001uh jen has the um the list she'll bring them in yes okay one second please sure this takes a little bit of time is moving in and out is not instantaneous so we apologize for the delays in doing this i have the list too is it in any particular order they're all going to come in as as um presenters at the same time they all have parts of this presentation they are currently being promoted at this time thanks for promoting me guys um i think i'm all the only ones so far but i'll wait in for the rest of my colleagues to come in excuse me i just want to make sure you could see the presentation yeah i can see it can you all hear me just want to do a quick mic check
002yes we can hear you thank you guys okay can we do a mic check for each one of us just to make sure that we can be heard can you hear me yes sajia can you move your screen so we can actually see your face or you're cut off the way your thing is oh yeah i gotta the shade is kind of blocking me i gotta fix it i'm sorry i'm not gonna fix it you're still cutting off your head we want to see you guys how's this that's better thank you so much thank you hi everybody hi okay thank you for having us are you guys ready is everyone here maya they usually get his video back up again we have to have all videos on okay oh i'm sorry i'm sorry about that
003i was just trying to fix this the thing that was blocking the light in my face that's why i turned the video off it's still in your face we're hard to see your beautiful face but we can proceed oh yeah you can just proceed i'm gonna fix it thank you um so hello all thank you for having us here tonight i want to thank obviously the distinguished board of education especially ms carbone for allowing us the time to speak to the yorktown central school district community through this platform and of course to uh thank you to our zoom members i see there's 93 people on the call tuning in virtually which is incredible so we really appreciate everyone's dedication to our schools um you know for taking the time to join tonight and i hope
004it's not too much longer we're able to hear some good news from governor cuomo about being able to gather in person again soon so before i begin uh please allow me to introduce myself i'm fatima chaudhry i've been in the yorktown central school district system for my whole life um k to 12 education started as a little bitty kindergartner all the way through the 12th grade graduating with the class of 2015. last year i completed my bachelor's from nyu with degrees in economics math and web programming and have since been working in new york city as a business intelligence analyst in the advertising industry tonight i'm here with a group of my colleagues some of whom you'll speak to and many of whom are tuned into this video conference we're called the yorktown for racial
005justice alumni and students coalition we'll be speaking to you about bringing an anti-racism education to yorktown so if the presenter could please switch the next slide thank you so we the yorktown for racial justice alumni and students coalition are a group composed of current students and alumni of the yorktown central school district who are dedicated to bringing anti-racism to our schools we came together after the tragic murder of george floyd in late may to discuss how we could spread awareness of racial injustice and racial equity to our home in yorktown so our group spans over a decade of experience within the yorktown school system starting with 2012 alums all the way down to the most recent freshman class who are set to graduate in 2023 some of us live locally others throughout the country and
006few even across continents all studying working and pursuing passions across a variety of different paths and our common thread here is understanding that through our experiences and the experiences of our peers that there is much work to be done in yorktown regarding anti-racism and racial equity working through days and even the wee hours of the night especially for many of our international members all while managing school jobs and other responsibilities it was after much discussion research and collaboration that our coalition wrote an open letter to superintendent hatter assistant superintendent o'shea and the yorktown central school district administration we published this letter online publicly in the form of a petition and since its publication around a month ago we've gathered the support of over 5.5 000 community members today we're speaking on behalf of the students
007alumni parents teachers community and even council members who've signed in support of our anti-racism initiative next slide please so you might be wondering why we're doing this i think every one of us has our own passion and drive behind why an initiative like this is so important and especially pertinent for yorktown conversations about race and racial injustice are best introduced at a young age to foster empathy and we applaud the strides that the district has made in confronting sensitive issues in recent years such as the creation of the husker discovery program the increased emphasis on teaching empathy and kindness to students through the eastern curriculum and collaborating with the alliance for safe kids organization in so many of our yorktown events but as students enter adulthood we need to equip them with the resources and
008education needed to critically engage in ongoing conversations uh in our communities and that will allow them by doing this we empower them to enact positive change within their communities and become empathetic leaders of society this is why our group and all of our supporters the 5.5 000 of them believe that the yorktown central school district must devote more time and resources to specifically and directly address contemporary racial justice issues so for me personally a pakistani muslim american who spent my entire primary and secondary education as a minority in your town i've witnessed and experienced both over and covert racism and prejudice towards myself my family towards other people of color and minorities and it wasn't until college for myself and many other yorktown students where we began to learn about incredibly important historical and even
009more current events that affected and continue to affect so many minorities and not even knowing how much there was regarding race and racial issues that i was never exposed to in my yorktown education i felt incredibly inadequately prepared to have taken part in any of these kind of kinds of discussions as i grew older and so speaking to the coalition and serving surveying tons of our community members in yorktown we we started to understand that this was the sentiment all around next slide please so now i'd sort of like to switch gears a little to explain how we came to understand this widespread agreement that yorktown needs to do better our group has spent close to the last two months reaching out far and wide to the yorktown community still living locally or long moved
010away to collect their experiences and stories to help this community on zoom and you know the wider community whoever watches this later on to sort of understand just an iota of the real magnitude of this problem in our town so these stories are real they're raw and they speak volumes to how pertinent anti-racism education is to our district so we ask that you please listen with your hearts as the stories that you hear later on are incredibly personal to our community members so if you allow me i'll start with my own so as of one probably of two two to three muslim south asian families in the yorktown community racism has managed to either blatantly present itself or disguise itself and slip into my family's lives in so many ways that recounting the overt and
011covert prejudice that my families experience within yorktown schools could actually fill novels and islamophobia and orientalism are rampant within the curriculum right textbooks chosen by the district portray any non-white regions as societies in such a contemptuous manner and they paint our history with this dangerous inaccurate whitewashed narrative of black indigenous and people of color so this coupled with our teachers implicit bias and and majority of students lack of education which they're coming to yorktown schools to fix is honestly a recipe for disaster so let me give you some examples here imagine as a muslim student in the third grade you're so excited to keep your fast for ramadan at school for the first time ever you've been fasting at home for around a year or two already you're ready your parents let you go to
012school and keep your fast so you trying to explain as best you can again because you're eight years old and in the third grade that you're fasting for your religion but the launch aide doesn't seem to understand she doesn't know what ramadan is and instead forces you to eat so you feel so pressured right you're eight years old in the third grade you start to cry and the school actually calls home to check that you're being fed properly imagine now as a muslim student you're sitting in your global nine social studies class during the islam unit your teacher is teaching the class a mnemonic device to differentiate between the two sects of the religion and says sunni sounds like sunny the happy majority and then draws the smiley face on the board shiite s-h-i apostrophe
013ite sounds like something else the crappy minority and then references a poop emoji imagine now as a south asian student you're learning about the british occupation of india in the imperial imperialism unit in your social studies class you later have to write a dbq about the benefits of mercantilism and profitable trading when merely you know this time period was of a genocide about where your ancestors were abused and killed tell me what the benefits of that were these are all true stories within my own family's experience and all this so far is disregarding the everyday microaggressions that became so normalized that it's almost hard for us to look back and recount them now but here are a few more the toxic political culture that cultivated following the 9 11 attack caused so many unaffiliated muslim
014nations and the religion of islam in general to become scapegoated so as a result innocent individuals in my family in my community were subject to xenophobic remarks and jokes being compared to violent terrorists within your town system comments like your food smells it's a comment like this one that leads so many south asians to become embarrassed by their race and ethnic origins this is a form of racial trauma instantly you become an outsider in the cafeteria because my mom decided to pack me butter chicken for lunch and comments like these are now coming they came from the same people who now post on instagram their authentic indian non-bread and butter chicken from jewel of himalaya in town comments like oh you kind of have an accent where is it from because of the color of
015my skin when actually i've spent my entire life in yorktown i speak english as fluently as the next person these are just small snippets into our everyday experiences a south asian a south asian muslim family living in yorktown attending yorktown schools it's time to shift away from teaching this whitewashed narrative that allows this kind of racism and microaggressions to perpetuate in this town we have an education curriculum an entire educational curriculum that was created and designed by predominantly one demographic that's being taught and implemented by the same predominant one demographic but being imposed onto a population including students of all demographics yorktown needs to do better so thank you for listening to me i'd like now to pass the mic over to the rest of my colleagues who are going to spend some time sharing
016with you the community stories we've collected through our surveys and talk you through the specifics of the points we made within our petition so next i'm going to hand the stage off to sarah shapiro sarah please take it away thank you so first of all i just want to thank the board for having us um i graduated in 2019 and i'm now attending the university of vermont so what i'm going to share with you first is my own community story which happened during my senior year so my time at yorktown high school holistically was an incredibly enjoyable one i made friends and memories which i carry with me through my entire life and i'll always cherish i made high on a roll consistently and was a new york scholar athlete for my winter track and
