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Hi, my name is Nancy Dome and I am the founder CEO of Epic Education in Northern California.
Epic Education supports school districts around issues of disproportionality, equity and diversity. And we do that through
diversity trainings, professional development, trainer of trainers, and some online
accredited coursework.
Racially, I identify as black.
This letter came to EmbraceRace from Chris in California.
And it says: I'm a black dad raising black children in an affluent and mostly white area in California.
My six-year-old daughter attends elementary school, which is strong academically, but they mostly ignore race which creates many challenges for us.
When I talked to administrators and educators at the school about this, they are either indifferent on clueless about where to start.
Short of moving, what do I do? Are there resources
I can point to that can help us move the school community in a direction that affirms race?
Well, Chris, that is a great question
because I think that you're not alone, first of all, in your concerns for the well-being -
emotional, social-emotional well-being - of your children
when they're in areas where there's not a lot of people who look like them and they don't have that ability to see themselves
positively represented.
Some of the things that I would suggest
kind of based on what you wrote ...
First I'll focus on this notion of being high academic but ignoring race.
There's a lot of research that suggests that it's actually those social supports and that identity piece that
contributed as much as rigor does to student achievement and overall success.
That's work by Beverly Tatum, work by Lisa Delpit, all things that you can read and get some more information about
and actually use as you think about going deeper into these conversations.
I think another strategy would be to
try to find other parents of color and just engage them one-on-one, when you pick up your daughter
Or we can drop her off. And just kind of find out what their experiences are.
The strength is going to be in numbers
And so the the more you can talk to people and find out if
there are similarities amongst what you're experiencing, the
easier it's going to be to talk about a next step and actually have support to do that.
This is hard work.
It's hard work. And when you're doing it by yourself it's even harder. So finding allies either who
will support you or people who are also in the same situation will be very
important.
Another strategy would be just to engage in a deeper conversation.
I think that it's our responsibility
as parents, as people of the community, to really hold our schools accountable for the
responsibility of educating all of our children. So if you feel that
your daughter's not getting what she needs as a black child attending their schools,
I think talking to people and being very explicit about what it is that's happening
and what it is that you need. I also would be interested to look at what the
school district data shows about
achievement for kids of color in the school and that may be
support that would help you and having this conversation if you can actually show them
what the achievement looks like?
Another
strategy would be finding community groups like the NAACP or LULAC even,
any group that works with
communities of color.
Finding them and talking to them and
seeing what kind of resources they actually have that are local to you.
And I think, finally, and I don't know if you said it in jest, but the "short of moving."
Sometimes moving is necessary, and I'm
actually not being flippant about it. If there are resources available and you have done everything that you can and
you really feel like the development of your children are at stake, then moving shouldn't be taken off the table.
My name is Nancy and I EmbraceRace.