001and i'm going to pause it looks like we're just waiting for curtis drop them a text message thanks joe for rescuing me i am looking for curtis so if he is there under an alias he just needs to text one of us oh he's having issues with his router maybe you can join by phone instead okay [Music] we could also get started and call the meeting to order and read our mission statement and see where he is okay let's do that i would like to call the mount greylock regional school district school committee to order it's tuesday october 19th 2021 it is 603 pm we are meeting remotely via zoom webinar this meeting will take place virtually pursuant to the law signed by governor baker on june 16 2021 and act extending certain covet 19
002measures adopted during the state of emergency which includes an extension until april 1 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of his march 12 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law this meeting will be broadcast on willienet tv channel 1302 in williamstown and the meeting will be posted to the mount greylock regional school district youtube page 24 hours after the meeting at mount greylock regional school district our mission is to create a community of learners working together in a safe and challenging learning environment that encourages restorative based processes respect inclusive diversity courtesy integrity and responsibility through high expectations and cooperation resulting in lifelong learning and personal growth i would like to thank courtney tunis for coming here to be with us tonight and for all of her work that she's been doing
003with the district we really appreciate it i'm actually going to turn it over to dr mccandless for introductions thank you christina um just a word everybody who was good enough to join us here tonight first of all thank you very much for giving up your time on a on a pretty lovely evening to uh to take part in this uh the unveiling of this what we consider a very important report just for your information this meeting will not include a time for questions or comments from you our audience or neighbors later conversations that we will build around this uh report the mount greylock listening and learning project will include that tonight is really about the school committee and uh and ms tunis so thank you for for your patience with that we're very grateful to
004have this opportunity to present this work with our communities the communities we're here to serve tonight as a leader that's new or at least new ish i'm coming up on a year here to lanesboro and williamstown i really suspect that that nothing you see or hear tonight will be new to you it's mostly stuff that you have known or or felt yourself nonetheless it's really important for us to join together to hear some truths that are sometimes easier and almost always more convenient to ignore it's vital for all members of our community to have the opportunity to be heard and for us to let every member of our community know that their voices matter so we thank you all for being here tonight to help solidify those messages it's been a tremendous honor to get
005to work with courtney tunis over the past many months on this project we're very grateful to her courtney is a graduate of williams college and she holds degrees from boston university and from the university of chicago her professional work over the years has taken her from the chicago history museum to our own berkshire gem mass moca to wheelock college and isaacson miller in boston to serving as the direct the executive director of pant suit nation and working as head of activation at super majority and we are very very grateful for the opportunity to add the mount greylock regional school district to that impressive mix of people places and work that courtney has done and lent her time and expertise to and so with many thanks for helping us get to know ourselves better uh so
006that we can better serve our students our community and better take care of each other i'd like to say uh a final thank you and welcome to courtney tunis and courtney with that the uh the floor is yours thank you so much jake that was a very kind introduction and christina as well i really appreciate it um so thank you very much to the school committee for inviting me here to talk about the outcomes of the work that i have done in the community um and i'm just gonna jump right in and just a quick disclaimer i live very close to fenway park and it is a big day in the red sox world and so if there's a slight hum there are some news helicopters uh going around over my house so apologies if
007you hear that in the background okay will you please nod if you can see my screen excellent okay and i can see most of your faces fabulous all right so um i was invited to create excuse me to participate in this listening learning project that's part of your school district's overarching work to understand itself better and then also be providing you know the best and most appropriate resources to be as strong as possible for all students and families and educators that are participating um and so the outcome of my work has been this report which was distributed to the school committee and um it is it has been truly an honor to work with this community and absorb the information coming from um the members here and um so thank you first of all to
008um all of the people who helped participate in this surveying and talks to me and um sent me their story so thank you very much and to all of those people that informed this work so um to get started the goals of this project were to understand how bias shows up in the mount greylock regional school district and i took uh um an absolute given that various types of biases exist in the school district because they exist everywhere and so the question really is what does that look like how does it manifest itself here and when you're asking questions like this that are about personal experience storytelling is such a powerful tool to get your head around what's going on that hearing from individual people about how they are experiencing a day or a month
009or many years in the school district is a way to put some shape to the understanding of how bias is present in the district um and as i said before this really could not have been um i couldn't have completed this without people being willing to share some really personal things some things that were very painful to discuss but also that sometimes showed incredible moments of coming together and empathy and so it's just been a really special thing for me to take this on okay so i wanted to talk a little bit about the background of some of the words that um i may be using in the course of this project just so we have a understanding and a collective sense of what they mean when i say them so um diversity i think
010is kind of the most commonly used word that people understand when we're taught when we're talking about these types of issues and it really just means um the variety of things that make people different from one another so in this project we were taught we'll talk about race or social socioeconomic background or gender um and diversity exists in an individual person can exist in different parts of these types of identities so you know i am a woman that is my gender but i am also black that is my race and so there can be um overlapping identities um equity is uh the practice of giving people what they need in order to be successful and that's very different than the process of equality which is providing everyone with the same tools equity requires a deeper
011understanding of how each person or each group or however you might be characterizing it um how their specific needs are or how you can address their specific needs so that there is an equitable experience of the education available in the mount greylock school district um inclusion is creating an environment where really anybody can feel um that they can participate fully with all of the things that in those diversity categories all the boxes that they check they can bring that full self to the table as they are participating in whether it's in the classroom or in extracurriculars or even just interacting with other members of the community out in the community um belonging is sometimes uh described as the result of all of these things working correctly together so a respect of a person of people's
012identities a very um conscious effort to create support systems where they're needed and the ability to then have these have anybody show up as their full selves and it creates um a sense of being part of the group that you are seen and that you are also in a psychologically safe place to be participating especially in a learning environment where you need to take risks um being able to do that without fear of any kind of retribution um because of who you are what you what you think where you come from etc um and the uh conscious bias and unconscious bias are two sides of the same coin um conscious bias is when a person is very clear about their feelings or attitudes or preferences for something um and this can manifest in negative or
