“Taking Back Our Girls”
Repairing Relationship & Building Connections: A Panel Discussion “Taking Back Our Girls”
December 3, 2020 (tonight) – 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Free
Black girls are suspended, criminalized and herded into juvenile confinement where they receive disproportionately harsh sentences. Poverty, sexual violence, abandonment, teen pregnancy and familial disruptions are some of the traumas these young girls are living with and instead of being understood and loved properly they are subjected to zero-tolerance punitive forms of discipline that cast them a side, strip them of their unique abilities and their voice. At alarming rates, Black girls, and other girls of color, experience discriminatory, disparate, punitive and unfair treatment in schools. Black girls are suspended, expelled, referred to law enforcement and arrested on school campus at rates that far exceed the public school population as a whole, and far exceed their white female peers.
Join SRI affiliate and Former Board Member, Gillian Smith in this panel discussion tonight for the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, Manhattan Chapter.
Commitment to Equity Institute Launched
Pegasus Springs Education Collective and School Reform Initiative are collaborating to offer professional learning to educators who are committed to practices of leadership and teaching that prioritize interrupting inequities and dismantling racism in their schools. This professional learning opportunity is a virtual offering, as we continue to navigate the stressors of COVID-19. Now more than ever, educators need tools that support a change of mindsets and practices that prioritizes racial and social justice, focuses on culturally relevant pedagogy, lifts student voices, and dismantles systems in schools that perpetuate inequities. We believe that educational equity is the practice of ensuring that all students are able to be successful, regardless of their external or internal racial, social, or cultural context. We understand that as long as race, social, and cultural factors continue to predict the future life chances of children in our schools, we must work to support educators to disrupt these inequities at the individual, classroom, school, and systemic level.
The Commitment to Equity Institute will support leaders, teachers, and students to address social justice issues in education in ways that begin in a safe space, move to a brave space, and ultimately lead to a bold space, where those who have felt marginalized the most are empowered to use their voice. This institute is a year-long virtual learning series designed to support educational leaders, teachers, and students in achieving racial and educational equity in their districts, schools, and communities. This pilot project launched in October with multiple cohorts of teachers, leaders, and students. We are excited to share the news of this project and hope to share our learning from it in the coming year.
Graduate Students in Search of SRI Colleagues!
If you are a graduate student interested in researching teacher collaborative practices, reflective practice, or any subset of SRI’s work please consider joining us. We are hoping to use this group to provide feedback on research designs and proposals, make meaning out of data together, point to relevant literature, or anything that you might find useful to your studies. If this sounds like just what you’ve been looking for, please contact Gena Merliss, emerliss@u.rochester.edu and Annie Leonard, anniemleona@gmail.com.
#PowerofCommunity
Our goal for 2020 is to help educators remember why they became educators, and to do whatever we can to not only help them to ‘feel’ supported, but to actually ‘be’ supported, and work together to create the schools our students deserve. I hope you will join me and continue to support SRI!
SRI is fiercely committed to educational equity and excellence, and we cannot do this work without your support!
Thank you for your commitment to students, families and communities!
Do you have news to share? Interesting things happening in your area? Please let us know so we can share with our community! Email Chris Jones, chris@schoolreforminitiative.org.
Thank you,
Deirdre Williams, Chris Jones, and Patrena Wright
On behalf of School Reform Initiative
