Members of the Lawrence community gather in Lawrence High School's cafeteria for a Community Conversation about racial equity in public schools, Monday, Jan. 30, 2017. Students were in attendance and participated in group talks about how to improve experiences for students of color in schools and community partnerships.

Taylor Royal expected Monday night’s Community Conversation on racial equity to be geared mostly toward parents — not students like herself.

Adrion Roberson, a Kansas City pastor and adaptive leadership facilitator contracted by the Lawrence school district to moderate the discussion, had even joked earlier that it’s usually folks 55 and older who attend meetings like the one held that evening at Lawrence High School.

But Royal, after experiencing what she described as ongoing and widespread institutionalized racism from the very start of her high school career in Lawrence, couldn’t stay home Monday night. Neither could the hundreds of parents, community members, Lawrence Public Schools staff and even a few dozen students who filled the LHS cafeteria for the conversation borne out of a school year, in Lawrence, marked with controversy.

“I don’t like talking in front of big crowds, but me voicing my opinion on all the racial issues at the high schools, it’s something that I feel needs to be done,” Royal, a junior at Free State, told the packed room.

As a racial minority — the teen is both Native American and Mexican — and a woman who also happens to be economically disadvantaged, “I deal with everything and anything you could possibly think of,” Royal said. And living in that skin, she added, hasn’t been made any easier by the “racist” words and actions Royal said she has experienced at Free State — and the school staffers whom she said did nothing to help her or the larger equity issues at play.

Her story and others like it have been at the forefront of discussions at school board meetings since October, when the district announced its investigation into allegations that a South Middle School teacher had made racist comments during class earlier that fall.

The controversial investigation, the findings of which have never been revealed by the district, continued to draw criticism from parents and community members in the weeks that followed, with many calling for greater transparency in the case.

Tensions finally boiled over at the school board’s Dec. 12 meeting, which was abruptly adjourned after outbursts from protesters made it difficult for business to continue as usual. That incident occurred just days after the disclosure of a settlement agreement between the district and the accused teacher in which district officials agreed to withhold information from the investigation in exchange for the promise that Lawrence Public Schools would not be sued over the matter.

Part of the school board’s efforts to put the controversy behind them, Marcel Harmon told the Journal-World last month, was a calling for a Community Conversation on racial equity. Roberson, of Kansas City’s DESTINY! Bible Fellowship Community Church and the Wichita-based Kansas Leadership Center, was brought aboard to facilitate that talk, and began Monday’s meeting by encouraging attendees to work toward progress, not a “fix.”

Racism, and the way it manifests itself in schools, is an “issue so huge, you may not live to see any fruit from it,” Roberson said. “But you’ll be a seed planter.”

In that spirit, he assigned each table in the cafeteria a set of five questions: Why are you here? What is the Lawrence school system doing to help students of color achieve their full potential, and how have those experiences (from a parent’s perspective, or a student’s) been impacted by race? How can those experiences be improved? And finally, do you have any suggestions that might better involve parents and community members in the district’s planning and advisory processes?

After around 30 minutes of discussion, each table was supposed to reach a consensus to share with the larger group. But that’s not how University of Kansas professor Jennifer Hamer approached her comments during that evening’s “community voices” segment. She’d visited a lot of tables throughout the talks, she said, and encountered a lot of folks who had envisioned a discussion “between the school board and the community and the school district,” as opposed to discussions at individual tables, which she deemed a “lost opportunity.”

“I think if the school district and the school board and the superintendent are going to say they’re going to hold themselves accountable, they really need to do that. But you can’t do that until you’ve really acknowledged the problem,” said Hamer, also the associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion at KU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “I think that we’re grown-up enough, even the kids in the room, to hear and see what the problem is. If we’re not willing to hear and see what the problem is in the real numbers and in the real feelings of our kids, then we’re not really ready to address it.”

At the heart of this, she added, are students. Hamer’s daughter attends a Lawrence public school, as do several of her friends’ children.

“This is not about progress,” she said. “This is about a fix,” and as parents and community members, “we better know how to fix it.”

One group that evening, the Intertribal Club of LHS, did offer a few potential fixes in a list of demands. Among them were the requests that all teachers partake in the district’s mandatory equity training, that all teachers follow the club’s list of acceptable terminology for Native Americans, which they will soon be emailing to school staffers, and that all resources — including existing school psychologists — be made “as apparent and available as possible” to students.

The demands also included reminders to teachers that their words and actions “influence students greatly,” LHS junior Shayla Chickaway told the crowd, and that students must learn to respect their peers of all backgrounds and ethnicities — both in the classroom and out.

Last fall, in the wake of the South Middle School incident, LHS sophomore and former South student Inez Robinson spoke up about her experiences with internal racism in Lawrence Public Schools — first at an emotional school board meeting and then in an interview with the Lawrence Journal-World.

Monday, she spoke up again. She encouraged the crowd to keep the conversation going — with whatever it takes, and with whoever is willing to listen. Equity, she explained, isn’t just black and white, either. It’s intersectional.

“The solution is not to be color-blind. It is to appreciate and recognize our differences,” Robinson said, her voice breaking with emotion. “We’d like to make it clear that indigenous lives matter, black lives matter, Latino lives matter, queer and trans lives matter.

“Muslim lives matter,” she added, “And immigrant lives matter.”

Monday’s Community Conversation, district leaders say, will be compiled into a summary that could be used for future discussions on equity.