013positive ways so you know if i'm throwing a party i don't like peanut butter nothing at the party is gonna have peanut butter in it i am biased against peanut butter and i make a conscious effort to keep that out unconscious bias is really the more challenging um thing to tackle because as it says in the name it's unconscious you don't realize that you're doing it so it operates you know sort of without your conscious mind doing it um and i think a lot of us will find um that there are things that we will say oh i'm not that you know i'm not racist for example is a very good example of a way that unconscious bias can show up you can say i'm not racist and yet you can maybe look back at
014um all of the companies that you have hired to contract with your company and realize that all of them are run by white people and that may not necessarily have been something you consciously did but if you are a white person yourself perhaps you didn't necessarily feel comfortable talking to people of color who were running those same businesses or you have a smaller excuse me you don't necessarily have a community to know where to find those people and it didn't necessarily even occur to you to try so these are the types of behaviors that can seep into a community and create negative outcomes even without people doing it on purpose um so uh those are kind of the six things that we will be tackling as we move forward um with the uh with the
015outcomes so the method of my work here was um to create these moments of storytelling the opportunity to create the conditions where people felt like they could share their experiences in the schools and so there were seven surveys deployed to the community five of them went to k through 12 students broken up in roughly two um two to four class grade uh years and all of those were um intentionally created to be developmentally uh more appropriate for those age groups understanding that a way that a child in kindergarten might express um something that they experience in school is very different from say a fifth grader or than you know 12th grader um i also sent out a survey to parents and guardians and one survey to educators and these surveys had a series of questions
016that were on either a um yes no maybe scale or a one through six uh one through three depending on the age and um of the students and this was in order to really start to get those juices flowing about the ideas we're talking about that um the i'll talk a little bit about this later but the demographics of the area it being primarily white people means that if you ask a question like are you comfortable in school on an uh sliding on a scale of zero to five or one to six um then if the majority of people say yes it can skew your understanding of how the people who are part of those minority groups are answering those questions so it's important to ask that question get people to think about the answer
017to it and how it applies to them and then ask a follow-up question that says you know do you have anything additional to say about that and that gives people an opportunity to then tell their own story and talk about how they really do feel um and that was a key piece in these surveys was priming people um to feel like they can tell their story by asking those kind of sliding skill questions and then following up to make sure that those stories were captured um i got demographic data from the massachusetts department of elementary and secondary education and um also there are further um self-identifiers in the survey so i knew you know the race of a person answering the gender sexual orientation and other characteristics i also conducted interviews with students and parents
018and guardians and educators by a zoom and telephone i gave any person taking the survey an opportunity to reach out or say that they would like an outreach from me or allow me to reach out if i wanted to ask for their questions and a number of people took me up on that and i also was able to get in touch with a number of people whose um students no longer participate in the mount gray like regional school district they've chosen other educational opportunities and i interviewed those people via zoom or phone and then the digital digital storage telling which is kind of what everyone was doing but um this is specifically over over email um if a person wasn't able to connect with me by phone or felt more comfortable writing their story outside
019of the survey environment um i received those by um by email and um the response rate of the surveys um were hovered um kind of in the uh 25 to 30 except for those high schoolers um which i would have loved to get more high schoolers to respond um but i also recall being in high school and so i'm not sure um that i could have done much more um at this point but um i certainly am encouraging ongoing work in this area um and i had um 221 parent responses and the educators i had 65. um so i was actually pretty happy with the response rates particularly of the lower grades um because it did give me a chance to hear from a variety of people and know that it was a relatively representative
020sample okay so um the top-line outcome of what i learned in this process was that there are two types of biases that show up in the mount greylock regional school district one is the widely felt biases which really represent um something that no matter what your identity is you can feel the effects of this type of bias and then the specified biases that require a specific identity um race gender or maybe your ideology in order to experience it and thus it can be sort of invisible or minimized by people who don't share that identity and it's less uh less easy to identify as a group that these things are happening because they're happening to specific types of people um and the widespread biases are mostly felt at the high school level um that's really where
021the preferential treatment for athletes and academics and the williamstown versus lanesboro and other towns as sort of a proxy for socioeconomic bias where that really starts to show up in the stories from students and families and the specified biases are really they are present almost starting in kindergarten um certainly race and gender starts that early um and it it's it's really interesting to see how these specified biases really show up early the students are aware of what's happening they know students that are either feeling it or seeing other people um you know experience these types of things so that is uh the age range is really k through 12. um okay oops so one other thing to note about these widely felt biases is that um they are they kind of create two different responses
022one is that this is something that is top of mind we need to address this first these are the most important things um because a wide swath of the population can identify these things that it doesn't necessarily matter who you are in some of the ways that the other biases do that you can be experiencing preferential treatment or not feeling preferential treatment because of your academics that that will cut across say race or gender um and certainly you know where you live what your zip code is is um doesn't really have any um you know bearing on certainly your gender your race um those are things that are kind of arbitrary and yet they are felt across the population um and so there's that really creates a sense of sort of urgency everyone can feel
023it everyone can see it the other side of that is that there can be a a way that this sort of becomes the backdrop for just how the school is that they're you know this it's always been this way um or we've been working on that for so long it's better so we don't necessarily need to do anything about it um so it operates on these two different levels where people will say that's not really a problem anymore and people also say this is the most important problem we don't need to talk about the other ones all right so i'm going to start with talking about these two widely felt biases and talk through them a little bit um so i'm going to start with preferential treatment for athletes and academics and this was a
024um this is one of those feelings that did not show up for elementary school students um it really starts to be pronounced around seventh grade um and the the perception is that athletes will be perceived to kind of get away with things that they're able to maybe do things that other students would get called out for they are perceived sometimes as being bullies but then also held up um publicly in the school which for someone who's been bullied by that particular athlete or that team can feel um really not seen if the school is honoring someone that has caused them pain um the uh the other piece is that there's a sense that there there just aren't as many creative outlets for people who out their extracurricular interests lie outside of sports that not only
025is there not as much opportunity to sort of get physical and move your body um that isn't about competitive sport but that also um arts or technology or things that um students are interested in are not as invested in in the school and therefore those students can both find that they are not um in that kind of preferential group but also that socially it's harder to find your people because there isn't a you know necessarily school organized way to connect with the people who have the same um interests um and the academic side of this is that um the students who are not in the top tier of academia can feel as though they don't have access to as many opportunities or like they're stuck in a certain level at the school um that there