017for soccer i loved both of those things very much unfortunately not all of my time spent at yorktown was as happy as some of the memories i choose to remember like so many of my peers i was discriminated against in the place in which i was supposed to feel most safe students making racist or anti-semitic comments was something many including myself had been prepared for by loved ones or family members what i was not expecting however was for this discrimination to come from a teacher i was in a small class with several other students when a conversation ensued about two youtubers who had both been punished by their communities for posting offensive content one had posted a anti-semitic slurs however and had punished more severely when one of the students asked my teacher why that
018was he simply replied that it was because jews owned the media being a young jewish woman i immediately felt alienated and afraid and quickly picked up my phone and took a walk hoping when i returned i wouldn't hear the same hurtful conversation being led by my educator unfortunately that was not the case when i returned to the classroom the teacher chuckled at the side of me and asked condescendingly what did i upset you he continued the anti-semitic tirade of abuse by explaining to me that jews own banks and the media and therefore they are the ones in power and that is simply a fact that they had taken over everything what may have hurt the most from this encounter was not the fact that my educator was spewing hate but that he was teaching it
019to other students in the room after i left and reported the incident to the principal more than one of the students who were in the room that day asked why i was so sensitive and even where my parents worked insinuating they wondered if they worked in media or owned it perhaps now i was being harassed by students who would otherwise not have held this opinion if an educator did not teach it to them after reporting i was promised this would be taken seriously and that there was no tolerance for this kind of behavior as i left school that day the same teacher found me in the hallway and taunted me saying ah are you still upset you're all so sensitive feeling victimized and ashamed i did not talk to my friends who are in that
020class for weeks afraid to hear the same hurtful comments again i did not receive any information about the incident how the incident was being handled for six weeks until my father wrote a letter to the administration the end result was that through a thorough investigation the incident did not qualify as harassment or discrimination how this incident which was a targeted attack against me because of my beliefs did not fall under discrimination is beyond my understanding the board came to the conclusion that no board policy was violated and the principal told me to just avoid him my own teacher the fact that this teacher is still teaching and spewing hate still makes me feel physically ill to this day he made the rest of my high school experience which was otherwise incredibly happy feel unsafe something
021no student should feel in their learning environment so this next learning community community story will be from a 2012 alum as a non-black person of color growing up in yorktown i've witnessed and experienced racism whether it was towards me or towards other people of color communities as a minority child who just wanted to fit in i just accepted it and never really said or did anything i now look back and regret my inaction i believe if there was more education and better curriculum about races and if we discussed more about sensitive topics like racism i would have had a much better experience in yorktown change is long overdue and absolutely necessary this is now from a 2014 along i saw so much racism at yorktown high school so many people saying the n-word who were
022white making racist comments against all students of color this is now a 2016 lot looking back on my education i feel like we didn't really cover a lot of black history or talk about extremely important issues related to race and current events in history that deeply affect the lives of students also the vast majority of my teachers were white i've come to understand that this can be detrimental to the ability of minority students to see themselves as potential future leaders and teachers and limits the viewpoints that get brought into education perpetuates a very subtle but extremely dangerous racism this is from a current student while i am grateful to not have been called any racial scorers the culture that exists in great time schools does not foster cultural expression outside the classroom while explicit racism
023is not very prevalent in what yorktown school district at least from my experience racial and colorist microaggressions are rampant since i've lived in yorktown for my entire life and have attended yorktown school district since kindergarten most of the racial assumptions i have experienced occurred earlier on when i was younger i got a lot of comments asking where are you from from and assumptions that since i am asian i must have strict parents no freedom and be good at stem courses now passive racism and stereotyping come with other non-asian classmates asking me for help with math and science homework regardless of if i have offered making assumptions about my actions and my parents actions and childishly imitating and mocking overly stereotyped south asian mannerisms and accents while at first glance they might not seem as damaging
024it reinforces the idea that majority white population new york town that microaggressions are okay and it reinforces the idea to people of color that they will not truly fit into yorktown society i'm a rising senior at yorktown high school you might catch some flack from my peers for saying this but it had to be said there is no reason that students should be making a mockery of my culture or the cultures of others just for the sake of cheap comedy this is a 2020 alarm the administration and teachers stand by as white students use the n-word in the hallways there's no accountability for the behavior and they simply turn a blind eye yorktown high school is clearly not a diverse place as both the student body and the staff it's upsetting it shows students a
025false view of the world so many kids will leave high school shocked to see different kinds of people and all the different kinds of people they will meet this is again from a current student as i have noticed these past few years teachers simply do not do enough to combat racism it's not simply racism but transphobia as well as homophobia and other hate speech teachers ignore students who use harmful language because they are so afraid to say anything yet other students who they are supposed to fee who they're supposed to protect feel that they cannot be themselves without being hated on or chastised in a place where they should feel safe teachers and staff should do more to combat hate this is from a parent crampon elementary school's war reenactment day really needs to be
026rethought it's so inappropriate some students have need of lineage how do you think they feel they either have to dress up as their oppressor and carry a musket used to kill their people or a native american and see all the weaponry on display and experience what their ancestors must have felt like not very empathetic this is from a recent alumni parent as a parent who has had children in the yorktown school district from 2007 to i have noticed a pattern of absence and acknowledgement of people of color it is a sort of invisibility while there are no two or three specific instances of terrible communication there is also an overall cluelessness about inclusive processes i speak from experience as a parent volunteer and with some engagements with the administration while i've explained away each of
027these instances as poor people skills i do think it's worth bringing up in the context of these changes that you were trying to make happen as examples a group email about a meeting was sent to all class parent volunteers except the one round parent an administrator completely ignored the one parent while acknowledging another parent and child at length even though they were both there for the same exact reason so i'd like to thank you again for having me and i'm going to pass and continue the community stories to lizzie who will share their own story and continue to share the survey stories thank you sarah can everybody hear me okay i think that's a yes all right so thank you again board for having us my name is lizzy and my pronouns are they in
028them i graduated from yorktown in 2013 as a westside finalist who went on to international competition i sweep through the yorktown science research classes i then went on to graduate from the university of pittsburgh in 2017 and now i am an environmental engineer in training i'm currently the facilities project coordinator at pips conservatory and botanical gardens down here in pittsburgh and also we're having pittsburgh weather right now so that means that within the past five minutes we're now having thunder so if you hear that in the background i apologize um i'm also a member of the lgbt community and i find that it's very important for minorities to support and uplift each other and that's why this is so close to home for me as others have said i have a lot of good memories
029in yorktown but i also have a lot of negative ones um so this is my personal story i found that santa claus was by far the worst the teachers always gave us a prompt and then split us up by political party and then they let us duke it out and it always always ended up with the less privileged students practically begging for the white affluent kids to hear their story and have some empathy the one story that sticks out to me the most was a latin student who came from a lower class family and was first generation from central america he spent five minutes talking about his experiences and life growing up with two hard-working parents who struggled to make ends meet and the only way he could go to college without incurring huge amounts
030of debt was to get a scholarship and get in with the assistance of affirmative action he put his heart on his sleeve only to have another kid from a rich white family tell him he didn't deserve it because he was taking my spot and then talked down to him for a couple minutes later the teachers had never stepped in to stop that instead anyone who wasn't straight white and upper class got beat down the entire semester trying to explain why people should care about them as a person there were also two girls in my grade who were probably the nicest people but no one ever interacted with them because they were ghetto and trashy simply because of how they spoke their clothes and the color of their skin never mind that half of the class
031was using the n word in the hallway trying to speak ghetto i still don't know what that means and then a bunch of white rich kids shouting the n-word in the hallway how welcoming must that feel to students of color students from other cultures constantly had their food their clothes and culture made fun of by students and even teachers we had to listen to stories about british and america american colonial rule the holocaust and multiple genocides around the world and hear other students mock the death of innocent people with no intervention from teachers in health class there was no education on the aids crisis and how it disproportionately kills black and gay people there was nothing just don't get aids that was all that we had and i cannot speak for the experiences for students
032of students of color but i can talk about what it was like growing up being queer and non-binary the feeling of being othered constantly and hiding yourself and trying to blend in to escape the abuse of your fellow students it's not surprising at all to me that students graduate they leave the town and they never come back the amount of people that i still talk to who actively disdain the school and administration of our time for not protecting them and teaching them speaks volumes the next one that i will say the next story that i will speak to is from a current yorktown student i saw this petition was being spread around across all social media so i decided to share it with a group of fellow students in my grade this group is composed
033of students taking advanced and ap courses these are all students who will graduate from yorktown to attend top-tier schools and grow to become successful professionals and this these are some of the comments that i received after sharing we don't learn about political issues in school they're not supposed to teach this therefore anti-racism in history we learn history in english we learn english and math we learn math and school ain't supposed to delve into politics you should have the freedom to be racist first amendment rights lol it's not a crime to dislike someone as long as you don't hurt him disliking someone is legal i'm gonna go to the middle east and get stoned for being christian and white yes racism exists but it's not as big as it's made out to be that is my
