To All White People, We Must Not Be Silent

George Floyd is dead. George Floyd is dead because a police officer knelt on Mr. Floyd's neck for more than seven minutes, while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed, despite Mr. Floyd saying "I can't breathe" and "I'm about to die." There is video of this tragic event. For me, it was powerful and sickening all at the same time. The reason I'm not including it anymore in this post is that I have a fabulous PLN in Vermont that helps me see blind spots. It was brought to my attention that while showing the video spreads awareness of the racism, it may be traumatic to Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC).  

Why were the police called in the first place? A shopkeeper called 911 to report that someone completed a transaction with counterfeit bills. Since the video above surfaced, several others have come to light that when pieced together, show the entirety of the interaction between Mr. Floyd and the police. There is nothing that this man did, nor was accused of that warranted being smothered to death. Nothing. 

George Floyd was murdered because of the color of his skin. Period. End of sentence. I know there are plenty of people that will disagree with me. I'm OK with that. I'm OK with you disagreeing because I know that racism is alive and well in our country. 

In 2018, when Montpelier High School's Racial Justice Alliance raised the first Black Lives Matter flag on a public high school campus, we received calls, some very menacing in nature, to our Leadership Team. Several threatened specific physical harm. A few told us we should raise a flag that says All Lives Matter, a familiar refrain I've heard as other schools in Vermont have also put this critical message on their campuses. 

Yes, all lives matter, and I agree with that. But that is not how we started our country. Our country was born of free and enslaved people. I'm not going to get into the semantics of the three-fifths compromise. I'm stating the facts. 

Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution stated (until 1865 and the 13th Amendment): "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons." The "other persons" referenced in the original text were slaves. 

So yes, all lives DO matter. But all lives haven't mattered from the beginning. And this is one of the many reasons we are struggling with racism as a country and as a state. Fundamentally we began this great experiment in democracy with an unequal playing field, and it continues to this day. 

Consider these examples from our country in the past few months. 

• Christian Cooper was watching birds in Central Park. When he asked Amy Cooper (no relation) to leash her dog, per the rules for that area of the park, Ms. Cooper called the police and reported to Mr. Cooper while making the call, "I'm going to tell them there's an African-American man threatening my life." 
• Ahmed Aubrey was shot while jogging, after a confrontation with two men in February. The responding officers recorded the account of Gregory and Travis McMichael and let them go home. Wanda Cooper, Mr. Aubrey's mother, was told, her son had been involved in a burglary and was killed by the "homeowner." We now know a different account of that story and that the McMichaels have been charged in the death of Mr. Aubrey. 

Consider these examples from our state: 

• The moment that spurred the first Black Lives Matter flag flying at a high school came almost two years earlier. One of the African American students at Montpelier High School, Joelyn Mensah, asked two white students to stop using the "N" word, while Major Jackson was giving a presentation at the school. Not only did they refuse, but they also used that racial slur toward Ms. Mensah. 
• Kiah Morris, the second-ever female African American lawmaker in our legislature, resigned after four years of public service. In her own words, she "intentionally left for many reasons," one of which was the safety of her family after racial harassment in her hometown of Bennington. 

So how do we move forward? From a colleague in Vermont, Peter Langella, one thing we cannot due is to expect this work to be done by our students of color in this state: 

Instead, those of us who are white must use our privilege, our platform, and our power in all of our places. We need to speak to our neighbors and our allies, those who agree with us, and more importantly those who disagree with us. We cannot allow systemic racism to continue to invade our state, like an untreated cancer, to advance and conquer our idyllic cities and towns, taking hold in the minds of our young people. We must be both an advocate and an ally, reflect and realize our implicit biases, and work our tails off to address them in our day-to-day lives. 

I am mindful of the quote from Lilla Watson, an Australian aboriginal woman: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together." My liberation, as a white man, is bound up with the people of color in the state of Vermont. 

I will not be silent. 

