John Dabla had spent the morning and afternoon in Brooklyn Center on the day it would make state and national headlines. And while news had begun to spread that a police officer had fatally shot Daunte Wright, a young Black man, it was an email from a student that alerted Dabla.
The student was reeling — horrified that even under the scrutiny of the world, local police had yet again killed a Black man. It’s a feeling, Dabla says, that was shared among other students in the Racial Justice club he advises at Twin Cities Academy, a charter school in St. Paul where he is a behavior specialist.
For weeks, Dabla had been leading a healing circle for students to navigate their emotions as they watched the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin take place some 13 miles from their school. Many of the students, Dabla said, felt frustrated and needed a space to talk through their emotions. Wright’s death in the midst of the Chauvin trial heightened the need to offer students healing and counseling services.
Aniya Bailey, a student in the club, said that while the circles have been helpful, schools are still falling short of providing Black students with the support they need.
“It’s a very scary feeling to know that all this is happening right outside of our doors, right in our streets, right in our community and it feels like we’re not supported or not cared for in a way that we should be,” Bailey said. “I feel like my white teachers just don’t get it, and my white peers just don’t feel the same.”
[image_caption]John Dabla[/image_caption]
‘We need to learn how to normalize conversations about race’
Ezra Hudson, a junior at St. Louis Park High School, says that most teachers are simply not having the discussions needed at the moment.
“A lot of students want to have conversations in their classroom and often are unable to because the teachers can’t facilitate it or their peers are just like not ready to have those conversations,” Hudson said. “We need to learn how to normalize conversations about race and process these things.”
Hudson was one of many student leaders across Minnesota who took part in organizing a statewide student walkout to protest racial injustice on April 19, the day before the jury in the Chauvin trial would give a verdict. And while many teachers assisted in planning the walkout and having conversations about it, Hudson says an equal number of teachers did not discuss it.
“Some teachers are kind of ignoring the situation and that’s a little hard to see,” Hudson said.
It’s a sentiment that Hudson says many Black students are feeling, and while some students have pointed to the lack of discussions, others have also mentioned a lack of connection.
“We have heard from students, and this is from a coalition of students, not just from one group and with emphasis on students of color, that they want their teachers to talk about it here at St. Louis Park High School,” said Breana Jacques, a social studies teacher at the school.
Resources offered, but no mandate
As with many high schools in the Twin Cities area, teachers were encouraged to lead discussions on the events of the past year and were offered resources to assist in facilitating the conversations, but as Jacques noted, they were not mandated to do so.
“What typically happens when it’s a difficult conversation is people opt out or people elect to not do it,” Jacques said. “We have that autonomy to do what we like and so that’s when you get the inconsistency.”
Caleb Willis, a counselor at Maple Grove Middle School, says the combination of the pandemic and the events of the past year have exposed the gap in services available to students of color.
“In times of injustice, you get to see what it really means to the students to have representation and we don’t have a lot of that in our system,” Willis said. “We don’t have a lot of Black school counselors. We don’t have a lot of Black teachers here. We don’t have a lot of Black therapists.”
Data collected by STAR — a system used by school districts to report employment and assignment information to the state — and shared by the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board from the 2019-2020 school year show that of 1,821 staff members in Minnesota schools with counseling licenses, only 41 individuals are identified as Black. There are a little over 100,000 Black students in Minnesota’s public and charter schools.
“We’re doing a disservice because there’s not more of them,” Caleb said.
A need to be creative
For students in parts of Minneapolis and Brooklyn Center, the trauma from living in proximity to policed zones and areas of unrest requires schools to be creative in the support they provide students, Caleb said.
“Sometimes they just don’t want to talk. Sometimes they need a place to hang their head and take a nap and get some food,” Willis said. The week of Wright’s death, a student came to Willis’ office expressing he was simply tired from the protests occurring outside his home. The noise had made it difficult for him to sleep.
Travis Sankofa, a community organizer based in Minneapolis, says that many of the students he has worked with simply need a safe space to express their frustration, fear and anger.
“Many see it as a constant cycle, because it is compounded trauma. They are living through a pandemic and they are reliving through violence over and over via social media, via the news. In addition, some of them live in proximity to violence,” Sanokofa said. “They need an environment in which they can feel safe and which they can feel vulnerable.”
And while a guilty verdict seems to have quieted the streets of Minneapolis and the suburbs for now, students would like to see discussions of racial inequality continue.
“I just want to emphasize that the killing of Ma’Khia Bryant hit home for me and I’m sure a lot of other people that look just like me, young Black girls,” Bailey said. “And I feel like there’s lots of talk about how Black students may be hurting, but there’s never any real initiative. There’s so much that schools can do and they choose not to do when it comes to students of color.”
Why would a math teacher, with no background in law enforcement, legal system and policing, talk about the current state of those institutions? Shouldn’t he teach math and leave that to a social studies class? Why would a student want to hear about the legal system from a creative writing teacher? These are teachers who have a specialty, let them teach what they know. If teachers, with no background in a subject, are throwing out their beliefs no wonder 50% of Mpls schoolchildren are not proficient in math, reading and writing.