034political opinion it does not exist systematically within legal institutions like police racist people does not equal systemic my values are racism is bad but not huge problems within legal institutions nothing morally wrong with that in my eyes and while this is just a small sample of yorktown high school students you will hear that this is more widespread than you think if students can get to high school thinking that it's their first amendment right and that there is nothing morally wrong about re being racist that we do not need to be learning about anti-racism because racism is a political issue the new york times education education system has missed the mark this is an exact contradiction to the empathy that yorktown is trying to instill in its students these are the same students who will grow
035up to hold positions in politics law medicine business and so much more and it's an utter disservice to them the yorktown community and wider communities they will touch as they grow up for yorktown central student central school district to do better in teaching anti-racism my next story is from a 2015 alumni um during student during my senior year at yorktown high school i took a super english class we wrote the book class matters which opened my eyes to the inequalities present in america that class was the reason i chose to major in sociology at college in my college classes i was astounded to learn about topics such as redlining the prison industrial complex mass incarceration food insecurity health disparities educational inequalities transportation and eviction underlying all of these topics was the theme of racial inequality
036i was naive when i first read class matters and realized that poverty and inequality runs rampant in the u.s and is not something that happens in foreign nations and in history textbooks if i had not been for my teacher's stupid english class i probably would not have majored in sociology in fact i probably would have continued to live in ignorance of the ongoing racism that exists in this country many students who attend yorktown schools have the privilege of learning about racism rather than experiencing it i was one of those students and i should have learned more we as a group the yorktown student coalition we would like to note that most kids do not take this class and that this is only one class that from one teacher and one book we feel as a
037group that one positive experience does not negate the multitude of negative ones and we just would like to point that out um next is from a 2012 alumni as a student i don't think that i received comprehensive information on racial injustice or systemic racism in this country and i think it's long overdue that we as a community come together and change that dismantling systemic racism must start with education the next com the next story that i have is from a parent and pta member and they were with a wrote in with three observations after picking up my son's books folders and school supplies on the assigned day at his elementary school he was eager to share his work with me he proudly showed me stories he had written essene project designs he had worked on
038and journals showing such incredible progress from the beginning of the school year to march my son had a phenomenal teacher and we mutually adored her the very first folder i opened however contained a worksheet about george washington carver my son said that it was something that they had worked on during black history month the worksheet was a brief biography with an illustration of what i can only assume was supposed to be george washington carver the image however was cartoonishly drawn and very much depicted a white man in the text there was not a single mention that dr carver was black i'm not sure how this worksheet made the cut but it should not have let's get better materials to our teachers and better training to identify problematic texts observation two in a public conversation a
039teacher was seeking support for her student who she believed could benefit from ptot evaluation the student was african-american and as part of her evidence she noted that he struggled to open and manipulate his own lunchable at snack time this could certainly be viewed as a result of lagging fine motor skills which pt or ot could help to improve her case was understandable she then mentioned as an aside quite enough to know that what she was saying was inappropriate yet loud enough for others to hear isn't he on free lunch and aren't lunchables expensive and finally the final observation observation three it is common practice in education to group classroom libraries by both level and interest unfortunately in creating interest book friends one teacher unintentionally segregated her library she had created bins for animal books adventure
040stories folk tales etc and labeled them as such she had one been labeled african-american in which she had placed all of her books portraying black protagonists from ruby bridges to peter and peter's chair a book about a kid adjusting to a new baby sister in a quiet moment i showed her the bin and how she could move peter's chair to the family bin and other books to the adventure bin and so on and so forth we desegregated her library and she was genuinely embarrassed apologetic and grateful for the help i did not bring up this memory to shame her or anyone yet at the same time her mistake went unnoticed and may have been for a very long time without support it would not have gone unnoticed to all of the children entrusted with her
041and they are watching and they are learning literacy pediatric development is important and without anti-racist pediatric development this exact story will repeat itself in other ways and in other scenarios and finally my last story is from a former parent and resident when we first moved to yorktown my family and i were touched by the kindness of our neighbors many of whom extended themselves in ways that make a community beautiful over time however we came to see that the generosity as a facade that concealed a subtle and insidious racism in the community too often i heard comments about immigrant groups that were taking over yorktown my children heard from their friends about latino or black classmates who had to move around a lot because they can't really afford a nice area like this and my skin
042crawled at the condensation that i heard towards the peekskill residents who should be grateful for the opportunity to sort through her bulk trash for couches and discarded bikes i was appalled by the lack of critical thinking in my children's curriculum history was taught as a fixed set of facts and too often revered white heroes such as christopher columbus without any mention of the effects of his action on native peoples at no point were issues of race or class discussed and at no point was the curriculum focused on anything other than the white dominated view of society i believe firmly that anti-bias education is essential in all schools but even more urgently needed in schools that lack diversity most of all i was appalled at the core of the community's other unwillingness to look critically at
043itself to consider how the experiences of non-whites might be different from their own the dominant message and general tone was that the yorktown way of life was idyllic and needed to be protected from those coming in from other areas with ideas that challenged the community's beliefs after only a few years my husband and i decided that our family had to leave yorktown we could no longer pretend that it was the perfect place the community pretended to be in recent days i have followed through social media as the controversy surrounding the youth-led protest for racial justice in yorktown and i am both horrified and unsurprised in how much opposition the community has shown for this important work everything i have witnessed in response to the protests has reaffirmed why we left yorktown has left scars on
044me and my family that will likely never go away and although we live relatively close now we actively avoid the area we do not shop or eat in town and most and for the most part have cut ties with the people we knew there any community that is not able to open its doors and mines to all people is not a place we choose to be thank you for listening i will now be passing the floor to maya who will be sharing her personal stories thank you lizzy hi everyone i'm maya and i will be sharing my story like others here today i've had many positive experiences in my time here in yorktown from k through 12. unfortunately there have been so many instances of racism as well i have witnessed or experienced in your
045town that have grown numb and have tried to forget or have forgotten many of them here are a few a high school social studies teacher telling us in class about his experience with prostitutes in a latin american country and telling us that women switching partners at night was part of their culture students who admired and respected him and thought he was cool for talking about this listened intently as he spoke and took his claims about the promiscuity of hispanic culture to be truth never mind it being inappropriate for a teacher to tell me as a 15 year old what he did or did not do with prostitutes but that was incredibly racist as well a substitute teacher who told me and another student that the gays were bad and we're doing it on purpose whatever
046it is when i interjected the teacher proceeded to explain to me why i was wrong for interceding so many times being asked where are you from where are you really from including from a teacher as well i've lost count this propagated the general sentiment that i was less american because i wasn't white and for the record i'm from yorktown and that's why i'm here today i deeply care about my community the insensitive colonial reenactment we had with native americans in elementary school and the pompous with which we celebrated christopher columbus a man who started a genocide against native americans the omission of discussions of racism in america after martin luther king the way we learned it it seems like martin luther king came and racism was solved we never talked about privilege mass incarceration systemic
047racism post redlining and so forth instances where our teachers turned a blind eye to racism in classroom discussions the teacher either did not intercede or actually actively joined in some instances include a classmate saying that he hated old muslims and worse in discussing winston churchill we never talked about how he was a war criminal in india and was a large reason behind the bengal famine famine when i brought up the genocide in which churchill was directly responsible for the death of over 10 million people i was dismissed and told by my teacher to pay more attention to how the positives balance out the negatives another teacher who told me to write the pros and cons of colonialism this is like glorifying slavery and when i brought this up i got in trouble with the teacher
048and was told by the teacher that he knows other indians well which gives him the permission to say what he does a classroom discussion led by a teacher about how it's not racism but it's just statistics and that's why i did cross over to the other side of the road in those situations these are just a few of many instances and while there are many negative instances there are a few positive i remember and i would like to acknowledge for example i remember my elementary school librarian standing up for my twin brother when his classmates bullied him and made racist remarks towards him we need more members like that in our community and i believe we can build a better community with anti-racism education and training i will now be passing the floor to my
049colleague tai who will be sharing more stories from our community how you doing oh how you doing everybody can you hear me we're good how are you doing so my name is taiji green i'm a 2016 yorktown high school alum um i came here my junior year and i'm a current um cpa student at lehman college and i'm interning right now with various financial firms um so first i'm going to start off with reading some more community stories that came in from our intake survey and then i'm gonna end it with um a personal story for myself so this one is from a current student um this student said our first hand seen the implicit bias that yorktown central schools teachers exhibit in their classrooms from proms such as implying islam is violent to pretending