026are if that you have to be the right kind of student in order to have access to certain things um you know such as the advanced courses that you're able to take at either um williams college or uh berkshire community college um that knowledge of that is really passed to the right students when students at different academic levels would be interested in participating um so i'm just going to read a couple of examples of the testimonials from this just because i think you know the in this report the um examples are there and you can read more of them but i think it'll be helpful just to have a little bit of the idea of what i'm talking about so for example a parent from the high school said my daughter feels as many kids
027do that the school highly values sporty kids and that the arts are really underinvested in at the school this has been my experience as a parent too there is not much thought given to the needs of kids who want to excel in other areas and there's really no entry point towards extracurricular physical engagement for a kid who wants to play something to have fun and build community when i look at the range of opportunities offered at for kids at mount greylock it seems to me there is real room for change and then some student perspectives these are both this is from um a ninth grader i don't think that certain students are necessarily encouraged over others to take ap classes but i do think there is too much of a divide between ap sat ivy
028league higher education types of students and students taking more normal classes it's probably partly due to the culture created by williams college but i think that that divide is a big problem in the early years of high school as people try to find and cement their place in the school so the influence of the williams college people is also um part of this bias in the academic side but i'm going to talk about that a little bit more when i talk about this next um area of uh wide widely felt bias okay so um the next area is williamstown versus lanesboro as a proxy um for socioeconomic bias or kind of access bias um and there is a perception generally that the students from williamstown are sort of double advantaged and that they're more likely
029to be um economically advantaged and more likely to have a parent or other family member who is connected with williams college and therefore kind of put on an academic pedestal um and that is makes the students more likely to have their needs met in the school in mount greylock high school um and the and it's important to note that i i said lanesboro because that was the town that most often came up but this incorporates other towns such as hancock so i don't want to be leaving those people out of this conversation um and there is a perception that this is the real bias issue at mount greylock that this is the most important thing it's the most widely spread um bias that people can see and experience and um i think it's it's certainly
030clear that this is very um easily identifiable by many people in the community but i don't think that using language like this is the real bias or this is the most important bias is helpful because there's so much interconnectivity of the people that are experiencing some of those specified biases and the people that are experiencing these widely felt biases that they really do need to be tackled um simultaneously um so uh the other piece um is that this it's interesting because some of the parents who attended mount greylock when they were younger mentioned this being a real issue when they were when they were attending so this is something that has you know generationally continued through um the the school and um the experts the expectation for some of those people is simply that um
031students from williamstown will be treated better and be better supported um so the outcome of that is an inequity um that williamstown students are seen to be given better opportunities and more supported and be better supported than students from other towns um and then there's also an experience of a lack of inclusion that um if you're not from williamstown or not part of the williams college crowd and you don't necessarily know those people outside of you know the sidelines at the football game or excuse me soccer game or whatever it might be um that it's hard to break in and become one of those members of the community who feels as though they're listened to or heard um so that also contributes to this sense of a bias against people who are not from williamstown
032okay so moving along um i'm going to talk about the specified biases now um and these affect specific groups of people at mount greylock regional school district rather than cut across um you know whole populations the way that the other two i just discussed do um and the uh one of the things that's kind of widespread about the experiences of these biases is that the students and families that are experiencing them can also find themselves having to justify that these are real issues and have to kind of prove that this is happening and that it's important and worth tackling and so that actually creates a sort of double um a double trauma really that there's the experiencing of the bias in the first place and then a sense of disbelief or um a you know
033not being taken seriously when when you bring up these issues and so i think it's important to um kind of have that in the back of our minds as we're hearing um about these different issues um and the uh yeah so i i think that it's um i want to be very clear that the um creating these different categories is really not a hierarchy um it's so important for us to make sure that we are not telling one group of people that their um experience is not as important as another person's and so i just want to keep reiterating that all right so the first specified bias i'm going to talk to is rate let's talk about is race um the incidences of racial bias in the mount greylock school district are some of the
034most jarring personal stories that came out of this report this was very difficult to read at times but i encourage everyone to sit with these stories because this is the lived experience of students at the school and families in this district um and i think it's really important as we're talking about race to just remember the demographics of the district so the mount greylock regional school district um the enrollment in 2020 through 2021 um was 86.2 percent white 14.8 students of color and specifically 2.4 percent of the district identifies as african-american so this is a very small community of people who are not the dominant group and yet they are experiencing a very deep and very high number of um these types of racial bias incidences and that is um you know when we talk
035about what's the most important thing to address this again can be this demographic difference in the numbers can be one of the things that obscures race as being a key issue that we discuss because it's a smaller group of people but what they're experiencing and what they're feeling is um really some of the most difficult stuff to read um and in the report i i struggled with how many of these testimonies to put into the report because there were so many and i ended up adding an additional um page or two in the appendix of specifically the um stories around racial bias because i think it was really important just to highlight how voluminous this group of reports was um so the um i also talked to families in for this particular issue i talked
036to families who had chosen um uh excuse me alternative educational opportunities for their students outside of the mount greylock regional school district and there were sort of twofold reasons for that um one was to have their students immersed in a more diverse environment so that they were seeing more faces that looked like them um all you know during the day um but the other piece was the feeling that some that um the incidences of racial bias could be handled much better than they were handled when they were in the school district and that that was a deciding factor that other schools were doing a better job at having their faculty and their administration be prepared to address these kinds of biases um so when this is going on um that of those kind of four
037things diversity equity inclusion and belonging it really is that belonging word that i think comes um to the fore here that if you're a student of color who is experiencing these racial macro and microaggressions small things that people say and big things that people say or do then it's almost impossible for you to feel as though you really belong in this space and that you're wanted there um and that is it just kind of breaks my heart to think of um students feeling as though they do not belong in a place like their classroom with in their school so i'm just going to read a couple of these um testimonials um okay so there is not a this is from a student in high school there is not a single day i haven't experienced racial
038microaggressions at the school you are failing your students of color um this is from a fifth fifth or sixth grader um i was told that my mom would be beaten up because i am adopted and that i am black i was also told i was hated because of the color of my skin which is black um this is from seventh grade or eighth grade a friend in my grade who is mixed heritage feels some boys in the class are racist and homophobic a boy in the class has says he doesn't like black people um ninth graders or excuse me high school a lot of the lack of diversity in the school has to do with the syllabus this year was basically the first time i've ever read diverse books as an assignment for class english
