San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Listen to families of color on safe school reopenings
Kev Choice said he wondered “where all of the Black and brown people were.”
Choice, a hiphop artist, activist and music teacher at the Oakland School for the Arts, was referring to the “Schools Not Screens” rally held near Lake Merritt on Feb. 28. The grassroots group OUSD Parents for Safe Reopening organized the event to urge the Oakland Unified School District to quickly reopen schools for inclass instruction. Even Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf attended, and she told the crowd of about 200 that it was “time we get our kids back to school — or, as we say in Oakland, ‘hella time.’ ”
Choice hadn’t heard about the rally until he stum
bled across it near the lake. The same goes for hiphop journalist and radio personality Davey D. Both Black Oaklanders posted photos and videos online calling attention to the lack of Black and brown faces in the crowd.
“If we’re having conversations and making decisions and moving policies forward without consideration of those most impacted, to me that’s a false narrative of equity and equality,” Choice told me a few days after the rally.
That message was met with days of contentious debate on Facebook. But making sure families of color have as much access to influential politicians as white families shouldn’t be controversial. The fact that it is makes the path to reopening schools harder than it needs to be.
And we’re leaving out critical voices in the process.
A recent survey conducted by the Oakland Unified School District shows a majority of elementary school families want to return to inperson learning. But, according to the East Bay Times, the report also showed that while 76% of white families wanted inperson learning, only 52% of Black families, 48% of Latino families and 44% of Asian families felt the same.
Surveys have shown that Black and brown families are hesitant about returning to school because of high rates of COVID19 infections in marginalized communities.
Yet when we talk about reopening schools and how to do so, whose voices are we most often hearing? And whose voices are being left out?
Lakisha Young says there are systemic reasons that parents of color feel at arms’ length from the public school system, including racial inequity in achievement and graduation rates.
“We’ve been in an education crisis since before we were in a health crisis,” said Young, cofounder of Oakland Reach, a Black parentrun organization that has helped underserved students navigate distance learning, including providing many with laptops, since the start of the pandemic. “We know what the problems are and what the solutions need to be.”
Black parents such as Young, who has three children, including a daughter who is a senior in the Oakland Unified School District, also know their voices get ignored in conversations about education. So they band together. This is how Oakland Reach recently secured a $900,000 grant from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and TNTP, formerly The New Teacher Project, to expand its learning hub model.
“There’s too much talking, too many voices,” Young told me. “People are trying to simplify a situation that for Black and brown families isn’t simple.”
Of the nearly 60,000 students enrolled in the San Francisco Unified School District, only 14% are white. A little more than 50,000 students are in the Oakland Unified School District, and white students account for only 10% of the student population. Yet there are Black, Asian and Latino parents, whose children account for the majority of each district’s students, who feel as though they’re being sidelined.
That isn’t how you build a consensus or return kids safely to school.
This problem isn’t isolated to San Francisco and Oakland. Ed Source recently published an article that mentioned a parent survey conducted by the West Contra Costa Unified School District. It was about returning students to inperson learning. According to the article, Latino and Black families were underrepresented in the survey compared with district enrollment demographics. White parents were overrepresented.
Oakland Unified recently unveiled a plan to get all preK through fifth grades back in school this month. San Francisco public schools are slated to begin inperson learning for certain groups starting April 12. The schools will open with limited inperson learning hours. There are parents in both districts still calling for a full reopening.
It’s worth remembering that, in California, families and teachers of all backgrounds share the same goal. No one’s arguing that education isn’t important or that Zoom is the preferred delivery method. All parents want their children to return to a school where they’re safe, cared for and educated.
But Black and brown teachers, parents and students are often shouted down when they try to participate in these conversations. That’s infuriating. It’s also counterproductive.
If our politicians, school board members and district officials are seeking out only the loudest, whitest voices at the rallies, the Bay Area will botch its chance to make an unprecedented school reopening process fair and equitable to everyone.