050that the racism was solved by martin luther king to imperialism as a means of opening up countries to modern ways they pass on these thoughts to young malleable children and reinforce stereotypes that they may have been not have been exposed to also white students are taught by white teachers who use textbooks written that favor the winners aka the whites therefore there should be an uplifting of um black indigenous and people of color literature history and education as part of a larger narrative not seen as something of the past our next story is from 2016 alone i have many anecdotes from myself and others regarding discrimination at yorktown in my 12th grade senate class when we were debating body cameras on cops my teacher brought in the cop to the classroom to describe why body cameras
051aren't necessary he was looking for volunteers but didn't indicate that he was speaking to me and said get up i was startled confirmed he was speaking to me and then obliged after the cop left my teacher asked me in front of the class why i acted so uncomfortable i said i was just surprised they then said no i saw the way you looked at that cop like get away from me pig again this happened in front of the class another teacher as a black student walked in asked her in front of the class what's that on your head she was confused and he clarified what's going on with your hair like what's that she then said it's my natural hair another teacher upon learning that a black student had gotten into fordham university told that
052you probably only got him because of affirmative action other examples include times during the 11th grade senate where two classes will come together and students who spoke about minorities and derogatory raids such as all gay people should die and black people don't deserve affirmative action will receive no criticism by teachers but students who were speaking up about human rights and justices to combat those statements were reprimanded for getting aggressive essentially the experience at yorktown high school is a white upper middle class privileged bubble where black and other people of color students are taught that their experience in history is not worth believing talking about or studying yorktown high school fails as black and people as college students by expressing not only cultural insensitivity but complete disregard for their voices and needs also this is only
053regarding the racial injustice at yorktown high school there are more anecdotes on lgbtq mental health class and disability discrimination as well all of these issues are connected and need to be addressed so i just want to thank those people for sharing um and now i'm gonna share um a story of mine so i just wanted to um talk about this because we're racial and justice being i'm sorry well racial injustice being front and center i wanted to speak here today to express some concerns of mine about the future of education at yorktown high school i want to preface this by saying your town does earn its national district character award per my experience i've met some amazing teachers and staff members at yorktown that really care about the future of the students however there is
054a disconnect between yorktown and what's going on in the real world throughout my time there i noticed the level of ultra-conservative ideals among students that seem to be reinforced by what was being told in particular people's opinions about what goes on in urban communities and about who is and isn't working hard enough and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps people whining and things of the sorts the issues that lizzie spoke about earlier heavily speak to this now everybody has a right to the opinion but when opinions are based on ideals and not facts then we have a problem i think that your town has more of an issue of xenophobia than anything else for example there was a time when me and a friend of mine who's black were wrestling the hallway on the last
055day of school and the teacher came out and said enough stop it right now you people are bringing this crap here to our school i can only imagine what she meant by that there were other microaggressive incidents that myself and friends face but i won't spend too much time on negativity um i want to say some terms now that we've been hearing all over lately throughout the mainstream media that have been misconstrued to mean things that they're not number one black lives matter black lives matter doesn't mean that everyone else's lives don't matter um it just means that we matter just as much as everyone else number two black on black crime is not a real thing so for me from a person i grew up in an urban black neighborhood nobody has ever been
056hurt or had a crime committed against them because they're black we're talking about proximity crime people are more likely to commit crimes with and against people that they live around also in most if not all inner city neighborhoods poverty is the number one driver of crime of any kind and there are plenty of drug-ridden violent white communities all over america but we don't call that white on white crime number three blue lives matter even the concept to compare the danger of being a police officer to black people being disproportionately handled aggressively and murdered by the police is ridiculous a blue life is a blue shirt when said shirt comes off the danger is over i don't get to take my skin off now why do these things matter to yorktown schools yorktown is an upper
057middle class neighborhood where most students if they just apply themselves just enough we'll be able to get opportunities that most others won't many go on to work at some of the biggest companies doing high level work right here in our yorktown for justice group we have engineers finance professionals people working at google you name it much more opportunity than the average kid coming from the inner city so when students from a place like this are allowed to foster ideas that aren't consistent with real world facts it creates problems a student starts going into health care needs to know that black women have the highest mortality rate during pregnancy due to their issues being dismissed by health care staff is then being quote unquote dramatic a student going into banking and finance needs to know that
058black people are often denied loans and charge high interest for loans when they have the same metrics and qualifications as their white counterparts the same students also need to know about redlining the process in which the federal government gave banks color-coded maps and told them which areas they could give out housing loans the green areas were white and the red areas were black and this wasn't about class black neighborhoods across class levels middle class upper class impoverished you name it they were all being red areas students going into real estate needs to know that homes owned by black people are generally appraised at lower values and equivalent homes owned by white people by appraisers students going into venture capital needs venture capital needs to know that black people get the lowest rate of venture capital
059funding out of any founders of any companies civil engineers and people that plan to work in government need to know about the federal highway act of 1956 that built highways directly into areas of thriving black business and effectively destroyed most of their wealth which has led to the lack of urban development in many black urban areas that we're seeing today and it wasn't a coincidence it was very much intentional that can be google by the way um this is a short list of many of the disparities that face black americans today if people knew these things they wouldn't ask questions like why are many black people poor why don't they just work harder why don't they just pull ourselves up from their bootstraps like everybody else people won't ask those kind of questions because they'll
060know their systematic issues that cause and perpetuate this students in your town need to know what's happening in the real world they don't need to be sugarcoated or coddled or hidden away from real life because then when they eventually go into these positions in these industries they'll make the same decisions that have led to the inequities that we have today anti-racism isn't a left or right or political thing it's a human rights issue it's an american issue i'm currently an intern at ey one of the biggest big for one of the big four accounting firms and they've committed millions of dollars into anti-racism the contributions and the standards they're taking against racism financially adjusted google search a way to learn more about yorktown central school district needs to be on that same energy we need
061to be on the right side of american history and make a safe space for all students and equip their students with the knowledge and tools of the real world so they can make a difference i just want to say in closing thank you for having me and i will now pass the mic back to my to speak to our demands thank you fatima sarah lizzie and ty for sharing these powerful stories from our community it's been emotional reading the stories that have been shared with us and i can't imagine how difficult it was for our brave community members to share this it takes a lot for those who have directly experienced this to come forward these stories are real personal and speak volumes to how we really need to do better as a community and
062it is so important for our administration and our greater community to understand the gravity of this issue so i'm maya i graduated from yorktown high school in 2013 carnegie mellon university school of computer science in 2017. i currently work for waymo formerly known as google's self-driving car project i will be sharing the goals of our petition around anti-racism education which has gathered the support of over 5.5 000 community members within our petition we've included oh uh could you switch to the next slide thank you within our petition we've included some key goals we believe the district must address in the near term and future in an effort to help start this dialogue one forming a diverse committee of administrators teachers students parents alumni and other active community members to spearhead this effort in the spirit
063of transparency and accountability two expanding any current anti-racism curriculum to address ongoing systemic and institutional racial issues host the civil rights movement of 1965 three being a district of upstanders against racial injustice as we see it happening across the country and especially when it's within the yorktown community four diversifying the teaching and administrative faculty next slide please our first request is that the district commit to creating an anti-racism task force that is specifically dedicated to lead and enact the petition points to follow in dr hatter's letter sent out to the ycsd community a few weeks ago regarding this topic he commits to building a task force but it only includes teachers and faculty we are asking this district to form a diverse committee of administrators teachers students parents alumni and other active community members to
064spearhead racial justice education and ensure racial equity in our schools this committee should be responsible for acting as a liaison between the district and the community a dedicated resource group is essential to bringing successful change within the curriculum in school not only will the task force be responsible for developing a strategy and rollout plan it will ensure that constant dialogue occurs between the district and the community which is why it's so important that it includes community members as well next slide please there's no doubt that the curriculum taught at your town is robust nurturing and stimulating we have teachers in our district who have gone above and beyond to craft syllabi and course material that has not only challenged us but has left us better in many ways however there is an overwhelmingly shared belief
065among current students alumni parents and community members alike that the curriculum at yorktown is not adequately anti-racist as stated in many of the community stories students are graduating from yorktown and entering college only to realize that they were never exposed to more than one perspective of global and american history or the real state of current racial relations in our nation yorktown students need to study an anti-racist curriculum starting from their earliest years and through their formative high school years this will not only create a safer learning environment for our increasingly diverse student body it will create a more tolerant culture within yorktown schools as well as a better rounded students and so we are requesting that the district revise and expand the existing anti-racism curriculum for grades k-12 to address topics such as racial identity
