Fayette County graduates start petition to add African American studies to curriculum

Two graduates of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School have started a petition to get African American studies into the Fayette County Public Schools curriculum.

The two graduates, Olivia Geveden and Kaden Gaylord, started the online petition on May 31. As of Monday, the petition has over 15,600 signatures. Geveden said she wanted to help amplify black voices in education.

“These are the voices that have been silenced for so long and so I wanted to make sure that I was coming at this with a clear purpose in mind, and I could use my privilege to help and not abate the situation,” Geveden said.

A student at American University in Washington, D.C., Geveden is double majoring in international relations and French. Within international relations, her primary focus is on identity, race, gender and culture.

Geveden said this focus has allowed her to learn more about the black experience than she learned in high school.

“We have a course that is mandatory for students to take that talks about the intersectionality of race and privilege and implicit bias,” Geveden said. “It’s not necessarily about about African American history, but it’s certainly identifying the biases that we that we hold.”

This is not the first student-led effort of this kind in Kentucky. Last summer, State Rep. Attica Scott pre-authored a bill that would require world history and world civilization course to teach Native American history and African history as it relates to the content covered in the class.

In recent weeks, demonstrators have taken to the streets in Lexington and around the world protesting the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, who were killed in separate incidents involving the police.

Geveden said the petition is not intended to detract awareness from these killings, but was partly inspired by them.

“We recognize that structural changes take a long time to implement,” Geveden said. “This is not a change that will happen overnight, unfortunately, but we have to start working on educating others and it shouldn’t be something that we just talk about during Black History Month in February.”

According to the FCPS website, the district is 48.7% white, 22.8% black, 17.8% Hispanic and 4.8% Asian. Geveden said a similar petition has started for Jefferson County Public Schools.

“Right now there’s approximately 12,300 students enrolled in a public high school in the district in Fayette County,” Geveden said. “So this is our goal for the petition because we really want it to be representative of all of the high school students.”

Tyler Murphy is a member of the FCPS school board, and teaches social studies at Boyle County High School. Murphy has been helping Geveden and Gaylord with the petition. In a statement, Murphy said he supports the petition and will submit a proposal for a “social studies curriculum working group” for FCPS.

“Education is the bedrock of a democracy,” Murphy said in the statement. “As a Social Studies educator, I experience each day the power that our curriculum has to provide our students historical context, critical and analytical thinking skills, and an understanding of the role they play as citizens in our community, our nation, and our world.”

The proposal is up for discussion at the FCPS board meeting on Monday, June 8. Murphy said community members and teachers alike have expressed their support for it, but hope it can extend beyond just the social studies curriculum.

“If we can start here and develop these standards, then it can expand to other disciplines and other areas,” Murphy said.

In his classroom, Murphy said one of the aspects of black history he teaches is Reconstruction which, he says, sets the stage for the way black Americans were treated from the end of the Civil War up to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Murphy said it is crucial for students to understand the roles these systems played in the shaping of the black experience in America.

“A system doesn’t injure a society for centuries and then just not impact the society,” Murphy said. “That’s where we try to draw those lines and help students understand that you have a civil war ended in 1865, but the effects of it are long lasting, so how do we grapple with those effects as citizens?”

The petition is available at www.change.org.