Lawrence Public Schools

The Lawrence school board sure got an earful Monday, though some might characterize the public discussion of classroom racism that occurred during the board’s semimonthly meeting as more of a wake-up call.

That night, several concerned parents and residents spoke directly to members of the school board to voice their frustration with what they described as a pervasive and ongoing problem of institutionalized racism in the Lawrence Public Schools.

The meeting was the school board’s first after allegations of racist remarks by a South Middle School teacher had been made public roughly a week before. The alleged incident, details of which have not been disclosed by the district because of confidentiality reasons, is hardly an isolated one, public commenters said.

“I’m not shocked to hear this happened at South. I went there my whole middle school career,” Inez Robinson, a sophomore at Lawrence High School, tearfully recalled that evening to school board members. “As much as I’m glad to know this is happening, I just don’t know why it didn’t happen sooner.”

Robinson, who had attended the meeting along with her mother, Mitzi, and her four younger siblings, spoke of her experiences as a student of color in the classroom, where she sometimes felt insecure, unsafe and unacknowledged by teachers and staff.

In a subsequent interview with the Journal-World, she said some of her concerns stemmed from what she deemed “insensitive” history lessons about her Native American ancestors. Robinson recounted an entire unit on Native American history, in which teachers screened the 2005 TV miniseries “Into the West” for students studying the Sand Creek Massacre. Robinson, who belongs to the Cheyenne and Kiowa tribes, remembers watching in discomfort as her teacher instructed the class to re-enact an emotional “Into the West” scene that depicted a Lakota boy singing an “honor song” while cutting his hair after being forcibly relocated to a boarding school.

In her culture, Robinson explains, cutting one’s hair is seen as an act of mourning, a tradition that continues to this day. When her great-grandmother died, Robinson’s entire family cut their hair, she remembers.

But during class, students were encouraged to perform the honor song in their “silliest voice.” Whoever could make the funniest job of it earned points for their “tribe,” Robinson said.

“The whole thing was a joke,” she recalls.

Two years later, Robinson is doing well at LHS — she’s an honor-roll student, her mother proudly attests, who keeps busy with marching band, French class and an editor spot on the school newspaper — but still wonders, “Did no one else have these problems at any of the other middle schools?” And, “Why am I not hearing about it with anyone else?”

At least not on a public level, she means to say, because Robinson has several friends “who went through this exact same thing,” and none of their stories have become news fodder.

“It’s not just that one teacher,” said Robinson, referring to the most recent allegations to come out of South. “It’s an actual problem that keeps on happening between multiple teachers and years, generations of students, and it keeps on happening.”

Jessica Beeson is a white woman, and an admittedly privileged one at that. She’s college-educated, works in academia as the director of research development and engagement of KU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and, notably, is a member of the Lawrence school board.

But she’s not shocked to hear stories like Robinson’s. Beeson, a Lawrence native who graduated from the public schools she now oversees, has heard similar tales from community members who are now reaching out to her in the wake of the South allegations.

That’s not to say, however, that Beeson needs anecdotes to believe institutionalized racism exists in Lawrence schools.

“Of course it’s here,” Beeson said simply. “It’s everywhere.”

“Those things happen. They’re real. Those stories are real,” she added. “And we have to continue to work on ways to improve the settings of schools so it feels safe and it feels like a place people where can learn and people are encouraged to become whatever they want to be when they grow up. That’s our job.”

Behaviors, she said, are learned. And Vanessa Sanburn, her colleague on the school board who is also a social worker by trade, agrees with her on that. There are several studies, Sanburn says, that prove this.

There are also some pretty obvious indications that students of color, both locally and nationally, are struggling academically in comparison with their white counterparts. And that, Sanburn and the school board collectively agree, is a reflection on the system, not the students.

The Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University found that, although achievement disparities between white and nonwhite students have lessened significantly since the 1970s, the gap between black and brown students and their white counterparts remains large, ranging from 0.5 to 0.9 standard deviations.

Lawrence, as a school district, has been proactive about this issue, Sanburn said. Stretching back more than a decade, the district’s efforts to combat institutionalized racism have included Beyond Diversity workshops and the introduction of staff-led equity teams at all 21 Lawrence public schools, among other measures. Thus far, the district has provided training to more than 1,500 school board members, building employees and community partners.

And the work appears to be paying off, at least in regard to the rates at which students of color are graduating high school. Last week, the district shared its most recent graduation rates with the Journal-World. The numbers reveal that, although still trailing whites, students of color — including African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians and multiracial students — are now graduating in at least the 85th percentile.

Asians, it should be noted, graduated in 2015 at 100 percent. White students, in comparison, graduated at 93 percent that year.

But the school board acknowledges there is more work to be done.

“So much of this is not purposeful,” Sanburn said of institutionalized racism. It’s also, she said, not a problem that is unique to Lawrence. But that doesn’t mean that the district and school board have been given a free pass to simply recognize the issue and move along, she stressed.

One effort that has been proposed, even before the allegations at South had been made public, is the integration of more culturally relevant curricula into classrooms. The idea, which is still in early talks, would provide staff with teaching strategies to better represent all students in lesson plans — including, for example, the place of African Americans in U.S. history that extends beyond their roles as slaves.

A series of workshops with this goal in mind are tentatively being planned for next spring.

Mitzi Robinson, who attended South herself and plans to send her youngest children there when the time comes, suggested a similar solution when asked what the district might do to avoid the kind of hurt — inadvertent or not, she recognizes — inflicted on her daughter.

Teachers, she said, must develop a sensitivity and awareness of the many varied experiences of their students, because words have power, and children listen. And, she added, it’s important that the educators in their lives listen to them, too.

After speaking at Monday’s school board meeting, Mitzi does feel better, if only, she said, for finally making herself heard on matters that she said have been brushed aside, from her perspective, for years. Her daughter does, too.

“I could care less what repercussions come from these teachers,” Mitzi said. “I just need to feel heard. I want to be heard.”

“I work two jobs to live here. I could go live in a cheaper community and raise my family without having to break my back every day. But it’s a good school district and a good community,” Mitzi said. “I pay the cost to live here, so all I want is to be heard.”