066the contemporary history of race relations in america post 1965 and ongoing systemic and institutional racist racial issues this curriculum should be interdisciplinary and especially prominent in english and social studies classes in english classes classes students should be assigned more texts directly related to systemic racism allyship and activism in social studies classes teachers should directly address issues such as privilege police brutality redlining mass incarceration and the continuous oppression of the indigenous populations topics which i personally never remember discussing in school and i was an avid student studio student the district should introduce regularly scheduled assemblies and workshops we can't just stop at martin luther king next slide please our next request has to do with the notion that i think we can all agree on that for the majority of students school is sort of a
067second home school is where they are spending most of their waking hours outside of their houses school is where students make most of their friends and naturally what happens at school has great impact on a student both positive and negative this is absolutely this is why it's absolutely imperative that school be a safe space for each and every student that walks the halls of yorktown schools it needs to be the goal of every administrator educator parent student and community member at your town and unfortunately it is apparent that we haven't been able to ensure this for every student historically as we saw in the community stories in order to feel safe at school it is essential that students feel that the school is speaking out and taking actions when they or the groups that they
068identify with are in need of support we need to be a district of upstanders against racial injustice and the district should stand in solidarity with black and indigenous people of color by releasing statements of acknowledgement and support for effective communities for affected communities when public incidences of racial injustice occur the district must also take a way more active role in combating racism in our own community we hear and heard in the stories earlier of many instances of racism prejudice and unacceptable actions in which the school failed to respond in the right way going forward the district must make it a primary duty to create and maintain a safe space for each student which includes holding faculty staff and students accountable for racist and prejudiced acts against other students being a bystander to racism is being
069complicit in the act itself we must actively be upstanders i will now give the floor to my colleague amna who will be sharing more how we envision your town being a leader in this racial justice initiative thank you thank you maya hello everyone my name is amna chaudhry and i'm a graduate of the yhs class of and the cornell university class of 2016. since graduating i've held roles in management consulting strategy and finance for a variety of publicly traded companies i am here as the eldest of a long line of girls who have graduated or will graduate from the yorktown schools and as one of the few south asian muslims who's attended yorktown historically i look back at my time at yorktown and recognize the need to do better as a community and district i
070hope our work will improve the educational experience of future ycsc students i'll be taking some time to talk through the remainder of our petition points and so without further ado um could you move could you move to the next slide please thank you the fourth point in our petition asks the district to diversify the teaching and administrative faculty across yorktown schools as evidence in the community stories we all just heard it's clear that unfortunately students are constantly at the receiving end of discrimination and microaggressions at the hand of the faculty and staff at yorktown what's also evidenced by the current racial and demographic makeup of the district faculty is that minority students are hard-pressed to find teachers that look like them and can't relate to current can't relate to the current faculty makeup what a
071non-diverse faculty results in is a sub-optimal learning environment for a variety of reasons including but not limited to one diversity in the workplace results its results to be proven to be to foster a more tolerant and inclusive workplace in this case the workplace is a school district that's educating thousands of children in our community who deserve a more inclusive environment two the current state is as such that minority students are finding difficulty finding teachers and authoritative figures in yorktown central school district that they may identify with or relate to and we all know how impactful teachers can be in a student's life aside from our parents they're often some of our initial role models lack of diversity in our teachers means that there are students in our schools who are struggling more than their white
072peers to see teachers as role models because they simply don't look like them the implications and disadvantages of this can be really really strong minority students may struggle to make connections with white teachers the way white students do which puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to something like college recommendations minority students might also have trouble imagining themselves as future teachers because growing up they saw that teachers are overwhelmingly just from one race in their school we need to make sure yorktown is making active changes in this area and so we as a coalition and a community are asking that the districts specifically aim to hire more black and indigenous and people of color teachers and administrators the district must also make a public commitment to improve minority representation across our faculty and staff
073and in the spirit of transparency and accountability we believe that demographic data a faculty composition should be made available to the yorkton community on an annual basis next slide please our fifth and final request is that the district mandate diversity training for our faculty and staff again as we heard in our community stories it's apparent that many of our teachers are not sufficiently equipped with the training and background required to teach without bias and prejudice and i want you all to keep in mind community stories are a small representation of what may be occurring day in and day out even today at your time teachers are the authoritative figure in a classroom not only are they setting the tone for their class they have direct control over the discussions the dialogue and the sentiments that
074are permitted or not permitted in their classroom all teachers but particularly teachers in a district like yorktown which is a top district need to be responsible for ensuring that every student that goes through their class feels included heard and appreciated however without the right training and resources in place many teachers are failing to remain cognizant of these responsibilities and instead are both knowingly and unknowingly making prejudice remarks out loud singling out students of color in tokenizing situations and teaching subject matter in a way that's not only not inclusive but potentially traumatic for students of different backgrounds one way the district needs to actively combat such behavior is to mandate extensive diversity inclusion sensitivity and unconscious bias bias training for faculty and staff unconscious bias are those micro aggressions that we're seeing being spewed from teachers
075left and right and so we believe that training is one way we can we can get over this as a group training should include specific topics on race and minority empowerment and should be administered by reputable vetted organizations that are qualified to do this i would like to stress that this training needs to be mandatory because every faculty staff and administrator is touching the lives of our students the first step to eliminating bias statements and actions made by our educators is to make them more aware of the ways in which in which unconscious bias can manifest in different settings and also equip equip them with the training they need to create the classroom environment we all wish for our students next slide please and that concludes the presentation of our petition points i'd like to
076re-emphasize that since the publishing of this petition it has gathered tons and tons of support in the form of 5.5 000 signatures tons of interest from local and regional news outlets as well as countless community members who've personally reached out to us to voice their support we're also proud to announce that this petition has put yorktown on the map as one of the first districts locally to initiate this sort of dialogue between the community and the board of education since the publishing of this petition many other districts are reaching out to us and using yorktown as an example to incite change in their own districts as well we are leaders not only locally but we're now also advising dozens of schools from texas california new jersey and so many more across the country we're hoping
077that this petition is just the first step of yorktown becoming the north star for diversity inclusion within the nation and we're already making taking that step because we're helping all these districts do this across the nation i'm super hopeful that the future collaboration dialogue and transparency between the yorktown community and the board of education will also make us a national example of a district that was on the right side of history in these trying times the day following the publication of our petition some weeks ago superintendent hatter released a letter outlining steps that ycsd administration has already decided to take which we're super proud of we're also pleased to learn of the anti-racism policies recently committed to by the alliance for safe kids these are amazing initial steps however our demands are a bit more
078specific and we feel we can do even better as a community we're proud that our district commits to offering faculty staff and board of education cultural awareness seminars addressing racism lgbtq and religious topics this is great however we ask is that these seminars are mandatory and conduct conducted by reputable and vetted organizations and why stop at seminars we're asking for trainings the district is also committed to forming an equity and cultural awareness task force as superintendent hatter mentioned in the beginning of this meeting we believe that this task force has to expand to include the wider community namely parents students alumni and active community members what we'd really like to see is plans timelines and progress be shared with the greater community in the spirit of transparency and accountability i think it's quite evident to
079all on this group how invested so much of our community is in this issue and i feel it's only right that we keep them involved and share the progress with them we all deeply care about our town which is why we've been working so consistently for the last month every day through weekends collaborating with current students and our accomplished alumni nationally and internationally we've been speaking a lot widely with the community parents teachers even our council members to understand how best to bring racial justice to yorktown and how to have these important conversations to parents on this call and in the greater community you guys are critical members of our community and we would love more of you to get involved in bringing racial justice education to our yorktown community we see you leading the
080community representation of our task force and spearheading future collaborative efforts with the board to raise our children into empathetic and successful members of our society children who will eventually grow into community leaders as ty mentioned we must create an environment in our schools in which everyone feels included and therefore can thrive to their full potential we must also equip our students with the resources to critically engage in difficult conversations and teach them what's actually going on in the world these conversations have to start at a young age education is such a key part of this movement and all change must start at home and for us that means yorktown board of education we are so grateful for your time today and the opportunity to speak on this really really important topic it's so important to
081so many of us and we're really excited to collaborate with you to make yorktown its absolute best as mentioned on the screen please feel free to reach out to us at racialjusticeycsd gmail.com if anyone has any questions or comments or wants to get involved and we thank you again uh i want to thank you all you you're all amazing really really amazing and i want to thank you for sharing your stories um they were extremely moving i i i don't necessarily have words for them um ron i don't know if you want to say anything before we move i would may i yes may i um to our alumni thank you so much for bringing this to us um i appreciate you sharing your experiences your pain and the reality that you experienced there just