Photo Courtesy of Sheldon L. Eakins, Ph.D., Leading Equity Center

Three Simple, But Hard to Say, Words

This past week, something came across my desk that would have been relatively simple to handle, were we not living through a global health crisis. One staff member reached out to me, with all the humility in the world, and expressed concern at how they were treated by another staff member. There were the usual caveats someone in leadership will hear: "I'm really not trying to get this person in trouble," "I know they meant well," and "I'm sure it was just stress." But during these especially trying times, I heard, "Their job is so much harder now," "I can't imagine trying to do all this from afar," and "The school dismissal is really hard on everyone."

Still, I pointed out, it has brought this to my attention. So I listened some more, took notes, and reviewed the situation from the first staff member's perspective. The entire conversation took somewhere between seven to ten minutes. This person thanked me for my time, and I hung up the phone. From what I heard, an apology was warranted. Still, I have had too many of these conversations in leadership over the years to expect two people to see these situations similarly.

Now, if we were not experiencing a pandemic, I would have reached out to the other staff member to set up a time to talk face to face. It was not a serious matter, I was not going to document this incident, nor even note it as a "verbal warning." It would just have been two people sitting down discussing a situation that took place.

Yet, we are living through a pandemic. That does change things. It has changed our landscape in a myriad of ways. It has added stress and anxiety to our lives. It has changed what school looks like. It has put tremendous strain on relationships. It has changed how we interact with each other. In short, nothing is like it ought to be.

I mulled the best way forward. Obviously, in person was not an option. Was it a Zoom Meeting or a Google Hangout? I didn't think so, based on the research from National Geographic. Our brains are trying to do too much virtually, and I was trying to keep this conversation reasonably low-key, while still discovering what the perspective of the other staff member was. I decided to go old-school and went with a phone call.

It seems so passe and even quaint. Not FaceTime, not FaceTime audio. Just ten numbers and push the green button.

I reached out via e-mail and set up a time to talk to the other staff member. When we connected, we each asked about the other's family, health, and wellness. After an acknowledgment of the beautiful weather for the three day weekend, I took a deep breath and asked about the interaction. What I heard from this staff member was nothing short of incredible.

"Oh boy, they got the worst of me that day. I was so upset, and they were the first person I saw. I'm sure I was not at my best, and I feel really badly about what happened. Do you think they would be open to an apology?"

I have been in educational leadership since 2003, and this is the first time I have had this happen to me. This is the first time I have not had to prod, poke, or steer the conversation. This is the first time I have heard someone acknowledge, from the beginning, how poorly they handled the situation. Finally, this is the first time I had had the other person offer to make an apology to the other when from the beginning, I thought one was appropriate.

Apologizing is one of the harder parts of being human. For the apology to feel authentic, the person needing to apologize must think that they truly made a mistake. Without that, the apology will, more often than not, feel empty to the person on the receiving end. As I glanced down at my notes for this conversation, asking for an apology was number four on the list I'd sketched out to guide me through this phone call. We'd gone from step 1 (asking about their perspective on the interaction) to step 4 immediately.

I was profuse with my praise for this individual. I spoke about their commitment to our profession of education, the example they are setting for others, and the ease with which they admitted their shortcomings in this particular situation. If more people could approach challenging situations like this, we would resolve our differences much more humanly. Honestly, if I could approach situations more like this staff member, I know My Family would appreciate it. I'm not always the best at admitting when I've made mistakes...

Despite the challenges of the current time we are living in, there are lessons that I want us to take away. This is one of them. I'm sure there's someone in your life who needs to hear these words. Please find that person this week. Please tell them you are sorry. The impact will be profound.

The words, however, are simple.

Photo courtesy of www.steemit.com

On Uncertainty

I will admit, I was one of those people. When this whole thing began to take hold of our state in the early part of March, I thought, "We will get through this, and we will get back to school in August, and we can start to address what we lost." Yet as I sit and type this blog post, I don't even know what school will look like in August.

That's a rabbit hole where I could go down. It's full of "what ifs" and "hows." There's a world of personal protective equipment, masks, and sanitization stations. There are conversations about physical distance, one-way hallways, and safety protocols. I can't go there yet.