Have an afternoon where you gather the students in a school auditorium and let them express their feelings with folks who understand law enforcement and legal system. At some point school has to be for getting an education, if not, you will continue with the terrible results you are currently getting. These are teachers we are talking about, they can give an opinion and foster a conversation but at some point they have to teach what they know.
Joe, with all due respect, you are far too removed from the reality of the kids you read about in this story, and your comments reveal that instantly.
These kids are in crisis. When you are in crisis and you know that kids who look like you do not live long lives and when it is stressing you and people you know are dying, you are in crisis. Learning math or anything else is utterly irrelevant when you are in crisis.
Any person who is an adult – and here I am talking about these teachers who feel unsure about navigating a discussion about race – can still open a discussion. They can say “I don’t know.” They can encourage kids to talk, even if they have no answers, which most of us don’t. The kids need to talk and the only responsible thing for us to do – we the adults – is to make those conversations happen. We need to open it up, we need to let every kid who needs to speak be heard. We teachers – especially white teachers – cannot and must not hide behind our discomfort with discussions of race. It is everything to these kids that we MOVE on this old albatross.
As far as your usual digs at teachers, they are ill-placed. What we face in the urban public schools – what kids bring to us – is a reflection of society, and for many, that society is giving them the short end of the stick.
Empathy, Joe. Empathy and big ears for listening.
No Tom, these children are in school…. If they need crisis management, they should set it up for after school or lunch time… We have public Government run, tax payer funded schools to teach kids how to read, write, do math and problem solve. Government run schools are failing at teaching the basics but you want teachers to be successful crisis councilors when they can’t teach kids how to read… That makes no sense.
Tom your comment reveals that you seem to not understand the purpose of a school. As a teacher you are there to teach the subject you were hired to teach.
Parents are there to guide their children through mental, emotional and moral hard times. They are their kids. If you want to volunteer at a charity after school, knock yourself out. Don’t turn your classroom into a group therapy session.
Kids who are so overwhelmed emotionally should be getting treatment from professionals. They shouldn’t be in school suffering.
Trying to turn every class in every school into a group therapy session isn’t helping anyone. Go to school to learn. Go to a therapist for emotional help.
My friends, I understand the distinction you are making between schools and a counselor’s office, and of course they each have their places. But there is a larger question here, and that is this: what to do with the kids who come to school overwhelmed with the dysfunction that is their lives/families/neighborhoods? I’m sure there are schools where the kids come in more or less adjusted and ready to learn. At home is a stable family and they feel relatively safe in their days of life. But many schools located in many areas have a considerable number of kids who come to school where violence, drugs, economic uncertainty and being a certain color have greatly narrowed the parameters of their lives. I can tsk-tsk their parents for the bad choices they have made and I can tell them they should try harder but that is irrelevant to the reality in front of me: kids who need much much more than their parents are giving them or can give them.
Now, I can harden my heart and say “too bad so sad” or I can look at them as the beautiful kids they are, but kids who are being slowly crushed by fate, and without direct intervention (and even with direct intervention) many will fall through the cracks through no fault of their own. Society pays the cost for them, and that is not even considering the moral cost.
My choice is to try to help where I can. The schools, and especially the public schools, simply mirror what we have created in society. There are haves and there are have nots, and anyone who denies this does not have their eyes open. No amount of drilling your multiplication facts or conjugating verbs precisely will pull a kid out of a very likely broken life and the broken dreams that go with it. If teachers are ineffective it is because not all kids come to school ready to learn. Put the blame where you will, but it is not the child’s fault and most teachers come from a place of wanting to help.
Tom, well said, thank you.
So you would rather have untrained teachers be sounding boards and council children rather than do their job and teach them? You already have teachers (not knocking teachers, just stating facts) who are not capable of producing 50% of students proficient in basic learning after 13 years of public schools. How is less learning time going to help the class. There are 30 children in most classes, are you saying all kids need crisis management? How about the 20 kids per class, who just want to be taught? When are they going to learn, between math teacher crisis management talk?
Makes no sense whatsoever.
Joe, it makes no sense because you are profoundly oversimplifying the situation in schools. Whatever society creates – they come into our schools. In areas of poverty they come into school in great numbers. If I follow your lead and simply teach math and reading and ignore the emotional and physical chaos they bring into the classroom, they will not learn anything because there is not room for any of it to go. They are overwhelmed. They were overwhelmed before they got to school, and that happened because of the society where many kids live.
If you are leaving no room for teachers to account for the emotion that comes into the classroom and continue to criticize them for the low scores coming out of so many schools, as you habitually do, then yes, you are certainly knocking teachers.
Tom, spending learning time on “feelings” is why Mpls public schools have 1/2 of their students graduating without being proficient in math, reading and writing. The kids who need counseling should get it after school or lunch time. Teachers are not prepared in any capacity to be professional councilors, they need to stick to teaching not class feelings. Teachers are failing our students now, why burden them more?
Perhaps worth noting a fact about Darnella Frazier, who recently won a Pulitzer prize for taking and posting the murder of George Floyd. Frazier attends a chartered public school in Minneapolis. The school is Augsburg Fairview Academy.
The school’s vision is “AFA is committed to serving and participating in our local community, working compassionately to promote social justice and equity through education, and contributing to our intercultural family.”
People can have different interpretations of social justice and equity. I think it’s great that the school is encouraging this.