082is no other way um to put it what i want to share with you and i think you get this sense i really do think you get the sense i want to share with you my personal commitment to this work um you inspire me you motivate me or students inspire me and their experiences inspire me in your town and i'm raising my own children here i live in this community and it should live up we should live up to the promise of our community and of our district and um in terms of the trainings and all the things that we identified there's more to come our task force is just getting started and they have met and we have our co-chairs on the line as well because i wanted them to hear and members of
083our task force are on this call because we thought it was important to listen and to hear and to acknowledge what happened and we're actually having a meeting tomorrow our task force is meeting tomorrow and i assure you this will be discussed and your experiences will be discussed and our next steps will be discussed so i appreciate you sharing this with us please know that you have i have heard you i i have heard you our task force chairs have heard you and i hope you get the sense that we're serious about the work and um silence is not an option silence is not acceptable and we will show our voice through our actions and that is where i will leave it and and i just want to thank you again for for sharing your
084experiences because you have no idea how meaningful they were to me and to my colleagues on this call i thank you thank you thank you thank you for giving us the time today thank you for having us so what we're going to do is we're going to go to the public comment portion and then at the end of that the board will make comments um if they choose if so we're going to remove you for all from uh panelists back to attendee and uh people can start to raise their hand if they'd like to speak while i read how public comment is going to work if you guys are okay with that all right so um just so you know how public comment works uh we don't usually have a lot of people so i
085just feel it's really important to tell you about it it's an opportunity for the public to make a statement to the board up to three minutes in length it's not a question and answer period our board meetings are strictly regulated under new york state law and they're not as some of you may un believe a town type forum where the public can go back and forth with the dialogue our meetings are conducted for board business and it is it and it is for our business it's under new york state law our meetings are required to be held in public boards of education in new york are not required to have public comment at their meetings but we always choose to do so in yorktown because we very much want to hear what the community has
086to say we want your ideas and we want your input in terms of public comment at our meetings in order to give everybody the same opportunity to speak and be heard there are procedures which we follow at every meeting and i will go over the accommodations that we've had to make now during zoom with our pandemic our comments are limited to three minutes our district clerk event segal will keep time we will not be extending grant granting extensions of time and that's always been our policy to assist speakers tonight event will hold up a sign indicating when you have 30 seconds left left and will state when your time is up anyone wishing to speak must electronically raise their hand so you are all in the zoom attendees when we see your hand raised we
087will move you one person at a time to a panelist we may not be able to see the order that your hands are raised in but we will get to everybody your name will be called out when it's time for you to speak and you will be moved over to panelists please state your first and last name as well as your address or connection to your council central school district before you begin speaking we do require both audio and video on for a speaker to be able to comment if there is a problem and we cannot see and both see and hear you we will take the next person in line to comment and you can try one more time again if that does not work then we apologize because sometimes there are difficulties but
088then we ask you to please submit your comment to us by email you can email yorktownvoe yorktown.org important again as i stated with the panelists we do not allow the name the use of personally identifiable identifiable information including names of students or employees when addressing any incidents or concerns this has never been allowed in any of our meetings so please do know that we very much want to hear what you have to say and we do not want to have to mute any speaker who goes over the time limit or uses any such kind of personally identifiable information also again if there's anything we deem inappropriate in either your audio or video feed you will be removed from panelist status and not allowed to return we're asking that everybody respects our policies and procedures for
089the hero for everybody's benefits so that everybody's just treated you fairly we thank you all for listening because we felt it was important and we appreciate all of our new members here at our meeting tonight i want to make sure that everybody understood our procedures and so everybody has a voice please make sure one other thing that the name on your screen matches the name as you raise your hand and state your name and address because sometimes people's names don't match the computers so can we see anybody who's raised their hand to speak we have i'm sorry i'm going to butcher your name and i really apologize natalya anababa we're only bringing one person in at a time yes i have two i promoted her to panelists there should only be one i have two
090people on panelists no okay i need you nada i need you to engage your audio and your video please thank you welcome um this is uh nalini rao i'm sorry for your name hi good evening i live in hunter brook road in yorktown heights and i'm a parent of three children who were born in westchester county and we went to the yorktown center school district we know the elementary the middle and the high schools well we came to kotlin about 35 years ago and to yorktown 23 years ago uh the school the proximity to ibm beautiful woods and hills and some of the reasons we settled here i've been teaching in this community for 23 years and while raising a family and building a lifetime of friendship with fellow yorkton dwellers we found wonderful dedicated
091teachers in the school but we have also met teachers who have looked the other way when children were bullied and we've met teachers who were insensitive a few instances in first grade the teacher told me when i went to meet her that i should speak only english with my daughter i speak several languages fluently she then told the mother who came next who happened to be white that it was wonderful that a child spoke french and she should continue her bilingual immersion in elementary school the teacher talked about how lucky india was to had the british rule them and my child came and asked me is that so i said well no and this is insensitive at several levels especially since our country here the u.s went to war over to the british rule and
092when my eldest daughter went to the school counselor we found a discussions with the counselor really strange and she seemed to hop more on how we looked then on our daughter's grades abilities and potential my daughter was told she should not look higher than local community colleges and small colleges we disagreed with her and my oldest child went to harvard and that counselor luckily was later replaced during our twins times late much later we found that many of the hispanic students in the school were not actively encouraged to go all out and try for admission and scholarships and we found that they did not have an advocate like we were advocates for our kids and they were following falling between the cracks one of my daughter's friend i remember was told again not to look
093beyond community colleges luckily the child was intelligent hard-working and was her own advocate and she disregarded the advice from the school counselor and went on to a great state university another hispanic friend however did not go to college at all and they were along our lives along with a wonderful life here we also had did meet many subtle and not so subtle instances of racism such as asking where are you really from and were you born here and we got so used to it that we just buried it and moved on but there were teachers who did stand up for us and and when they did it listen the sting i think that is really important that we implement an anti-racism education this is a community which deeply cares and we need to have the
094mandatory training for teachers and educators and administrators and we need to have a really all-inclusive curriculum it's important that we all work together so that this community reflects our universal values thank you for your time thank you so much we appreciate your thoughts thank you we're going to take catherine grebosh hello can you see me yes we can oh we can hear you great perfect i am catherine grabosh and i live on mohansec avenue in yorktown heights and i am a fairly new member of this community uh we just moved up here last year and are really enjoying being part of the yorktown community and first i just wanted to say that i am so proud to be in a community where the alumni speak so wonderfully and so eloquently about the issues that we
095are facing not just in yorktown but everywhere um and i i commend them for that that work and all they have done for that um and i am also a fellow educator in a local district and i have to say when this all started with george floyd i contacted dr hatter and i was very pleased to hear back from him and hear the commitment that yorktown central school district does have towards anti-racist education and curriculum and i just wanted to show my support i do agree that if there is a task force that is extended that community members parents alumni students definitely need to be a part of that i would love to be a part of that um as well being a parent of a student who's currently in third grade going into fourth
096and another one who will be in schools in the next few years um i think that we as community members can truly make a change and i do believe that if our equity task force that is already established has actions and goals and uh real uh tasks that they're going to enact i think a lot of good can come from that and i do hope that the changes we see and i think the alumni spoke to this that it needs to be more than just band-aids uh little things to be changed but really a deep systemic change that will help all of our students feel safe and comfortable in the society and yorktown community where we live and work thank you very much thank you so much for sharing that we're going to go to
097dax armstrong good evening uh hello everyone can you hear me okay wonderful um i just wanted to share okay so i have to introduce myself i'm dax armstrong i live on high ridge road here in yorktown um i've been here for about three years i also work for the yorktown central school district this is my first year um i'm very proud of the work that i'm getting a chance to do and participate in uh here at the district and i just wanted to say how moved i was by our speakers today um it's really wonderful to see young professionals that came out of our schools that are that are so i'm i'm telling you i don't think i could have done it better and really um i'm so impacted by what you've said tonight and
098i i can't even describe it and it's definitely going to be front and center um with the work that we're doing and i do hear uh what you guys are saying i really like to get the the powerpoint that you presented us with today because i'd like to use that um to kind of inform some of our work and for me to steal some notes and some of these wonderful ideas that our young people have i wanted to just let you know that i am an ally that i do believe in the work i do believe in the message that you're presenting for us here today and i'm gonna do everything in my power to move us forward in the district in this community i'm a member of this community um and and i really
099believe that we can as you said be leaders for the country in this work um so i just wanted to say thank you i'm so glad that i'm that i'm able to be here and and witness firsthand and see this and you know um i i i made it a mission of of my own as a young person to learn about black history when no one else would teach it to me and i remember my father telling me the importance of learning black history of learning native american history of learning hinduism and buddhism and and muslim religion um all throughout my life and what i understand is that revolution and great change like the civil rights movement it it it takes a village and it you know if we do it as a community it
