Racial Equity Work

The Background

Asheville Primary School is engaging with district-wide efforts to examine and address racial inequities in our schools - in particular, the significant achievement gap affecting students of color across all schools and subjects.

In the spring of 2016, a group of staff and parents from Asheville Preschool and our pilot Kindergarten class participated in a PhotoVoice project to explore issues related to racial equity in our schools. This group created several recommendations that will help to guide our goal of growth with equity:

• Avoid labeling students and families in a way that undermines high expectations.
• Support more social-emotional instruction in the classroom.
• Engage district students in discussing racial inequity—reasons, experiences, and solutions.
• Engage parents to increase awareness of the achievement gap and hear their experiences directly.
• Explore where home-school communication breaks down—focus on building trust and rapport.
• Don’t avoid talking about race—at home and in the classroom.
• Recruit and retain more teachers of color.
• Ensure all teachers have professional development to increase equity awareness and culturally responsive practices.
• Continue to address teacher pay and support.
• Examine practices across our schools to grow what works, and let go of what doesn’t.

The Opportunity

In starting a new school from the ground level, we have an exciting opportunity to lean in to that last recommendation: examine educational practices, and let go of what doesn't work. The decision to pursue Montessori Education as our magnet theme was made with this idea at the forefront:

Let us try an evidence-based, internationally-practiced, and comprehensive alternative approach that

• permeates the entire classroom experience
• is structured for teacher support
• explicitly and continuously addresses student social-emotional development
• allows for increased student autonomy within a highly ordered and predictable environment
• resists the temptation to overwhelm students and teachers with well-intentioned but sometimes overloaded schedules, environments, expectations, and programming

The Work Ahead

In starting a new school, we also have myriad opportunities to ineffectively address inequity - in enrollment, family engagement, staffing, support for teachers and students, and more. We're committed to examining our own practices with families, staff, district leadership, and community members leading equity work.

In 2017 our school began participating in district-wide equity work with Integrated Comprehensive Systems. Through this process, we'll begin the work of setting school-specific equity goals for Primary and Preschool while continuing to explore how we can implement the recommendations from the PhotoVoice project. We look forward to engaging new families in this process as partners, and as advocates for our students and teachers.