YUHSD maintaining commitment to ensure equity in education
As Latino students comprise nearly half of the state’s student population, Yuma Union High School District has pledged to continue ensuring equitable opportunities for all students within district borders.
Through a recent resolution with ALL in Education, the district affirmed its commitment to maintaining equity both in and out of the classroom through policies, practices and programs that “position students to thrive.”
“Arizona low-income families and communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by inequitable policies, practices and programs for far too long,” the resolution read. “These inequalities have spanned issues like education, workforce development, housing, immigration, healthcare and have resulted in large populations of disconnected and disengaged youth of color in our state.”
According to YUHSD Superintendent Gina Thompson, though recently adopted, the resolution builds on a long-standing district pledge to “serve every student and create equity where there’s an absence of equity.”
“We have spent decades working toward equity and working for every student,” she said. “While ‘equity’ has been a buzzword across many different avenues, it’s part of the very fiber of Yuma Union High School District. We have always looked at strategically building our system around equity. It’s part of a relentless mindse ... that really speaks to what we believe to be true and what we value.
“It isn’t just talk and rhetoric, and I’m proud of the fact that we have evidence that we have been working toward this. This resolution just takes us closer to the great work that we still need to do.”
According to Thompson, the resolution is in no way
intended to represent a political agenda.
“It certainly is not a political agenda for me,” she said. “For me, this is the very fiber that is woven into Yuma Union and what we’re all about. This really is about students and access and learning and doing the right thing, and this holds me accountable to that. I never would have presented this as a superintendent to my governing board if I didn’t feel strongly that it was exactly what our mission was all about anyway, and that it’s only going to make us better.”
In the spirit of betterment, Thompson said the district has been working to identify inequities within its system and reverse them to every extent possible.
In the realm of education, few things have magnified inequities quite like the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered brick-and-mortar schools in mid-March and immediately launched students into a remote learning environment. For students who lacked ready access to resources like electronic devices and a reliable internet connection, this scenario posed significant barriers to their academic success.
“Not all of us are connected digitally; the access to electronic communication sometimes simply is not there,” Thompson said. “Along with that is the cost. Especially at a time of unemployment or any other tragedies that come along, sometimes the first thing to go are those subscriptions to cellphone service or internet service, and because a lot of our businesses were shut down and libraries and places people would traditionally go for access, it was a huge barrier to the online learning and online communication.”
According to Thompson, this realization spurred the district to reevaluate the way it communicates with families. While the district had been “capitalizing on social media” to convey key information and updates throughout the school closure, administrators found this wasn’t particularly efficient.
“There’s actually a very large population that doesn’t engage on social media,” Thompson said. “Nor does social media always allow for positive and informational communication; sometimes it can become really noisy and negative. We found that all parents were not getting equity of information, so that allowed for us to examine how we were communicating information and put some other things in place.
“We’d gotten away from traditional mail, but we found that many of our parents still need and prefer that type of engagement.”
Additionally, as the district prepares to offer hybrid and online learning models in the coming school year, one thing that’s paramount is ensuring equity in those instructional opportunities.
“We’ve been looking even more so at how we can offer better, more rigorous online instruction from the teachers in the classroom,” Thompson said. “That is only equitable if every student has the same access. We know that we cannot necessarily control bandwidth and access points for every family, but we certainly can control how instruction is offered. ‘Fair’ is not always ‘equal,’ and some families need more support put in place. It’s allowed us to drill in a little bit more to identify different things that we need to do at each campus to support the actual learning.”
According to Thompson, this does not imply that education is a monopoly in YUHSD.
“We feel very strongly that all students have to be able to have access to the most rigorous curriculum – we don’t select which student to put into a curriculum,” Thompson said. “Everyone has access to the same curriculum. It’s just that everyone might need a different type of instruction or different type of support in order to access that curriculum.”
To further ensure equity this school year, the district’s teaching and learning team have developed a series of resources for parents who’ve been thrust into the role of educator as their children engage in remote learning starting Aug. 6.
“Parents have been put into a very difficult situation of becoming parent and now educator,” Thompson said. “Not all of us have the same background and experience of signing onto things on the computer, logging into different areas where curriculum may be held, knowing how to use a (WiFi) hot spot. So we are trying to also be equitable in access by offering very short (video) tutorials and having everything accessible to parents through the website as a one-stop shop.”
These resources are accessible at yumaunion.org.
According to Thompson, ensuring equity remains at the forefront of district decision-making – and it’s a collaborative effort.
“The bottom line is that educational attainment for every student is our priority,” she said. “And that means that we need to exhaust all the possible avenues for providing those opportunities. It requires all of us to work together to identify things that we can do better.”