Olympia school board responds after parents say BIPOC program amounts to segregation
The Olympia School District has been implementing smaller, more intimate learning models for the past few years in an effort to bring test scores up and get kids back on track after the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Black, Indigenous, and People of Color mentorship group was started at Centennial Elementary School a couple weeks ago, and it doesn’t sit right with some parents. School board president Darcy Huffman said the elementary school’s principal received a flurry of emails from people calling the group exclusionary because white students are not involved as well as a kind of segregation.
Members of the board responded to complaints during their regular meeting last week, assuring the public that the group will continue to exist.
Board member Talauna Reed said the BIPOC mentorship group is not the same thing as segregation. She said her mother actually experienced segregation going to school as a little girl. She said she was spit on, had rocks thrown at her and more, just for trying to go to school.
She said she doesn’t think people understand the use of the word and that its history needs to be put on the forefront so “we stop all that nonsense and counter that narrative.”
OSD communications staff sent an email out to parents and families detailing the purpose of the group after they heard concerns about it being exclusionary. According to the statement, it’s a branch of a district-wide mentorship program for students who have been historically underrepresented, including students of color and those of lower socioeconomic status.
“Staff work with students to determine their goals and needs by building relationships and creating spaces for students to share experiences which inform how the program is built,” the statement reads.
School board member Maria Flores said her mother, too, experienced segregation as a Native American and Hispanic woman. She said using the word segregation is a false equivalency, and that Brown v. The Board of Education was put into place to ensure the desegregation of schools.
“These groups help these students get what they need to succeed,” Flores said. “Being a good ally allows you to recognize when I need to allow people space to talk amongst themselves and process their experience, and when I invite myself in.”
Flores said these types of groups are required to allow students to succeed because they aren’t getting the attention they need or deserve outside of them. And other students are allowed to come, but she hasn’t heard any complaints of exclusion from students themselves.
“We will always meet our students exactly where they’re at and serve them,” Flores said. “I want to say, please consider what it feels like to be a person who has experienced, in your family, segregation, and then to evoke that word. It’s irresponsible.”
Christine Zhang, a student representative from Olympia High School, said from a student perspective, she can understand wanting to be part of a new student group — but not necessarily this one. She doesn’t want to take away from the resources or time put into the group to support her Black peers who have experienced things she can’t fathom, she said. That’s why she joined the school’s equity group, and there are plenty of other options for students seeking community.
Vice President Hilary Seidel said she’s heard from some parents and teachers alleging that “woke” ideas and Social and Emotional Learning models are bad, and that they’re driving people away from the district. She countered that narrative.
According to the district’s most recent monitoring report, in the last year and a half or so of increased instructional coaching, counselors, social workers, family liaisons and the mentor programs, test scores have gone up.
“Their growth in reading and math is going up significantly,” Seidel said. “Groups of students who have historically been underserved by our school district are achieving at levels we have not seen before.”
Board President Darcy Huffman represents District 3, which includes Centennial. She said it broke her heart to read the complaints the principal received about the program.
“My mother, god rest her soul, taught me better than to write someone, ‘I hope you get cancer and die,’” she said. “That’s what the principal received, and that is not OK.”
The group at Centennial Elementary was created to allow students to talk openly about issues and their identity and how they affect their time at school. And it’s meant to be student led. Huffman said it was created after students at the school specifically asked for it.
“The supposed adults in the room put our innocent kids in the middle of our culture wars,” Huffman said.
Huffman said she knows a few of the kids and their parents that are involved in the mentor group. She said they’re her friends, and they campaigned with her when she was running for school board. She assured them that despite the complaints the district will likely continue to get about the groups, they will continue to have them.
“I know 100% that our students will be more respectful of the needs of our BIPOC students for space and privacy than their parents have been,” Huffman said.