039and we watch diverse movies as well in history i think it's evident when teachers go that extra step to create diversity in the classroom and in our education and i appreciate them for that and then a couple of testimonials from parents my child did flat out say i don't feel safe when i'm at school and we just moved here and my kids are adjusting but it's very different and we feel it we are a white family and do not feel treated differently but my children have noticed multiple acts of racism and bigotry that go unaddressed by fellow students and staff okay i think we can all kind of take a deep breath here it's tough and i i know it's important for me to kind of reground myself as i'm going through some of these
040testimonials and talking about this so um if you need a minute to just breathe um you can do that as i switch the slide okay so now i'm going to talk about gender um the uh girls in the mount gorilla regional school district specifically experience gender bias behavior both from their fellow students then and also at times it's reinforced by their teachers and this gender divide really also begins in elementary school with either comments made from other students or teachers reinforcing some gender stereotypes and as students begin to interact you know with those other types of widely felt biases say preferential treatment for athletes this can become another kind of weight on the gender bias because part of this dynamic is bullying uh young girls out of playing sports and then not keeping them in
041that sort of pipeline with athletes that then results in that experience of that wider bias of not being preferentially treated um well most of the gender bias references that i were that i received in this process were the treatment of girls versus boys um there is also a a sense of a lack of sensitivity to non-binary people in the community um not just through kind of misgendering and some of those more overt um issues but also in talking about reinforcing traditional gender roles um students or families who are non-binary or have non-binary members are then hearing this reinforced erasure of their identity um and this is again you know creating an inequal excuse me an inequity for students who don't always feel the ability to participate in certain activities because of the way that they
042are treated or perceived and that among people who are non-binary they they can feel as though they need to hide part of their identity which is you know a key part of feeling like you are included and feeling like you belong being able to show up as your full self and so needing to hide your non-binary identity or that you have nonbinary people in your family um is a barrier to that um so some examples of this particular specified bias um from seventh grade or eighth grade um blatant sexism while doing physical activities uh gym completely ignoring the presence of girls and going out of their way in order to prevent a female student from touching the ball um when mistakes by girls are made even once comments like pass it to someone with a
043uh i can't say that word on this um aren't out of the ordinary um and then uh high school reported there's definitely a teenage culture of beauty that has never negatively affected me at greylock but that has less to do with the school and administration than to do with sports sports are greatly valued which is a good quality um in the school since sports can teach and give students so much but certain cultures on teens especially girls teams encourage unhealthy mindsets about body image and eating i think there needs to be more available education about eating disorders and body image and problems body image problems through the school and more communication with coaches and health teachers about how they teach how to maintain a healthy lifestyle so it's interesting to see that in the sports
044there is this very gendered sense of body identity and beauty identity in the women's sports that it's not just about um not being able to access that but even the women that feel as though they can't access it um have these additional um additional weights put on them um and you know i just to be um really upfront the rest of this uh report this particular story says a now retired health teacher told girls in my health class that our athletic careers would be ruined by the five b's boobs butts boyfriends beers and birth control though i often told that story as a funny joke it certainly imprinted on me an idea that my growing body was not useful strong or built correctly and that the teacher and other adults had kind of gross expectations
045for my behavior so i think that that's a really jarring example of that gendering of the body and the expectations and how that can come not just from other students but unfortunately from um staff members that are not appropriately prepared to have these conversations um and then i just want to talk about this one um i want to give you one guardian parent or guardian example um this is from a lower school parent there was a conditioning moment in a classroom a student noted that the all girls team was always going last and asked why can't we go first and the pera or the teacher's aide said because girls are more patient than boys it would feel excuse me it would be different if the para had something had said something like i've observed that
046the four of you are very patient and that's something i appreciate about your team instead it was framed in a gendered way that is problematic for the girls and the boys too who learn that they do not have to be patient so that's an example of a reinforced gender stereotype in the classroom as early as lower school okay so this next piece um is a ideology bias and students who hold viewpoints from different from the majority can feel unwelcome and bullied as a result um excuse me and as a result we'll be unwilling to participate in class um and so a number of students addressed um excuse me said that their ideas um are not welcome in the classroom and they felt as though then their voices were not welcome in the classroom um and
047this type of ideology bias against these types of ideologies and and the speaking up um can create a barrier for students to participate in their education and can have negative mental health consequences for students who are feeling alienated and bullied um so this is an ex especially challenging uh bias to address because um for educators if a student is expressing ideas that are discriminatory in some way um the the educator is put in a position of needing to minimize the harm that is potentially happening to other students in their classroom because of these ideas while also not wanting to inflict harm on the student who is talking who is sharing these ideas it's really delicate and difficult and it's important that students are made aware how their comments and behaviors are harmful to their classmates
048but it does not serve any of the students to have a student be belittled for what they're feeling so difficult discussions around challenging topics can be had in productive ways um but this is a place where professional development is really key and we'll talk just in a minute about how educators are really looking for concrete ways to intervene in moments like this so that they can minimize harm on both sides um and just a quick couple of testimonials um this is from a parent i do not believe that teachers have adequate training to facilitate a safe sharing of opinions and ideas it seems that the political divide between students from different towns is large and that animosity is festering rather than modeling for students how to build relationships across political divides um and i'll read
049another uh parent testimonial um we got an email and phone calls about my child not participating and not speaking up or answering questions we told one of the teachers that they don't agree with many of the things being said and that there's a student on the call who told them to kill themselves and so they were not going to speak up in class nothing changed nothing got better and nothing happened so you know it goes without saying that no student should be told to kill themselves at any point in their educational experience and um it's not an excuse that you disagree with a person's ideology or ideas okay so uh i see that i am getting up there in time so i want to um move through these next one so we can get to
050the questions um so the way that i've outlined this i've highlighted five ways that bias shows up in the district but it's certainly not the only way um and i think that there are and there's ways to go deeper on what has been identified here and then also areas to consider so um i think understanding the experience broken out by the towns um athletes versus non-athletes gender presentation lgbtqia plus students and academic performance ranges how students feel um in school their sense of belonging based on their identities in those areas would i think helped to make a richer set of information to move forward with tackling these biases and other areas that came up um that are areas to consider especially because there's constantly there's constant movement in these different types of um areas of
