Mari Kanagy, Reporter
Since spring of last year, local community members have been actively working with the Parents and Friends for Racial Equity Committee (PFREC) to improve racial equity on Vashon.
In March of 2016, PFREC requested a meeting with Superintendent Michael Soltman.
“We had many questions for him and expressed [our] many concerns because we wanted to better understand how our schools were meeting the needs of our children of color,” committee leader and island parent Spring Hecht said.
Since it was first established, PFREC has collaborated with the school district, as well as with the Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD), an agency that works with schools to improve educational programs. These organizations have helped PFREC to install its programs in Vashon schools.
“Our parent and community-wide committee of now hundreds is officially partnered with VISD equity team, and … the school board formerly approved a racial equity [policy] a couple of weeks ago,” Hecht said.
As stated on the school district website, “The mission of PRFEC is to … serve as a resource to help all children and families promote inclusion, racial equity and social justice; our goal is to teach children and their parents how to be allies and recognize and combat racism and racial discrimination, as well as engage in dialogue about race issues with respect and integrity.”
Racial equity, as Hecht explained, is not the same as racial equality.
“Racial equity in education can be defined as raising the achievement of all students while narrowing the gap between the highest and lowest performing students and eliminating the racial predictability and disproportionality of which student groups occupy the highest and lowest achievement categories,” Hecht said. Instead, racial equality is about giving equal opportunity to all races.
In order to clearly identify the issue, Nikum Pon, a PSESD staff member, gathered data on the racial equity of our district. Pon’s data came from compiled statistics of the school district and focus groups with students.
“Our school district is … comprised of nearly one quarter students of color [which is] higher than [the island’s] overall population,” Hecht said. “After reviewing the results of a data inquiry, we have discovered that there is an achievement gap in our district that is very similar to our statewide statistics.”
Specifically, students of color in both the Vashon school district and across Washington state do not have the same achievement rates as their white peers.
“We want to change this by rooting out inequities and raising race consciousness to eliminate individual and institutional racism in our schools,” Hecht said.
Students who are interested in getting involved in racial equity issues in our community can join local organizations such as the Youth Undoing Institutionalized Racism (YUIR) or the Seattle Young People’s Project (SYPP).