100will happen and i and i do believe in that and i'm just um yes and i i just want to show everyone let everyone know my support and and that i'll do everything that i can thank you thank you dad we're so grateful that you and michelle are leading the task force we know we're in good hands with the two of you so we appreciate of that thank you uh we're gonna go to a hiring room worthy hi can you hear me yes we can good evening hi so i'm putty i uh i went to the yorktown central school district from k-12 i got my bachelor's in math from nyu in 2017 i graduated from yhs 2013 and right now i'm a fourth year phd student in mathematics at notre dame and i just wanted
101to tell you why it is so important and why it would help to have some uh culture cultural sensitivity training and a training in the um and that would make you more aware of modern day racism as it manifests in our school and our community um when uh i know that the people are there with me uh it lessens the sting of the racism which we faced in school and elsewhere and when uh i don't get that sense uh uh the racist incidents which i face and which many other people face to a much greater degree than me this is that they face and which i face uh it's a dead weight on me that that stays with me so i just wanted to give a few examples uh when my librarian uh stood up
102for me uh when some uh high racial incident happened on my bus it did not stick with me i was able to brush it off because uh uh he stood up for me and uh i could just dismiss it as more bullying and i forgot about it like a few days later when i was renting the car with friends on spring break and uh the person at the rental counter asked uh who is this the stalker um i was with uh two white people uh when my friends did not stand up for me uh uh that stood with that stuck with me and it still sticks with me and then i just recently brought it up with them but it um it has stuck with me for a long time and it's it's a dead
103weight on my shoulders uh when a fellow yhs alumni um uh when i told that i confided in her about some of the things that happened to me uh said never happened to me that was something that stuck with me so knowing that my neighbors are aware of the challenges that we face is really important and it can lessen the sting of the racism that happens uh to us in real life so i think we would be really good if we could have examples that have uh that show uh how it manifests in our community in real life and racism that we do thank you for sharing um we're gonna go to rachel frederick can everybody see and hear me am i good okay my name is rachel frederick i'm a parent of three in
104the yorktown central school district um my oldest is in the schools right now so firstly i'd like to recognize and commend the work and effort by the yorktown alumni they are a true force for good and a testament to what ycsd can produce i'm speaking tonight as a parent in the ycsc community one who is concerned with social justice social change accurate and inclusive history and social emotional education i worked with wonderful yorktown students to co-organize a march for civil justice last month in the community the students i met are kind intelligent and excited about becoming civically engaged they were however disheartened by their lack of education surrounding race and racism in america i tried to think of an example of social education or diversity inclusion in my oldest son's school experience so far to
105speak to the benefit and the positivity of these experience and i couldn't think of a single one i was excited when the district laid out a plan for empathy education as an educator myself i expected a social emotional curriculum i have not seen or heard of any empathy curriculum teaching lessons or resources the initiative seems to have fallen short of the mark for actionable change that is my experience as the parent of an elementary student and i would like to make sure that this doesn't happen in the same way i would like to see that the initiative is amplified significantly and i think that pushing for diversity and inclusion within our schools can mesh with that goal of empathy education we've all recognized the need for the same three things diversifying the staff the need
106for anti-bias and cultural awareness training and immediate curriculum reform all of these goals are in alignment between the alumni and the students and the district goals nobody is disagreeing on the needs for these changes however as a parent and teacher myself i'm here to show support and to say that these words cannot be empty promises with slow and incremental change we cannot allow this initiative of anti-bias education to become nice words in an email or a poster outside of our buildings with little action behind it there is so much community support behind this push and i fully support these changes and would like to advocate for oversight and actionable measurable change immediately we need full transparency with this work and i hope there are professionals in the field of diversity and inclusion or cultural awareness
107education to be consulted over the implementation oversight and transparency a year-long teacher training series will not cut it i would like to see people who can guide ycsd school buildings to include diverse perspectives and assemblies experiences trips performances books resources and materials in real ways we can and we must do better i am so grateful that the district has outlined intended goals for this much needed reform ycsd students and alumni with the support of parents are here to support to advocate for that reform to go faster and further and to partner in ways that make this goal fulfilled and one for all of community members we look forward to supporting these changes throughout the year and the years to come my hope for my children is that they get to be taught by diverse teachers
108learn diverse perspectives hear diverse history narratives have diverse friends master social emotional skills learn and use empathy think critically and be educated holistically we need to make space for that by breaking down harmful practices such as white-washed history curriculum materials and resources perpetuating narrow-minded perspectives and implicit bias in hiring practices that create homogeneous staffing in entire buildings in the past two years i have had four friends close friends withdraw their children from ycsd public elementary schools for the reasons echoed in the sentiments expressed you need to you need to wrap it up okay i'm sorry but it's three minutes so just one more time that's fine i have had countless other friends of color refuse to even consider yorktown as a place to live or as a place to educate their children for these same
109reasons we are appeasing a certain population to the exclusion of others and we are the problem if we continue to allow this thank you for your time and your extra time you're welcome thank you for your shape and we appreciate it uh we're going to go to michelle copeland [Music] before michelle gets on there's a lily who's got a hand raised but unless i have a last name i can't call on her so there needs to be a name on that screen go ahead michelle what you need you need audio there we go good evening thank you i'm glad you're not driving now i know well first of all i wanted to apologize about that um i just i really wanted to personally say thank you to the alumni and everyone who shared stories tonight
110um they were profound and enlightening i'm relatively new to yorktown myself um but i think also a lot of these things happen and aren't widely understood by the rest of the community or known and i think that's a huge part of the work that we can do moving forward um so i really just wanted to say thank you and that i'm incredibly honored and humbled to be doing this work with this district and then i really look forward to working more with the community of people who presented today and hearing more of their stories um and that i look forward to the amazing things that we can all do together thank you thank you and again thank you for your leadership on the committee we appreciate it it's my honor thank you uh we're gonna
111go to patricia sullivan rother and again lily if i don't see a last name i'm not going to be able to call on you i really do want to call on you oh hello can you can everybody see me or hear me yeah we can go ahead good evening good evening thank you for the time board um it has been hard to hear tonight's meeting um i'm sure it's hard for you all it's hard for me as a parent i'm patricia sullivan rothburg i have a rising senior and there have been some wonderful things that we've experienced here in the schools but there has been as the group discussed tonight some things where we need to do work i am incredibly impressed with this group of alumni i would like to help in any way
112i can i think we have a lot of work to do and while my son has one more year left i will be in the community and i would like to help um i have friends who've left the district because of what they've experienced i've had friends that are still in the district and i've witnessed some really difficult things embarrassingly i have not come forward because i've been afraid and i think of myself as a someone who speaks out um so when the protest happened it was such a watershed moment for me i have been waiting for a group like this for 16 years we've been in the district um so there's a lot of work for us to do around the country and there's a lot of work for us to do locally i'm
113very impressed that the district is opening their hearts and minds it has weighed heavy on our family with some of what and i'm white and privileged but some of what we've witnessed and heard about um this generation of alums we are so lucky one of the silver linings of sheltering in places they all came home and they're vested in making our district better so as much as it's hard to hear tonight i'm just really happy that we're going to embrace this it's not going to be easy it's going to require work and there's more i want to say but i know my three minutes is going to be up so thank you all for your time thank you very much patricia we appreciate it uh lily ciao you got your last name up wonderful come
114on in hi hi um my name is leitz hall i graduated yorktown in 2013 and i went to school at washu in st louis i'm in 27 graduated in 2017 went to nyu for medical school graduated this past year and now i'm doing my residency in internal medicine at nyu i just wanted to start off by saying how in all i am of my classmates both my my classmates who i graduated with and spanning all years for being able to share their stories something that really struck me was how powerful it is to me to have a place where you know we are heard um without fear of judgment um later on after leaving your tone i think a lot of my adult life i looked back at my time at yorktown and felt this
115conflict between wanting to speak out and wanting to express my anger and my sadness about what was happening but also being afraid um and being um upset on myself for being afraid and sometimes i think that the difficult thing with the microaggressions that took place when i was a student when people asked me where i was from when they made fun of my food i guess there's less of a microaggression more of a direct aggression but when i was a kid and people would make chinese eyes at me um was that i let the um i let where i grew up from and what people around me felt and said make me feel like i was the crazy one for being upset i felt i was too sensitive and too weak and i think a
116lot of growing up becoming a doctor learning about the things that happened to patients was being able to understand that what was happening to me was ridiculous um and that if people graduate yorktown not understanding that that's ridiculous and enter positions of power like the profession i've chosen where you have this tremendous responsibility to advocate for your patience and care about who you take care of for people to not understand the importance of recognizing racism that's just not that's just not okay um and so i really want to thank everyone for speaking out today and i really want to thank you guys for listening thank you lillian thank you for sharing uh banakashi good evening good evening finally got me got it sorry about that uh well i i want to join with everybody else