051experience in areas of bias some things could flare or some things could come down and some other areas that were mentioned were family makeup so things like does a school um know how best to handle um a family that has two households or um is a teacher prepared to talk about families that um have guardians versus parents and that type of thing um lgbtqia plus identity really across the board how students who um identify as being in the lgbtq community are feeling accepted and comfortable at school or how students who have family members that identify that way are feeling comfortable at school when maybe they don't necessarily present visibly themselves as a member of that community um and a third area is neurodivergence so how students who are either on the spectrum or have various
052diagnoses adhd that kind of thing how their experience in the school is um and how uh basically like what biases those students might be experiencing um so there's also an educator survey and i just want to really quickly talk about some key outcomes there um there was a lot of desire for professional development but with the um specificity that they're looking for ways that um the best ways to address difficult topics or moments when they arise so not just the sort of um upper level but what are the words i can be using what are the phrases i can be using what are activities that we can do um similarly when uh there is an overhearing of a an incident how is it best for a teacher to intervene what's the best follow-up that that
053type of thing um also teachers are really hungry for opportunities for collaboration um so after receiving the professional development the ability to kind of share those ideas and talk about techniques that have worked particularly understanding at their grade level or the context of the classes they teach working with each other to kind of create a set of best practices um most of the uh people are who responded to the educational survey are on board but some people do still have a dismissive attitude and usually it reflects some of the things i was talking about before like this is the real issue here being um a socioeconomic divide um and it's important that there's um kind of a more deep understanding of that because students can experience things differently based on how seriously the um their
054educators take that professional development and so they there can be an inequity in um the classroom experience um if there isn't a kind of um buy-in overall that these are important things to work on and the fourth one is an open back and forth of the administration um there's a sense that maybe the door is open but that invitation has not necessarily been extended um or uh you know the opportunity to provide that feedback um is maybe just not known um to teachers they don't necessarily know how to do it um and again there's more appetite for collaboration but also from the administration level and with parents um to address these types of challenges so um final thoughts our goal was to eliminate how bias shows up in the mount grey life regional school district
055outcomes are these um five areas of bias that are most prominent but they do not mean that they're the only things and ongoing work should include more demographic breakdowns and group breakdowns um and that i again absorbing this content can be really challenging but it's really necessary and it's very brave for your school district to be doing this work um and again you know there's professional opportunities professional development opportunities moving forward for educators and the continuing gathering of data is key for the ongoing process of learning about the district and that's that so i did take a lot of time so i'm going to x out of this and give us um a chance to talk face to face where i can actually see all of you rather than just four of you in the
056little corner do you have any questions or comments or anything yeah courtney thank you so much for this uh really thoughtful um presentation i was trying to come up with other other adjectives and there are many but um you know it's it's a uh information work that you know the district that all of us community members parents and the district are gonna have to to think hard hard on hard about and and hard about what we wanna what we wanna do um going forward uh so this question and i suspect i know the answer um but it's uh related to the low response rates that that we we received for the various groups would you suspect or do you suspect that if we could improve those response rates that your findings would be different in
057any way um that's a good question i i don't necessarily think that there would be a difference in um the types of things that bubbled up to the surface but i do think that there would be a value in understanding kind of even more broadly how people are experiencing these things and um i guess the one area where maybe that would be the case is some of those sort of additional topics things that came up a little bit enough for me to feel as though i needed to mention them but they didn't really fit into um the you know five key areas that i saw um so there could be you know some movement that suggests that there's more um more meat there than this um this report was able to dig up i just
058saw a hand oh carrie thanks courtney and i'll echo jose's appreciation um this is um really tough stuff to hear but as jake said you know it's not none of it is is a complete surprise um one of the things that you talked about is is the divide um between the towns right um it's a divide that is historical goes back to before the district was formed before the 712 district was formed it's resurfaced in a lot of ways over the years my question is whether there is such a thing as community professional development whether there are ways that we can think about healing the historic divides as well as addressing the current divide um in the many ways that it's it's felt and i guess i have this a similar question about the elementary
059schools even though they don't have the town divides there there are issues within the elementary schools that are very much community based around family and and kid culture that i don't know that we've ever really tried to address so those are two different questions yeah um i think that this is uh i'm i'm babbling a little bit because your question is really interesting um i think that there's what you have named the sort of idea of a community professional development i think is reflected in what you see both in the educator survey and in some of the parent comments of wanting to work together to move these issues forward that there's a desire to be working with the administration the educators and parents and guardians um so that the effort is multi-pronged and exists you
060know beyond when the school day ends um so i i will say that there's definitely i feel like there's an appetite for that um i am not as well uh informed about people who do that i have to say and that's something that i can tap into my networks and see what that might look like and who does that or what those practices look like because i think it's really interesting um i have a sense that the the doctor that was tapped for the professional development work that's ongoing right now would also be a great resource to find out that kind of information since i would imagine that there's a lot of transferable practice from working in a school community to working in a living community um so that would be a great idea um
061the second piece was the question about the elementary schools and the um community can you can you remind me of the second question sure um there have been a number of incidents as you know of racist behavior or behavior that has been described and felt as racist in in the elementary schools i'm sure you i mean we heard some of those stories and um [Music] there the the question is whether there is work that can be done [Music] um with the kids and with the families in general not specific kids and specific families but with the communities right the elementary school communities that can help with the learning and the growth and the awareness but also the healing that needs to be done when these kinds of things happen and to avoid that is um
062again it's kind of similar that they're that kind of work that healing that working together is um [Music] you know definitely an expertise that needs to be brought in um and another thing that i think is potentially helpful is just like where is all of this information and practice being held right now and and there it can be really helpful to have one person who is looking at this in its um entirety and so can recognize things like okay if we can make behavioral improvements or you know however you want to say it um at the elementary school level let's monitor the outcomes as it goes up through high school and how students are feeling about their sense of belonging in the community um and so i again you know that's um it's not necessarily
063my area of expertise you know how to actually step in and do that healing with families and students um i'm really more of the kind of professional side but i think that that's um you know a really it's a really good idea um because as i said before you know people land on a variety of different parts of the identity spectrum and so it's not just you know one type of person that can benefit from that type of learning so sorry if those weren't particularly satisfying satisfying answers but yes i know a person you can call but um i can certainly do some more research and see what i'm able might be able to um send to the committee you're sent to jake thanks so much yeah jose i saw your hand it's courtney we
