‘Representation matters.’ Diverse Fayette school district now has all-white school board.
Penny Christian has had four daughters go through the Fayette County Public Schools, and had to fight for every one to get into AP and advanced classes. Once there, they were always one of just one or two other Black students.
Now as president of the 16th District PTA, Christian sees frequent and similar stereotyping of non-white students even though they make up roughly half of Fayette’s student body. And that’s why she’s concerned that as of Tuesday, Fayette has an all white school board.
“Representation matters,” she said. “These people are decisions makers, and it’s absolutely crucial that we have that representation.”
That’s not to say that the new school board members, Amy Green and Tom Jones, won’t join the current school board members in making conscientious decisions about race, equity and fairness. It’s just that they don’t have the same experiences as the two Black men — Daryl Love and Ray Daniels — who stepped down.
“There’s no one to blame for this situation, but it’s unfortunate,” said P.G. Peeples, president of the Lexington Urban League. “They don’t have the lived experience of racism, they have not lived the experiences of the kids or the kids families and that’s going to be very difficult.”
That racism shows up in schools segregated by race and income, by assumptions about what is possible for students of color and a wealth gap that affects measures like standardized test scores. Fayette County, like most school districts, has longstanding achievement gaps between races, as well as disparities in school discipline. A study by the local NAACP in 2017 found that black students were twice as likely to be suspended in and outside of school than whites in the Fayette school system.
This all comes at a time when the cases of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have put long ignored problems of race and social justice front and center of our lives. It seems like a big step backward to return to a total lack of diversity on the school board, or as Peeples says, quoting Lyman T. Johnson, who integrated the University of Kentucky, “starting to let the wagon roll back down the hill.”
Christian thinks one problem is that no one takes the school board seriously, until say, we get to a pandemic, and we don’t think about building a bench of potential candidates. On top of that, it’s really hard work where on a good day you only get 50 emails telling you what a terrible job you’re doing.
But as we’re finally recognizing, as conspiracies and anti-science sentiment grow commensurate with cuts in school funding, public schools are quite important and we ought to take their leadership more seriously.
Abdul Muhammad chairs the school board’s Equity Council, tasked with studying these issues and bringing them to the board’s attention.
“So the equity council may need to step up to another level,” he said. “But let’s hope these new individuals will be intentional about reaching out and wanting to know more about these issues.”
Muhammad also thinks there should be more recruitment of diverse candidates. “We have to be more intentional about how to mentor people and have bench strength,” he said.
Clearly Superintendent Manny Caulk has made inequality and the achievement gap a big priority of his leadership. Last fall, he talked about what it meant to soon have a majority-minority school district.
“It means... we are going to attract and recruit talented educators of color,” Caulk said. “We want to make sure that the composition of our employees , the staff, our teachers, the educators, reflect the demography of our students. We want to make sure that the materials that we put in front of our students are rigorous but also respect and represent our cultural diversity as well. “
Let’s see if our community can start doing a better job making sure his bosses reflect that demography as well.