So, where do I turn? To the things, I am certain about.

What do I know with 100% certainty? In my personal life, I know the love of My Wife, children, and family are certain. I know of dear friendships that have been maintained during this time and yearn to be replenished with less physical distance, more handshakes, and plenty of hugs.

And what do I have absolute clarity about in my professional world? That whenever we have a restart in education, we will have to make it about one thing and one thing only: relationships. Yes, we will have to transition back, and there will be assessments. There will be plans to remediate, plans to maintain, and plans to enrich our students' education. We will need to set goals, have conversations with parents or guardians, and work diligently together to achieve those goals.

But before all of that, we must re-establish our relationships with our students. The abruptness of our departure did not allow for the slow transition of winter to spring to the end of the school year. We lost the field trips, the quarter ends, and typical mileposts to the final days of school. Without little warning, our school year unceremoniously ended. And not only that, we have labored through emergency distance teaching, which is challenging (at best) for everyone involved, especially our students.

Know that I'm not at all quibbling with any of these decisions. The public health ramifications were and are clear. Given the lack of a vaccine, physical distance is the only way to stop this virus from transmitting. Until we know more about the virus itself, the antibodies, and the epidemiology, this is the responsible way forward. It's working in our state. According to Michael S. Pieciak, the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation, we have the lowest three-day and seven-day growth rates of the virus in the country (VT Digger, May 15).

And it can't be forever. At some point, our buildings will have children and adults back in them. There are models from other countries that are being considered. Our Agency of Education, in partnership with the Governor's Administration, is working to share guidance and parameters in the coming weeks. Public health officials are continuing to monitor the cases in our state and inform us on how we can best begin to consider education in the coming months. But as of today, we don't know what that will look like.

So what do we know? We know that no one ever chose to go into education as a profession for the paycheck. We know that it's not about June, July, and August, except for the skeptics. And we know that the choice to go into education was not for the glory. It was for one thing, and one thing only.

The choice to be a professional educator is made when one is hoping to find a path forward in service to students and their families. Period. That's it. That's the list.

Further, we know the only way that we can make a difference in the lives of our students and their families is through relationships. It was never about content, it was never about scores, it was never about essays, or projects, or dioramas. Do you know what most children worry about on the first day of school, each and every school year in this country? Will my teacher like me?

Education was about relationships on March 17, 2020, the last day before school dismissal in the state of Vermont.

Education is about relationships, as we navigate unchartered waters of emergency distance teaching.

Education will be about relationships, when school restarts again, no matter what it looks like.

About this, I am certain.

Photo courtesy of www.edutopia.org

Call Me By My First Name

This past week, I had the privilege of talking on the phone with my 6th-grade teacher. Let me explain...

Sheri Hefler is no longer teaching, she has a business called The Paint Tube. She uses Facebook, and I saw something that I wanted to get for my goddaughter. I e-mailed the store and inquired about the product I wanted. In the e-mail, I called her "Ms. Hefler," as that is how I knew her. When she responded, she included her phone number and insisted that I call her Sheri. I was not to call her Ms. Hefler anymore.

When we spoke on the phone, just the sound of her voice brought me back to her classroom and that year in my education. I had vivid memories of the room itself, we had a loft, and all my classmates as well. I remembered how Ms. Hefler would stand at the blackboard (yup a blackboard) with her back to us and say, "Excuse me," repeatedly without turning around to try to get us to stop talking.

I remembered that her dad died during that year, and the timing was early fall. Ms. Hefler didn't dress up for Halloween that year. But she still took pictures with all of us and had a genuine smile on her face.

I remember that her classroom management was centered around finances. We each had a transaction register (remember those), and when our behavior was worthy, we got a deposit into our account. When we did something that required redirection, money was deducted. Everyone was included.

As I listened to her talk, I remembered how safe I felt in her classroom. We had so much agency. Ms. Hefler would not let us "snitch" on each other - we had to handle disagreements with our classmates. She only stepped in if we came to her together.