064have this thing where we we don't speak until what we're we're called upon or uber uber polite um no i've got a question uh following a bit from from what you heard from carrie and i was curious about the [Music] biases perceived biases against individuals with minority ideologies one of the challenges that we face we have faced in our communities is that um you know by engaging in work like like the the work that you presented to us today um reinforces those biases against against certain folks um in the communities that you've worked with what have you seen or have you seen ways that communities can move forward that can that can help address those perceived biases and maybe even real biases um and it can bring more folks along as we try to you
065know make our community as as welcoming and as inclusive as we can um give any sense of how we might move forward in that regard yeah it's a it's a very difficult um challenge in particular because of what i was talking about that it's um there's harm that's coming from both sides usually and that is is really difficult um one thing that i have seen be pretty key is the um you know continued humanization of each person participating in this and that's really why storytelling for me is such a critical piece of understanding where people stand and where they come from and and how they got to where they are that the sense that hearing from people about what their fears are or what their um life experience has been and or how they are
066affected by the current structure in the school or the town or whatever it might be is really helpful to create that empathy across those differences so that you can kind of have a base to stand on rather than you know kind of idea versus idea but like remembering that it's person to person um it's it's not difficult because there's also um in it's not no i'm sorry i mean it is difficult it is very difficult i'm not being flipped about it um but the other thing that i think is important is to um you know have a sense of i don't know i don't i don't want to say kind of like a line in the sand but it's it is important to be clear about what is not okay and clear and consistent and
067you don't have to be a jerk when you say that it can it's really more um effective when you're doing this building to just be clear and concise and then continue the conversation forward so you know we are not going to dismiss trans identity in this conversation and then moving forward with the conversation um and that is you know it doesn't necessarily um create like a ton of shame in that moment or a a confrontational moment if you are in that building stance um it's a you know it's a different thing if people are doing acts of harm against other people and you know requires a different response um but in that building stance having very key um you know places that the community will not tolerate in terms of intolerance is really important um
068but not letting those moments be a stop sign um and then not going forward no that's great thank you i just saw curtis's hand hi we're all very pavlovian trained i also i'm a teacher in another district so hand raising very big on that um uh first of all again thank you for doing all this heavy lifting and helping us uh really dig into the experience of being a student at our school and being a community member in this community um also i'm a fellow bu alum go terriers how you doing um yeah i'm still paying for it too um but um facts uh i i noticed there's i couldn't even figure out how to form a question or out of this but uh there's a simultaneous drive to uh explore and improve uh diversity
069equity representation uh uh diversity in in our storytelling and in our learning uh that mirrors the diversity of our community which is very diverse um and a transition into a restorative justice model of addressing harm uh and addressing uh perceived uh injury and and overt injury and and i'm i'm trying to my question if there is one in this is uh is is there a restorative justice focused professional development geared specifically towards coming to terms with and moving through this very painful conversation a very necessary conversation towards that building that we're talking about towards that uh not just healing but uh finding enough common ground to see and hear each other's experiences and stories that is accessible to a district like ours i know that's a giant question but there's that's what i have no
070it's it's a really good question and i think um it's it's great to hear that question because i think that the um it's so key to really do like a a true accounting for what is um what has happened and what is happening and that restorative justice model you know does not allow you to say just you know this what happened before it doesn't have an impact on what's moving forward um i think the key part of the question is actually your very last piece about accessibility to the district there's certainly restorative justice practitioners who are experts at this kind of work but i am not very informed on what they cost or how long they take or what their processes um are like in this kind of you know school district environment um but
071i think that that again is a really um potentially really transformative and um useful endeavor um because it to sort of what i was talking about in the very beginning excuse me of the presentation is that um the acknowledgement of the truth of these experiences is so critical to the healing moving forward that no longer having to say yes this is real like believe me is is really important and um that you know it's not just the harm of the act but it's the harm of the erasure is is also part of it and so needing to also have that be part of that restorative justice model um but again i am happy to do a little digging and a little research and talk to the people that i know that are in the restorative
072justice practice thank you christina and julie julia just came off mute too so you have to battle it out this is not a question um it's just a comment for uh the listening audience that um courtney's full report will be available on the district website tomorrow for their consumption thank you great thank you julia did you have a question um i i wouldn't say it's a question um but i i really want to echo my colleagues in gratitude for what you have shared with us um [Music] i i this the the numbers could tell us one thing but you are absolutely right the stories humanize um this challenge um in a way that you know numbers never could um even even if the numbers were bigger you know but but the stories um i'm heartbroken
073just gonna say that i'm heartbroken and um i sit with this and i guess um i know our culture is one that is let's jump to jump to solutions but i i do think there's also value in us sitting with this and really deeply holding it and um honoring the people who shared their stories um honoring uh you know the the space we're in and the challenge we have and and really kind of holding that and moving through that to get to solutions um and i just want to you know it's not really a question but i i think it's um i think the more i sit with it the more deeply i feel it the more committed i am to change um and i think the more possibilities will open for how that change
074can happen so um i guess i just share that as as what i'm sitting with right now yeah i um i absolutely can tell you as a person who has sat with a lot of this over you know the number of months that i've been doing this work that you're absolutely right that the um you know you sort of new things emerge from the stories when you revisit them and um yeah it's just a constant reminder of what's at stake i think too um so i i think that you're uh i i also understand like that you want to fix it and there's an urgency but there's urgency too so if we need both but to sort of understand this the scope of the challenge um really allowing this to absorb allowing yourself to feel
075that that pain and that heartbreak i think is is important too because it really um again just makes real the um how important the job is moving forward yeah so jake you mentioned that there would be future opportunities for the community just to discuss um this work and the community members who are either watching this now or who will watch this on willy net or will read the report will want to share feedback and do you have more specific thoughts about how the community can provide feedback to either the administration the school committee to courtney directly what what makes sense i would need to talk to courtney about providing feedback to her since our contracted period is uh just about up but we will certainly be reaching out within each of the three school communities
076and then a larger community to to sort of have a version of what we saw tonight likely absent courtney but but to just um really do a brief overview people at that point will have the report in front of them uh and and really take an opportunity is the school department to listen uh and and hear what people's questions are hear what people's concerns are and hear what individuals and family stories are as as we continue to sort of make sense of all of this and figure out how to move through it and move forward kerry okay thank you jake jose courtney i've got uh this one is a difficult question for me um even to think about let alone pose um and i think about the you know the the big challenges facing our
