School district administrators and Equity Committee members have been left with the challenge of figuring out how to get out from under a half-century-old court desegregation order after public opposition quashed the hiring of an equity and diversity chief.
School Superintendent David Moore said the divisiveness caused by the Feb. 24 job posting for a Chief Equity and Diversity Officer for the 2021-2022 school year convinced him to instead try a team approach to desegregating the public schools.
“The pushback was quite shocking to me,” Moore said during the School Board’s May 11 business meeting. “The understanding I’ve come to is that I don’t need one position. I’m going to reallocate responsibilities within senior staff and cabinet to ensure we do a much better job around access.
“We need to be better in providing the resources to those that don’t have the resources to be successful,” Moore said. “Connecting children to the systems, to the people, to the programs – whatever it is they need to be successful.”
In a related matter, the School Board voted unanimously to assign the existing Equity Committee the challenge of advancing efforts to bring the school district into compliance with the 1967 federal desegregation order.
The district has agreed to work to improve the academic performance and reduce the disciplinary disparities for African-American students, and hire more African-American educators, among other goals.
School Board member Peggy Jones, whose four-decade career in the district included a stint as Sebastian River High School principal, said having African-American educators helps motivate better academic performance and behavior among African-American students.
“I want everyone to know, regarding this Equity Committee: The work that is being done is so very important,” Jones said. “This is a huge part of what we’ve got to do in the district to move it forward.
“Equity is more than race,” Jones said. “We want all students on every campus to have the same shot at whatever they want to do.”
School Board member Jacqueline Rosario joined several parents and political activists in claiming that some are using words like “diversity” and “equity” as euphemisms to advance a “Neo-Marxist” political agenda in public schools.
“This is in part where we’re getting the community’s uproar about this,” Rosario said, reading from a right-wing website called Battlefront that offers ideas on how to oppose the purported “Neo-Marxist” agenda.
Rosario called for district administrators to research legislation in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Idaho that bans “critical race theory” from public schools, and figure out if similar policies can be instituted in Indian River County.
An American Bar Association lesson on critical race theory dated Jan. 12, 2021 says: “It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers.
“It acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.”
Paul Westcott, a Vero Beach attorney, offered to draft a policy for the School Board to keep critical race theory out of the public schools based on the new laws in other states.
“There are a lot of people interested in helping, but when we hear ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’ and all of that stuff, it doesn’t give us warm and fuzzy feelings,” Westcott said. “Quite frankly, I don’t want to show up and have reason to feel guilty.
“My family comes from Kansas and Illinois. I haven’t done detailed research, but I’m pretty sure none of them owned slaves,” Westcott said. “I shouldn’t feel guilty, and I shouldn’t have to tiptoe around those issues showing up to help. Neither should anyone else in our community.”
Others called it a waste of money to pay an administrator approximately $100,000 per-year “to lead the district’s efforts to build a culture of equity, diversity and inclusiveness for all students, families, employees and school community.”
But Joseph Parr, a Stetson University student and Vero Beach High School graduate, told the School Board “critical race theory directly threatens white supremacy because it exposes the various ways racism exists in law and policy.
“The attacks you will hear today are just a sideshow meant to distract the board from achieving full unitary status with a desegregation order we should have fulfilled decades ago,” Parr said. “Stay the course and work to make our school district more equitable for our students.”