Superintendent's Blog: Our Commitments to Equity

I've been watching, listening and reflecting on the events happening across our nation in which citizens are speaking out against social injustice and in support of equity, fairness, and equality for all.

Over the past few days, I have seen public figures and public entities make statements in support of our African American community and against the injustices that we have seen.  These words are needed and appreciated because what has happened in our democracy is wrong.   I have also been thinking about action, because I am convinced that our actions reflect our character, our intentions, and our dispositions.   Ultimately, our actions or reactions are what we have control of as human beings.

As superintendent of Paducah Public Schools, I want our community to see congruency between our words and our actions. So, I want to briefly mention four ongoing commitments we have made to the community as we pursue equity, fairness and justice together.

1) We are committed to our district's vision to "know each and every child by name and need."

Our district's vision for half a decade has inclusion and equity at its core. "Each and every" means inclusion of all races, all religions, and all socio-economic demographics. And when our vision talks about knowing each individual student's needs it speaks to our common goal of equity. Every child has unique needs. Our system strives to differentiate how we serve each child so that our efforts effectively meet their needs.  There is still much work to be done in our pursuit of this vision, but we are committed to serving all students with fairness and equity.

2) We are committed to making implicit bias training an ongoing component of professional development for our staff.

At the end of the 2016-17 school year, a committee of faculty, staff, and administrators from across our district assessed the need for ongoing professional development around issues of diversity.  The committee began by facilitating a viewing and discussion around a film called "Racial Taboo," which examined issues of race in our society.  Around the same time, the district also facilitated a workshop based on Ruby Payne's book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty. This workshop is now a regular part of our new teacher orientation.  Most recently, the district has provided implicit bias workshops to our three elementary schools, our middle school, and high school. We invited Marian Vasser, the University of Louisville Director of Diversity Education and Inclusive Excellence, to train our district. Our staff was excited about the training and interested in on-going professional development in this area.  Mrs. Vasser is scheduled to begin a second series of workshops this summer before school starts. We are committed to ensuring that implicit bias training will be a permanent fixture in our professional development going forward.

Recently at the June 3 Kentucky Board of Education meeting, Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman asked board members to work with the Kentucky Department of Education – in partnership with schools and students across the state – to develop implicit bias training for students, teachers and school leaders. We are excited that our state sees the importance of this training, and we will continue to look for ways to learn more about diversity and inclusion.

3) We are committed to increasing minority enrollment in Honors and Advanced Placement classes.

Paducah Public Schools is the only district in the commonwealth working with Equal Opportunity Schools (https://eoschools.org) to increase the participation rate of minority students in AP classes. As a result, we have seen multiple years of increases of minority students in our AP courses. This past school year was an all-time best in course enrollment for AP for minority students at Tilghman. We haven't reached our goal of having our participation rate reflect our student demographics yet, but we are improving towards our goal.

It's been encouraging for me to see how our faculty at PTHS are moving forward in a unified way on this initiative. Our teachers are driving this due to their passion for our children and the relationships they have built with students, which is our vision in action.

4) We are committed to recruiting and hiring minority faculty.

Based on KDE's Certified Staff Ethnic Count (2020) report from last fall, our district is currently third in the commonwealth in our percentage of minority staff. We want to continue to make improvement in this area. We believe that building the new Head Start close to PTHS will facilitate the enhancement of an early childhood education career path that will give our students the opportunity to experience real- world education training while they are students at Tilghman, continue their professional training in college, and then be recruited to come back to their childhood school district and community to teach.

In closing, historically, one of the foundational reasons that education exists is to educate the masses for democracy.  We teach students to know their rights and how to exercise those rights. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of assembly and freedom of petition -- this set of guarantees, protected by the First Amendment, are the cornerstone of our democracy.  As educators we are defenders of those rights and we stand with all our students past, present, and future, who exercise those freedoms.

A long-held belief of the board and our leadership is continuous improvement. Regardless of where we are today in working toward a more just and equitable school system, we want to be better tomorrow. There is much work to be done. As educators in the Paducah Public School System, we are committed to doing this important work the right way, with the right heart.