077community and the role of family community in helping to address these challenges and helping um and helping our children right grow up and and and be as welcoming of diversity and and in all the ways that it manifests itself as possible but that that saying that you know the role that our our district and thinking about our teachers the world that our teachers play is quite considerable um you know your survey i think highlighted how i think a significant number at least of our students k through 12 don't feel like they belong and i don't think it takes much to imagine how that lack of that feeling of of belonging might impact their learning and impact their their growing as as people um in your educator survey one of the this is this is the
078difficult part you know some of your the feedback that you receive from educators speaks to [Music] perhaps a frustration that some educators feel in terms of the amount of time and attention that we're paying to diversity that it's taking taking too much space too much of the bandwidth that we need to spend more time on the basics math science literature um and there's that in in that disconnect between what i think your report has shown us and what you we've learned because of your work about what our students our kids are going through that there seems to be a disconnect between their experience and and the challenges i think that our teachers feel and maybe the the priority they they or or how much they they believe this to be or shouldn't be a priority
079of our district what was your sense from from what you learned yeah i think that that is that is a perspective that does exist um i would hesitate to categorize it as a majority um or minority uh position um i i think that it's um i think there's kind of two things embedded there there's one piece that are the the and this is i think the majority of people who do believe that this is very important and that is necessary to incorporate into their work regardless of what they teach but that the time to do that is is really hard to come by to learn about how i bring that into the classroom and how i um make this a part of you know sort of an unconscious part of how i do my job
080it's you know it takes a lot of learning and so there's it you know a willingness to do it but sort of not necessarily knowing um you know when or how to fit that in with already um all of the challenges on on the place of educators and then i do think there is the other side of the coin which is people which is echoed through you know students and parents as well there are people who say we're doing too much it's not it's not important um and i was actually a little bit um i had to ask i think in one of my check-in meetings i was like they're still like teaching science right like there's no like science classes still exist yes so there is a there is a perspective that you know
081there's an extreme um way to say this which is you know we're not doing science and math anymore and like of course of course you are um but part of the question is um you know if we are if diversity and equity and belonging is done well then it's it's an umbrella over all of these things that are being taught and you know i've said sometimes that like the goal is for me to not need to exist or people that do this type of work that it it's getting a place or a group of people to um a point where it's just ingrained in in what you do but that's really hard it's really really hard and um it's not necessarily you know it's definitely not like a switch you can flip but i do
082think just optimistically that more people are in the bucket of wanting to tackle this and not knowing how or not knowing how to put how to get the time together to do it rather than thinking that it's not important um i do think that that's the divide i'm glad that you said that i was i was starting to feel less optimistic yeah and i think that people i mean i there's some really interesting self-awareness in some of these responses too of you know i i didn't speak up and i should have or i have not you know i didn't take advantage of this and i wish i had um and so there's also that that self-reflection that's important where people are saying okay what is my individual role in um you know pushing this forward
083and being an advocate you know it's it's one thing to be the person that is like yeah we're gonna do this and it sends another message to be neutral um and not say anything and i could read in some of the responses people um who don't necessarily want to be neutral anymore which is exciting i can keep posing questions courtney i don't know have you but um yeah i mean i'm i'm around so please so while you're here uh what surprised you the most in the conversations that you had with with our communities and in the data that you receive what a good question oh actually um the prevalence of the the biases around gender was actually really surprising to me um i i didn't expect that i'd kind of heard it a little bit
084but i i didn't expect it to be to rise to the level that it did in terms of just how many people um were reporting that um and it i think that's kind of my own blinders i'm coming from a gender equity workplace as you know one of my most previous roles um most recent previous roles um and so i was you know pushing the envelope on gender equity in that work and it was a good grounding for me to sort of be brought back down to um the everyday experience of gender bias and how it starts very young um and so that was uh that was jarring but also um you know just really good information to have really good to know that that's what some students are experiencing and um i think the
085the knowledge of how gender stereotypes are being reinforced from adults it was actually really interesting too because you know i would expect there to be you know the the teasing of other students and that type of thing but hearing that um you know this is this has been reinforced to my child in the classroom and that was really interesting to to learn too and something that i think is again like a a very um teachable spot and a place where maybe you just like need to realize that you're doing it and i think we all have those kinds of things where you can fix it relatively easily when you realize that you're doing it and that's one of those unconscious biases because gender stereotypes are everywhere around us that many people just do easily um
086and without realizing they're doing it so that was that was kind of surprising yeah curtis uh i uh bring to my position on this committee my experience both as a teacher in another district and as a parent and and school committee member in this district and i see a lot of overlap in the problems that we're facing in districts throughout the region uh i uh not to dismiss the work that our district needs to do but our region has uh a lot of the same problems throughout the county and uh one one thing i keep coming up again teachers this teacher is really fond of word walls and vocabulary building and reaching common ground and consensus through a shared understanding of the meaning of things um and that's coming from a person who teaches math
087uh and uh there's there are so many i hate to use the phrase buzzwords because these are things that have meaning and gravity but because of the way society processes language there are all these buzzwords around even the words themselves diversity inclusion representation equity um if you say the phrase critical race theory a fist fight in a kentucky fried chicken breaks out not that we have those in this county anymore uh but um uh i i my struggle as a teacher is that uh while i am receiving ample but still not enough if that's a thing professional development in um identifying and addressing microaggressions um being conscious of appropriate pronoun use and avoiding dead naming students who are uh finding their own identities uh there's so many components to the professional development aspect of this
088as a teacher that i i feel like i could take a two-week pd seminar uh which to every teacher i know i just said root canal to you um a two-week professional development seminar addressing each of these different things how to handle parents who uh view the words themselves as triggers uh who uh see all of this work as a waste of time who and some of these parents can also be teachers in the room and it's just there it feels at times that there's so much to address and there's no real compartmentalization to it because i can't address the lack of representation the storytelling in my curriculum without also identifying the the way that my nine non-binary students and family members are either being ignored or marginalized or just seen as social unicorns uh
089that it's becomes this giant mass that we don't even know where to start deconstructing it uh where i don't know uh how to address the the parents that are sending a kid in with preconceived notions of what gender is as a biological thing rather than a social construct where i have students who are identifying themselves by specific pronouns and names but also need to keep that information from their own parents because they don't feel safe and comfortable saying that to them and it just starts to feel like a mash unit where we just need to triage what's what's the first big step in untying all of this um and i guess that's my questions what if you could identify like what is what is the launch point what is the first big step to undoing
