board to board News from the Board of NWESD
A Note From Our Superintendent Last year, the Northwest Educational Service District staff began a collective journey around the topic of racial equity. Our learning and growth has been nurtured and sustained by deeply committed and immensely talented NWESD staff who have bravely embraced the leadership of our racial equity work. The NWESD mission – Together We Can…promote excellence and equity through leadership and service – calls out the promotion of equity as central to our purpose and existence. And while equity encompasses many dimensions – gender, ability, income level, primary language – our focus on the particular dimension of racial equity is intentionally chosen. Growing racial diversity across our region is undeniable. In 2005-06, 24% of the students served in public schools across the NWESD region were students of color. By 2011-12, students of color made up over 33% of the NWESD region. Last year, 40% of the NWESD region identified as students of color. We also know that students of color can lag far behind their white student peers across a wide range of academic and non-academic measures. Whether one looks at performance on state assessments, participation in advanced coursework, graduation rates, chronic absenteeism, suspension rates, or a wide range of other indicators, students of color in the NWESD region – particularly Latino, African American, and Native American students – perform behind, and often well behind, their white counterparts. The reasons for these differences are incredibly complex and extend far beyond the walls of the schools and the influences of local communities. A combination of individual, systemic, and institutional barriers continue to impact people of color across the NWESD region, our state, and our nation. As the institutions charged with safeguarding our American democracy and promoting our national ideals, those of us in public education must accept our role and responsibility in disrupting and surmounting these persistent disparities. Like most school districts, the racial composition of the NWESD staff does not come close to mirroring that of the nearly 170,000 students of the NWESD region. As an overwhelmingly white staff, our collective life experiences and perspectives provide limited insight into students and families of color in today’s world. Operating from the premise that you can’t lead what you don’t know, we believe that each of us at the NWESD should commit to a personal and collective journey to better understand and appreciate how opportunity, access, and expectation can differ for people of color, in both visible and invisible ways, and how those differences shape disparate outcomes such as those noted above. It is through this greater understanding and awareness that we can better act and respond intentionally to help eliminate the most destructive barriers that exist. Race remains a decidedly difficult and challenging topic, particularly given our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and civil rights struggles that continue to this day. But to truly realize our mission to promote excellence and equity through leadership and service, we must accept the challenge of growing a stronger racial equity lens individually and collectively to inform our work on behalf of the students, educators, and families we support. The difficulty of confronting racial equity is precisely the reason we must. Perhaps our most powerful learning to date has been the realization of the complexity and depth of the many facets of racial equity. No single training, book, podcast, or facilitated conversation enables one to check the racial equity box and move on to other topics. It is the acceptance of non-closure, the recognition of personal discomfort, and appreciation for the incremental gains in our knowledge, awareness, skills, and advocacy that move us toward our mission of equity and excellence for all students.
Larry Francois
NWESD Superintendent
January-February 2019