117and and and saying how impressed i was with the people speaking uh my name again is vidat gashi uh i'm the county legislator representing yorktown or one of them representing your town collin smith also does uh i'm also a parent of two kids in yorktown schools both in brookside and while i didn't go to yorktown um i grew up in yorktown and i went to lakeland high school i think a lot of the experiences i heard i recognized um as a guy named badat gashi um an immigrant uh and uh muslim uh i experienced a lot of the same sorts of things uh the microaggressions uh being told my bag is ticking and that uh you know what kind of name is that that's so interesting or whatever and you know sometimes by very well-meaning
118people oftentimes not um i think uh growing up we viewed these things differently i think i accepted them differently it's been uh encouraging and exciting for me to see this uh i think discourse change and evolve and i think here um as with a couple of other issues um guns and some of the other ones the youth are really doing a heck of a lot better job than we are um i'm so impressed i i like to encourage as much as possible in any way that i can be helpful through my role or otherwise i'd like to offer that help and uh just say thank you again for doing it thank you guys thank you we appreciate it thank you so much um i don't see anybody else is there anybody else wanting to speak
119before we should oh there we go emmecation hi emma can everyone hear me yep okay great um so hello i graduated um yorktown in 2015. i went all the way through from kindergarten on i'm now getting my master's in public health at columbia university um so i actually i for me had a wonderful time throughout yorktown um in a lot of ways i thrived and um i don't think it was until i went to college that i really realized a lot of the problems that existed there um but one thing that is really stark for me is that i have an adoptable brother who's black and his experience not be more different than mine and so actually fatima shout out love you girl she um reached out to me and asked if i if i
120wanted to share or if jj wanted to share some of his experiences he's my little brother um so we sat down and started to write out things that have happened to him and it is sorry it is so devastating to read and to see all at once is just like it really hits your heart um he actually decided after looking at all that he did it was not comfortable to chair anymore um i kind of asked him why gently nudging him and he's like i don't need people to have another reason to look at me he's like i'm out like i don't want to do this so after a little while i waited a week or two and i asked him again and he said he looked at me and he said if anybody is
121feeling these things that i'm feeling they should leave and he walked away and it's really hard to hear that from him because obviously when there's something wrong in a society it's not the it's not the individuals that should leave it's the society that should adapt and adjust and grow with them um but i also understand the pain of a 16 year old who's been called the n-word who's been discriminated and belittled by his peers by his profes vice teachers and by administrators throughout the district who haven't believed his stories who tell him that he's being too sensitive who say okay well were you doing something wrong that made this happen um and i can't tell you how much i really appreciate um this coalition coming together and starting this change and it's a really beautiful
122thing and um i would love to be more part of it and thank you to the board for letting people talk i think this is really incredible i haven't heard this happening in other districts so i think that it's really amazing that we could be the leaders in a fight like this and be on the right side of history so thank you thank you emma is there anybody else who wishes to speak i don't see any more hands raised so i'll give one more call out for hands anybody all right then we're gonna shut public comments one more shot nobody okay uh we're gonna go on to uh board comment if anybody wishes to speak just raise your hand so i know go ahead lisa so um i just wanted to say quickly that i
123appreciate everybody's comment both the students and the community members and i want to thank all of you for coming out and talking with us tonight i'm sorry it had to be in this format rather than in person because i would have liked to have met all of you and heard your stories personally um emma thank you for your comments i know that was difficult for you and i appreciate you taking the time to share that with us what i heard was two things one the majority of our students had a good experience at yorktown which is encouraging which means that the majority of our administration and our staff is doing a great job which we knew right we we know they're doing a great job but the other thing i heard is that there are
124some that are not doing a great job and we need to get to the bottom of that and we also need to continue to work and educate and learn from each other and take our award of empathy and our goal and philosophy of empathy and go further because we haven't gone far enough i mean the students who have spoken today and the parents who have also spoken today have shown us that we just haven't gone far enough um so thank you for all of you to all of you for your time and sharing your stories especially to those of you who would who found it incredibly difficult to share i really appreciate it um and in terms of the task force that the school district is putting together it's only the beginning so i know
125you guys have a lot of requests and you want more done and you want more people on it give it a moment everyone take a breath it's going to happen we're your town we are excellent and we're going to get there i don't remember who it was that made the comment that we are the leader we will always be the leader we've been the leader in everything up to now and we will continue to do that look at our community look at our kids i mean they're amazing how could we not be the leader with them behind us that's all i have thanks lisa anybody else wishing to speak um i know mike wants to speak if he wants to go last i'll say my statement now so mike let me know i can't hear
126you if you're muted you have rushed me all right you want to speak i didn't see rushme i i looked that nobody said yes okay go ahead rush me so i do want to thank uh our alumni for you know coming tonight and for sharing your thoughts and for joining us uh i hope that this is the first of many conversations that you'll have on this journey to listening and learning and making changes as a minority myself i think there is um no place for racism in our community uh like lika said we will do better we can do better and this is just the beginning of uh our collective work so you know thank you cheryl were you looking to speak yes i'd like to say a few words uh i wanted to thank
127this group for coming forward they're a very impressive group and uh most of all i realize that there's pain in telling these stories so i i really applaud you for coming forward and doing that um it was a wonderfully well thought out and planned presentation it is um a spring springboard for what's to come we can't do this without you it would be impossible for us to say that we know what's going on and what's going on the stories give us room for growth um i actually have to you know think about some of the things you've said and how to move forward and um i i can't tell this group how valuable the information is as we move forward so i really thank this group so much they've done a wonderful job and uh
128really i mean shed such a wonderful light on your town so thank you so much for this uh your town for racial justice group for coming forward anybody else sure absolutely um this was an incredible meeting um for a variety of reasons and i and i wrote down a bunch of things um the the thing that stuck out to me the most um and i think it was amna that used the word super proud or the term super proud and that that's exactly how i feel about the alumni that we had on our panel tonight just truly extraordinary young people and michelle used the term profound and this really does have a profound impact on our community and i think it's critically important that we continue to address some of these things for those of
129you who don't know i'm going on 50 years as a yorktown resident i was not born here but i moved here when i started kindergarten and i graduated from lakeland high school so i've seen a lot and i've heard a lot of the things that were talked about tonight and so there's quite a lot to reflect on scarily i made this comment to superintendent not too long ago that my own personal experience with u.s history ended at around 1965 also and i graduated from lakeland in 1985 so uh looks like we have a lot of things to look at as far as uh how we're teaching more current events and um i have a utmost confidence not only in in the community because it's a tremendous community but also in our superintendent and our administrators
130and our board of education we will make changes that are necessary we will address these things um shout out to you emma for being the voice of jj um i know that young man uh well i'm a little scared that he's actually 16 years old at this point but that's just me getting old and thank you for being his voice and um please let him know that uh he has he has plenty of advocates here i mean if he ever needs uh someone else to talk to that uh our administrators um and even myself more than happy to take it up and and uh listen to his experiences because there's a lot that needs to be done and as i said i think we're um we've got the right people in place to make things
131happen and uh i support it 100 so thank you very much for this this was a wonderful wonderful evening um i just want to i i yorktown students past and present never cease to amaze me they are incredible incredible students speakers human beings uh and you guys all showed that tonight and uh i think we're doing something right if you have the empathy to want to make the change and know that we as a district are committed to making changes we're not ones that see an issue and just stop if we know there's an issue then we're going to try to fix it and i i believe strongly that dr hatter and mrs o'shea and mr cole believe the same way too and we want to make the changes we our point tonight was to
132listen to hear what you had to say because if we don't know the stories we can't start to build the changes and it was deliberate to bring our task force to hear the stories as well and i know that they're going to take it back and they're going to do something with it i want to just thank everybody for sharing because it's very difficult to share people don't like to do it and i understand why some of the presenters shared other people's stories because people don't always have the strength to come forward and we wish that they did but we're glad that we hear their stories anyways i want to thank you all for that i'm so proud of your account i really am and i'm proud of the fact that i know that we
133can do this hard work and i know that we can make this a better place um ron lisa tom did you want to say anything i would like to dr hatter is that okay if i go first please please so i'm not going to say much more than what's already been said but to our s members of the coalition who organized and came forward by sharing your personal stories and the stories of others in our community and to our other community members who spoke during our public session i do want you to know that you have given us so much to reflect on and so much to help guide our work moving forward i'm looking forward to the opportunity of listening to this again the recording of this again when i'm not filled with emotions
134one being so incredibly proud of all of you and to being so saddened by your experiences so i am looking forward to being able to listen again to be much more aware in the moment and to help guide our work with our committees at the various levels in our buildings and in within the community as we go forward so thank you to everyone who had a part in this evening and for helping drive this work it's much appreciated and i'll just end with from saying thank you for to our alumni um i think i've said enough today and i think um the attention turns to obviously continuing to listen continuing to acknowledge what happened there were a lot of positive things that we heard and a lot of things that we need to address and
135um look forward to the journey because we're going to continue to listen and then we need to take action and that's a really important part of our next steps in our next um the next stage of this work and you have my commitment thank you anybody else all right then can i have a motion to a juror salute all those in favor all right i oppose thank you all very much for attending tonight we really appreciate seeing you all here good night all right