The South Bend school superintendent is promising to change school culture and boost cultural competency with a new strategic plan.
Superintendent Mansour Eid says the plan will focus on five to seven achievable goals. “Something that we will be able to see the results, hopefully, within a year or two – nothing 10, 20 years down the line,” Eid told the school board Monday.
He said the planning process will include a community survey to help identify what the school corporation needs to work on. A team of stakeholders – including board members, teachers and community partners – will meet for a series of five “retreats” between now and November.
The Indiana School Boards Association will facilitate the planning process, while consultant Baruti Kafele will help guide cultural competency discussions.
Eid noted that 77 percent of students were identified as Caucasian when the district entered into a consent decree in 1980. Now, they make up 23 percent of the student population. However, Hispanic and mixed-race students weren’t counted as separate categories in 1980. Meanwhile, the percentage of Black students has increased from 23 to 38.
“Our demographics have shifted, and it behooves us to work on establishing some kind of cultural competency that we all can move forward with,” Eid said.
This comes as the local chapters of Black Lives Matter and the NAACP, along with other advocacy groups, are calling on the school corporation to create a strategic plan specifically for Black student achievement, drafting their own proposed resolution for the school board's consideration.
They cite the South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission’s recent report that found that Black students have faced harsher discipline than white students and were less likely to be recommended for honors programs, among other disparities.
"The Black community, the Black families, have waited far too long for real change," Oletha Jones, education chair of the NAACP South Bend Branch, told the school board. "They’ve waited far too long to have a real seat at the table."
School board member Bill Sniadecki thinks the board needs to look at their recommendations, although he admitted he disagreed with some of them. He felt that poverty needed to be considered, not just race.
"It’s just not the African American people," Sniadecki said. "It’s everybody. And if they want to call me a racist for doing that, let them call me a racist. I’m doing this for all the kids."
Eid expects the district’s strategic plan to be completed this December.