090this gordian knot of uh everything what would that be no pressure [Laughter] well if i give the great answer for this then i think i've solved a lot of problems in the world um one of the one of the challenges with what you've discussed is just that these are things that are systemic in our society and so you know we're talking about what mount greylock regional school district is going to do and mount garlic regional school director school district will play a key role in um how you might up end the system in your area but the system has a lot of pressures and it wants to stay the same and so there to your point like it's just a really challenging thing to untie um one thing that i think it that you're already
091doing which i do think is kind of the most important thing is just the minimization of harm that what is the what are the things that will minimize the harm that these students are potentially experiencing because of their identities or their experiences or whatever that might be um and so having that as the kind of driving initial force is what you know creates the curiosity to learn more about you know how about pronouns or the curiosity to learn more about um you know how to talk to someone about critical race theory and kind of explain what that is and those kinds of things um i do also think that it's it's really hard when there isn't like a centralized place to have a partner in gathering that information maybe not necessarily someone who like is
092just like i've got my folder on that right here and like knows what to do um immediately but someone who is um kind of as i said before sort of the holder of this these projects and and is able to then support um you as you untie the kind of variety of threads and that knot um i know like when i was um you know when i was working at pansy nation we were doing a lot of this kind of harm minimization in um in internet comments if you want to go into a hot fiery mess that's where to go um and we had a very thick resource document that had a variety of topics and then a variety of different educational materials that were you know articles videos um podcasts different things that could
093help um [Music] illuminate some of those issues and and you know how do people learn it's differently and so here are these different ways some are visual some are audio that kind of thing and it was a really great opportunity and it was kind of a growing and living document that okay this is outdated you know this is now the the thing that's the um you know front line um that the people in this community are telling us that they need so we'll put that in rather than these other resources um and that was a really helpful document to be able to go to on a regular basis because um you know i might have been able to help populate a few of the sections but my colleagues had populated some other ones and so
094you know i knew that i could go there for information um so there there could be a sort of and i think this goes back to the shared um collaborative time or you know opportunity but there could you know potentially be a collaborative space where resources best practices that kind of thing are um available thank you yeah jose thanks courtney i was gonna just uh follow on with a question um follow up uh curtis with with the question um i think you know for the number of of people who are here with us tonight um who may differ in terms of their opinion or our opinion and how how how much significance we place on on your report let's just argue i would i would just take that that's probably the case i think what
095we can't argue is that there are many children in our district who don't feel like they have a place and that that's a problem you know um and i don't think you can escape that and you can't walk away from your presentation um without acknowledging that truth and acknowledging that real problem right that that children from a variety of backgrounds don't feel like they belong they don't have a place in our in our schools um as we move forward and as we sadly part ways with you tonight um i think as a district one of the thoughts we had moving forward is that we would professionalize some kind of you know um support for diversity equity inclusion and belonging um hiring or potentially creating a directorship of sorts you know i'm just just speaking speaking
096hypothetically here but if if we were to create a position um you know the problems that you presented to us today are so numerous and are so embedded in so many elements of our communities and families and in schools that it can seem intractable where to even start but um imagining again this this position and imagining that we have someone within the district to provide certain types of support what would you argue should be the priorities of this position in terms of where they should allocate their their time and our district allocated resources [Music] um that's a very good question and i am not sure it's like quite advisable right now for me to answer it because i think that i i don't have enough information um that the uh you know i i'm not
097quite sure based on the information that i have right now like what what could be low-hanging fruit that can be you know dealt with pretty quickly and what are things that would need to be you know uh a project that's created over multiple months or or even years um and so that it's hard to say necessarily what i think that that person should focus on i do think that that's a very good idea um because as i was talking about before kind of having a holder um a place or person um or team that is um you know keeping track of all of these things keeping track of all of the um experiences but also all of the um practices that have worked and things that have been tried and been tweaked and and then
098you know found to be useful um i think is is important just so that you're not like replicating yourself also um and you know doing spinning wheels or doing the same thing um over and over again so it's just helpful to kind of keep that learning moving forward um i think like if if it were me more listening would be the one of the first things that um the opportunity you know i was i was doing this with uh the covid thing that's been really challenging and the ability to you know embed physically in the community and talk to people um face to face or in um community groups or however it might be i think it would be really helpful as a potential like next step um just to keep the learning moving forward
099on um the the areas that i've identified here um so i would imagine that anybody that would step into a position like that would know that like really starting to understand how this community works and what makes it tick um would be a key first step sounds wise i would say i think we're all being incredibly polite we're normally we normally have uh lots of questions courtney but uh since the since the science were quiet i was and jake had just unmuted himself this question was for you jake in terms of uh um having what you need moving forward what questions might you have of courtney jake i i was actually going to suggest that that we've we've kept our viewing audience for for a full hour and a half plus and that it's probably
100about time to consider winding this down but uh but yeah jose as always thank you for thinking of that uh uh you know we had our district improvement plan uh presented to you less than a week ago um where we're hearing some of this stuff out loud i think i've been getting some texts from people who've read this report some of whom have read it five or six times here hearing courtney read just a few things out loud adds a new punch to it in a new level of kind of hurt and empathy uh so you know we're i don't know exactly what we need jose i'm grateful for the fact that i think we have a group of people on this screen right now who are committed to providing what we need when we
101when we wrap our heads and and hearts and hands around it together so thank you for that question and sorry for the for the thin answer but i i do just want to add uh in in closing i would suggest although it's the school committee's meeting and i work for you that um courtney again it's it's you've really uh it's been powerful to work with you we're very grateful for getting to work with you you've shown us some really you've shown us good ways to to do this work and and shown us good ways to be listeners and provided i think some really powerful um frameworks for us to to put this information on so that we can make use of it and uh and and i know we're not going to be totally out
102of touch and and i know i speak for the whole administration and we're just very grateful to have had this time with you and uh and thank you thank you jake it really has been a pleasure to do this work so thank you for inviting me into your community thank you so much courtney really really deeply appreciated and deeply felt i know by everyone so do i have a motion to adjourn so moved carrie moves do i have a second second curtis seconds all in favor oh and i connery i constantine eye elephant by an eye green eye malloy okay thank you this meeting is adjourned at 7 39 p.m thank you so much courtney thank you everyone thank you thank you for everyone who listened tonight we really appreciate it