According to Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools director of equity leadership Sheldon Lanier, assistant superintendent Rydell Harrison takes a copy of the district’s equity plan to every meeting.
“Dr. Harrison has done a great job of referring to the plan every single time,” Lanier said. “I was actually in a meeting with him one time and he said, ‘You can tell I use my plan.’ It was tattered and torn. It was bent in every single corner, and I think there were some pages upside down.”
Lanier and Harrison are major parts of the school district’s push to close the achievement gap, which has consistently seen minority students underperform compared to their white counterparts.
It is has also seen minority students, particularly African Americans, being disciplined at a much higher rate.
According to CHCCS, 26 percent of African American students in the district were given office discipline referrals, over two and half times more frequently than the next closest racial group.
Harrison said the equity plan created by the district over the summer will try to address some of these concerns.
“When you see a problem persist over time, you can do an intervention on the students as if they’re the problem,” Harrison said. “But what we recognize and what our plan addresses is we need to look systemically at how we are meeting the needs of our students.”
Sheldon Lanier and Rydell Harrison discussed equity in Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools with Aaron Keck on WCHL.
This school year the district has began implementing restorative practices that focuses more on interventions with students rather than the usual form of discipline.
“Now that we’re at the end of the first quarter and kind of reflecting on what we did so far, we’re seeing overall a decrease in our discipline referrals by 46 percent, which is huge,” Harrison said.
Even with some of the early results, Lanier is hesitant to offer too much praise.
“It’s going to always be a draft,” Lanier said. “Because of the fact that you’re going to always go back to the plan, you’re going to always revise the plan based upon data.”
The district is developing a website that will give residents access to the equity plan and allow people to track the results as the year goes along.
A link to that site will be posted on the CHCCS website when it is available.
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