Mount Greylock School Officials Outline Diversity Work Plan
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Thursday heard an update on the district's efforts to promote inclusion and belonging at its three schools.
And part of the story was an acknowledgement of where those efforts fell short.
One of many areas where the district has emphasized its push for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging has been in how it communicates with the families of students, Business Administrator Joe Bergeron told the committee.
"Despite the fact that I, in sending emails regularly to families across the district, especially during COVID, tried to be pretty consistent about making sure there were translations in every email I sent — I made mistakes," Bergeron said.
"I would receive last-minute content when the state was changing something up, I'd scramble to get an email, I'd try to make sure I didn't have too many typos in it, I needed to get it out before parents would be picking people up so they could know what they needed to know. I'd click send, and about 10 seconds later, I'd say, 'Wait, where was the translation? I thought I had just done it. What did I do?' And that's from somebody who is sitting here tonight saying, this is a mandate and this is something we're paying close attention to."
Bergeron's anecdote helped illustrate a larger point in his presentation: fear of coming up short in an effort to build a more equitable community is no reason to not make the effort.
"Nowadays, when we say 'DEIB,' it can make people shy away from it because it is so personal and it is something where if you do fail, you have failed an individual and a group of people that you do care about," Bergeron said. "And nothing is enough. You're never going to get fully done. You're never going to make things fully better. But the things we can celebrate as a school district and as teams of people will be being able to look and know, 1, that we worked hard at it, 2, that we created positive change, and 3, that the individuals we care about are better off as a result.
"Those are metrics that people can feel and teams can feel. It's a little more difficult to put it up in a grid and say, 'We had a 97 percent score within this area.' But I do feel we can do that as a group: to know what we've done and who we positively impacted and why that was."
Superintendent Jason McCandless and members of the School Committee have repeatedly acknowledged that a mountain of institutional racism in society and in public education needs to be addressed in the district.
To that end, last year, McCandless created a new administrative position in the district office, a director of DEIB. But the district was unsuccessful in its first year trying to fill the role, and the unfilled position was a victim of budget cuts in the FY24 budget that voters in Williamstown and Lanesborough will see this spring.
Even without a director in place, school officials are looking at a number of areas where the DEIB work needs to be done, including the communications to families but also: incident reporting and responses; community building; giving staff the tools to engage in difficult conversations; diversifying library offerings; updating policies and procedures; improving classroom content; and hiring and retention of faculty and staff that reflect the student body's diversity.
Jose Constantine, the only School Committee member who voted against the FY24 budget as presented by the administration earlier this spring, questioned whether such an ambitious agenda in the area of diversity is possible to implement without a full-time professional dedicated to the work.
"That's the worry for me, and, I'm sure, many members of our community," Constantine said.
He singled out one area of the district's plan and asked for specifics about how the administration plans to recruit more diverse staff, particularly in light of McCandless' presentation earlier this year on the lack of certified teachers from historically underrepresented groups in the commonwealth as a whole.
"We are making sure those job postings become as detailed and as inviting as we can," Bergeron said. "If we're posting for a visual art teacher, for instance, the tradition would be: You put up a job posting to say you need a visual arts teacher who has licensure and is excited to work with students in Grades 7 through 12.
"A much better approach would be to talk about the breadth of experiences, the depth of experiences and the kinds of things that you would like to be able to offer your students so somebody who has a background and reads that job posting can say, 'These are folks I want to work with. These are folks who are going to value what I bring to the table beyond a standard job posting.' "
Bergeron said the district also is looking at the places where it posts its job openings and reaching out to existing members of the school community with diverse backgrounds to help spread the word.
"Those are all achievable things over the next 12 months and all things that the staff we have doing the work .. are all invested in," Bergeron said. "Will it be perfect? No, absolutely not. Would a DEIB director, if they committed a day of their week, each week to only that, would they make more progress? Yes. But that doesn't mean we're not going to make progress. It doesn't mean we're not going to be able to do it."
Efforts to address the school's curricula came up earlier in last Thursday's meeting, when Director of Curriculum and Instruction Joelle Brookner shared the district's effort piloting the commonwealth's Investigating History lesson plan in the fifth and sixth grades at Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary.
According to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's website, Investigating History will "address not only instances of racial oppression and prejudice in developmentally appropriate ways, but also highlight the individuals and movements who have challenged it, and the way in which diversity has been and continues to be a strength of our nation."
Brookner said the local elementary schools got in on the ground floor of an approach to teaching history and social studies that will be going live for all schools in the commonwealth in the 2023-24 school year.
"We just feel fortunate that we're in Massachusetts, that is supporting really trying to teach true history," she said. "There's a fantastic statement on the [DESE] website, there's an FAQ called 'Race, Racism, and Culturally Responsive Teaching in History and Social Science in Massachusetts.' I encourage people to read it. It's a great resource."
As for the rest of the district's DEIB action plan, outlined in a PDF on the Mount Greylock Regional School District website, the committee discussed creating a standing agenda item to receive updates on the plan's implementation. And the committee members discussed adjusting the existing goals for the superintendent in order to allow McCandless more time to focus on the DEIB work.
Specifically, member Julia Bowen suggested that the committee cut a goal of moving the district toward a reconfigured school day where elementary school classes start earlier than middle/high school classes.
"It's a big lift, if that were to ever happen," Bowen said. "Is it something we should not ask the team to focus on?"
Bergeron noted that "flipping" the schedule would, among other things, involve a major fiscal commitment to redo how the district transports students. And McCandless said he agreed with Bowen that, unlike other goals for the administration that the School Committee approved, there were no "crosswalks" between the time shift and the DEIB work.
"That's one [goal] I'd be open to putting on the back burner — simply because of the complexity and, at the end of the day, the fact that the answer is still likely to be, 'Not right now,' " McCandless said.
Bowen asked that the committee add an agenda item for a future meeting to revisit the superintendent's goals.
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