Ms. Hefler's classroom was so welcoming. It was not perfect, nor was she. But she was human. On Day 1, she introduced herself and told us her first name. She told us where she shopped and that if we saw her out in the world, she wanted us to say hi. It was clear that relationships were the cornerstone of Ms. Hefler's work.

I will fully admit, I don't remember a substantial amount about the content that I learned that year. I do remember watching the Challenger launch and disaster in real-time because that year, we were focusing on space. I mentioned the transaction register to her, and I remember learning the steps for reconciling a bank statement. I do distinctly and palpably remember how I felt in that room and how Ms. Hefler made me (and I suspect all my classmates) feel.

After our call, she followed up with a beautiful e-mail and even sent along these pictures of my classmates and me in the Penny Power magazine from a jeans test we did. Recognize anyone?

So why does all this really matter? When I introduce myself to students, particularly younger ones, often the question is asked of me, "What does a superintendent do?" I struggled to answer that for the first several years of my superintendency. What I've learned, what I believe, and what I say now when a student asks me that question is this:

It is my job to make sure that every single student who comes to school feels safe, welcomed, and included so that he or she can learn to the best of their ability. 

Lessons I learned well from Sheri Hefler, my sixth-grade teacher.

We're on a first-name basis now.

Photo courtesy of www.edutopia.com

Teacher Appreciation... From Afar

Since the middle of March, nothing has felt normal this year. Not teaching, not shopping, and not learning. We can't go out with a friend for a cup of coffee, we can't go out for date night, we can't even shake hands. And while in Vermont, there is some relaxation in the manufacturing and construction industries, we are entering into our last full month of the academic year, and it still looks nothing like it did in August or in February.

The first week of May is when we celebrate and appreciate our teachers for everything they do. This graphic from a tweet @NicholasFerroni sent sums up how I feel: 

Please know that this is the absolute truth. I did not think teachers could work harder than they already did. But emergency distance teaching is so much harder than what teachers do in person every day. During one of my virtual office hours, I had a teacher nearly in tears as they explained how impossible it was to monitor students' work from afar. This teacher (like me and many others) would walk around the classroom, checking in on literally every student while working on an activity or lesson. That's simply not possible anymore. There are not enough hours in the day to do this.

I had another worried sick about a child whose family was not responding to phone calls or e-mail messages. The child has a unique family dynamic, and this teacher was not sure which family member the child was staying with. As this teacher swallowed hard, they told me how the child would regularly come to school and would share in the course of the day whose house they came from and which house they would be going home to. Until this pandemic, this teacher did not realize how important that small interaction was to the peace of mind for the well being of this student.

And in case those examples don't move you to recognize the enormous undertaking this kind of teaching is for our educators, consider this article from National Geographic. There's a great deal of science that is discussed in the piece, which I encourage you all to read, but it boils down to this: "virtual interactions can be extremely hard on the brain." This is all we have to connect with our students.

The work that educators do in 2020 is already challenging. In St. Johnsbury, we see the social-emotional lives of our students and families regularly impacted by the opioid crisis in the Northeast Kingdom, by poverty, and by the fragmentation of our world. Personally, I've witnessed children acting out in ways that have stunned me. Like many school districts in Vermont, we, too, have hired more support personnel (social workers, counselors, and board-certified behavior specialists) than direct instructors to meet the needs of our students. We need these essential professionals to help our students grow from the trauma they're experiencing so they can access their education fully.

Teaching was already challenging, and it was already taxing the minds and hearts of teachers before this pandemic impacted our world. I, like many other educational leaders, parents, and community members, looked forward to celebrating teachers this week, so they could tangibly feel how much their efforts meant to us. We can't do that this year when I believe teachers need it the most.

So if I'm only relegated to words my dear St. Johnsbury teachers and paraprofessionals, please know this:

I see you. I am grateful. You awe me with your dedication and commitment to our students and their families. Not even a global health crisis can deter you. I am honored to be your superintendent.

Thank you.

Photo courtesy of www.redbooth.com