The ICCSD's Comprehensive Equity Plan in 6 Languages

Captions, from left to right: Kingsley Botchway, Iowa City Community School District equity director; Douglas Narveson on left, unknown school board candidate in middle, part of Megan Schwalm, a candidate for Tuyet’s two-year term on right; Reverend Doyle Landry; Clair Rudison, Chair of the Iowa Commission on the Status of African Americans; Julie Van Dyke, a community activist who follows the actions and inactions of the school district and its board very closely; Ross Wilburn, former ICCSD equity director, now in Ames, and a fast, friendly rider I frequently encounter on the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI); Phil Hemingway, a school board candidate for a four-year term and owner/manager of Phil’s Repair; and Todd Fanning, a school board candidate for a four-year term and chief financial officer of the University of Iowa Community Credit Union. Fanning is an accountant and has lived in the Iowa City area for three years. He’s from Illinois.

Kingsley Botchway, the Iowa City Community School District’s equity director, presented the district’s comprehensive equity plan Monday evening, August 3rd, 2015, at the Iowa City Public Library. The meeting date, place, and time were published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen Saturday, August 1st, in English. Botchway’s handout was published in English, French, Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, and Chinese, but the approximately 20 people who showed up in meeting room B, a relatively small room, all seemed to speak English.

The handout began with goal 3 of the strategic plan. Kingsley apologized for leaving out goals 1 and 2. In my current and former capacities as a writer and technical writer, editor, and proofreader, it seems to me that an attentive typist, translator, or proofreader might have caught such an obvious error. On the other hand, Kingsley is the one who makes the big bucks to notice such things.

Be that as it may, Kingsley showed us marketing flyers for teachers and other staff in the district’s alleged effort to hire more minorities. He denied purported rumors that the district will lower standards to build more inclusiveness in a desire to match the backgrounds of staff to district students.

Efforts to reduce disproportionality in student discipline, assignment to special education, drop-out rates, and educational achievement; as well as to improve community engagement and staff diversity are all in the future tense.

Any efforts to show progress in these areas in the past or present are attempts to put lipstick on a pig, in my opinion, and a number of people in the audience said so.

Doug Narveson, a community activist, asked if the district engaged in implicit attitude testing, which is apparently a process to determine inherent bias. Kingsley said no, not to his knowledge.

Reverend Doyle Landry spoke and said, “There’s no accountability for racism in Iowa City.” He said he was born and raised in Iowa City. He’s college educated. He stressed that he’s not from Chicago, and yet young black men like him still can’t find jobs here. He was well dressed and well spoken, but he seemed depressed and angry.

“I confront racism every day. Why would I stay?” he asked.

Reverend Clair Rudison, an older black man who is Chair of the Iowa Commission on the Status of African Americans and a job developer for the Evelyn K. Davis Center for Working Families in Des Moines, pointed out that the Annie E. Casey Foundation discovered that if a young student can’t read by the third grade, that student is 79% more likely to drop out of school than a student who can read by the third grade.

Julie Van Dyke, a community activist who has been particularly attentive to what the school district and board does and doesn’t do, said that a panel was convened to interview and recommend one or more candidates for equity director when Ross Wilburn, the former equity director, left to take a job in Ames. She said that before the panel made its decision on which candidate it wanted to recommend, the district selected Kingsley Botchway as its new equity director.

In other words, the district reached out to encourage community engagement in the process of hiring a new equity director and then let the panel know how irrelevant it was to its deliberations by picking a candidate by themselves without the advice of the panel.

I was there when Kingsley got the call offering him the job because he came in late to a Disproportionate Minority Contact Subcommittee Meeting and announced that he’d just gotten the job.

I remember asking him if he got a significant salary hike over his then current job in the county auditor’s job, and he agreed that yes, he got a significant bump in salary.

The DMC Subcommittee has barely seen him since.

Latisha DeLoach, a school board candidate for a four-year term, addressed the issue of academic achievement and Mr. Rudison’s statement that if a child can’t read by third grade, that child is 79% more likely to drop out than a child who can read by third grade by asking about out-of-school suspensions for kindergarteners. She said if class time is important to a child’s ability to read, then kindergarteners shouldn’t be suspended out of school. She did not specify which behaviors are involved when the district suspends a kindergartener and requires the child’s removal from the school, but again, if reductions in out-of-school suspensions for minority students occur, they will occur in the future, apparently.

Obviously, we need to know what behaviors are prompting such drastic measures for kindergartners. What bothers me is that when I try to find out, the black parents who I’ve talked to don’t want to talk about what the specific behaviors are. They want to talk about culture and racism. While these may be entirely legitimate issues; in fact I’m sure they are, I want to know what the specific behaviors are or what language has been used to identify those behaviors. I know that one disruptive or even hyperactive child can affect an entire classroom.

When my son was in first grade, which was about 25 years ago, his first-grade teacher, Mrs. Honohan, said, “Maria, I could teach so much more 15 years ago.” She was talking about disruptive behaviors that made it more difficult for her to teach.

What about the rights of children who arrive at kindergarten ready and willing to learn?

Kingsley said more efforts will be made to do home visits, which is good. I said that early childhood education is very important, and that children who have access to quality preschools tend to do better in kindergarten.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Iowa has the highest disproportionate rate of minority incarceration in the country. Wouldn’t our money be better spent on early childhood education than prison, which is more expensive? Studies show that you get a bigger bang for your buck in the first few years of a child’s life, when brain development is occurring rapidly between years one month to three years old.

After the meeting, I talked to two school board candidates after the meeting, Phil Hemingway and Todd Fanning, the chief financial officer at the University of Iowa Community Credit Union.

Fanning was very attentive at the meeting and said he liked what I had to say about how busing impoverished children was a hardship for the children and their parents because the two biggest barriers for poor families are (1) transportation and (2) child care. If the district buses poor children away from their neighborhood schools to balance test scores, when that child gets sick at school, a parent at a low-wage job who has to pick that child up at school may not have transportation to get the child and may lose her job if she leaves work, especially if it’s more than once or twice.

Also, each bus costs $40,000, and teachers also cost about $40,000. When teachers are laid off, do you want to pay for buses and bus drivers instead of teachers?

I remember working as a social worker at HACAP with two clients on Benton Street. Their friend on Broadway Street had a working vehicle. The three friends shared that one vehicle until the car broke down. After that, one of my clients on Benton Street walked all the way from the top of Benton Street Hill to her workplace on Lower Muscatine on Sundays when the city buses don’t run. She didn’t need more barriers in her life such as having her children bused out of her neighborhood.

Her kids loved Roosevelt School, which was almost right across the street from where they lived. The little family went to extracurricular family activities at Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a very successful neighborhood elementary school. This woman came from a very bad neighborhood in Chicago. Her brother’s girlfriend tortured her daughter to death according to my client.

When the school district, in its wisdom, decided to close Roosevelt as a neighborhood elementary school and repurpose it, I often thought about what a successful school it had been, to engage my client and her children from Chicago, a woman from a neighborhood so marginal that when she went back to Chicago for mandatory drug testing, the building she reported to was literally on fire.