Message from Kirsten Carr:
I would like to convene a special committee on racial equality and social justice.
Ideally, I would like to see leadership and representation from those families who are in a class of persons affected by prejudice of any and all kinds. We can decide what step two should be from there. In order to keep momentum, the first meeting is October 24th from 7-8 PM in the library at hayhurst. The committee can then plan future meetings and events from there.
If interested, please join us.
All are welcome.
For context, here’s the message that Kirsten shared to our closed Facebook group a few days ago:
For those of you who are not in the know, there have been several incidents at the high school, middle school and within our own school of targeting children based on race and gender identity. These incidents have presented real threats (not just silly comments) as well as uncovered a need for our community to stand up and have tough conversations about our own privilege and prejudice. There was a parent meeting last night at Robert Gray addressing one of these incidents and there were children of color who stood up and told VERY DISTURBING stories about their experience at school.
I know that often kids pick up words or habits or see things on the You Tubes and have no context or idea what they may be saying or doing. Even more, some know exactly what they are saying but don’t have a historical context for the gravity of comments and actions. How do we approach this?
The question is how will we respond? How will we as a school community make sure that our children know what is inside and outside of our bubble and foster not just kindness but fierce advocacy for folks of color, different gender identification and orientation, of different cultural or religious backgrounds, women, those with different abilities, and those who happened to be born into a situation of food and money insecurity?
Robert Gray has formed a Social Justice and Racial Equity committee as part of their PTA. Do we want to borrow that and try to engage with them?
Do we want our own committee? We have awesome parents who are willing to lead hard discussions in our homes and identifying our own backgrounds and how that contributes to our parenting styles and ability to have hard discussion. Would people be interested in that?
Thanks friends and good luck out there in the world !
There’s discussion on this on our Facebook group, please chime in there if interested, and if you’re not on Facebook, please reach out to Kirsten.