we have to do i appreciate the fact that we are all listening to our girlfriends you know when you listen to your girlfriends like honey this ain't right doing something toxic and you finally start listening i appreciate that we are at a district trustee gonzalez we're listening we know that this is not how every relationship is supposed to be even though every relationship that we've seen is like this that it's a racist abusive toxic relationship so this is the day that we get out this is the day that we start making a plan i appreciate all of you i
180value all of you thank you for everything that you put in this every single day by the virtue of who you are and who god made you to be we will continue we will we will keep moving we will keep moving forward trustee gonzalez soy will talk offline and see how we can push and pull where we need to go on the board level we have to push or we have to pull we will make sure that we get there um again everyone thank you so much i really appreciate it this was such a needed conversation and it's something that we need to we need to say it every time we breathe every time we breathe in and every time we exhale out we have to center this conversation so mr aurelio i appreciate you
181uh miss burns i appreciate you miss rogers dr rogers i really appreciate you thank you mr wilson thank you mr mcgee thank you trustee gonzalez hoy please get some rest it's a heavy conversation get some rest have some reflection and let's just be better i think we're finished oh oh hold on i gotta remember uh our next section our next our next uh i was just about to walk away our next academic committee is may 24th we're going 4 o'clock to 5 30 because we are going to leave space for us all to get ready for the reclassification of our students on june 7th we're having another special meeting we're having a special meeting around special education but we're also understanding that that's centered in this conversation we cannot have a conversation about special ed
182if we're not centering the fact of the disparities in our black and brown community on june 28th listen honey we may not have that meeting we just missed it you met delete delete delete we may not have that meeting because we are both of us are unavailable but we will pick it back up um future agenda items our 24th we are going to talk about uh virtual the the virtual school and we're going to talk about the afrocentric school um trustee gonzalez soy anything else to add to this no thank you very much it's great and it's 6 40. i like to i like to leave on an even number okay it is 6 40. we are adjourned i appreciate all of you thank you so much for the hard conversation we did it in
183a soft way and that's how we have to continue to work in this district harder conversations in a soft way thank you and goodnight everyone