Tags
San Diego Unified Board of Education, San Diego Unified School District, San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Cindy Marten, SDUSD Trustee Richard Barrera
Here are some interesting articles we received and discovered this past week…
ENJOY!
California School District Among Latest to Change Board Elections to Better Reflect Diversity of Community
More than 190 school districts statewide have switched how they elect board members
Quote from Article:
Across California, more than 190 school districts are electing board members to represent specific geographic areas in hopes of improving the representation of diverse communities.
The West Contra Costa Unified district in the Bay Area is one of the most recent to make this change after it faced a lawsuit that alleged “at large” elections in the district that serves about 29,000 students in Richmond and surrounding areas did not give African-American and Latino voters adequate representation on the five-member board.
Richmond resident Linda Ruiz-Lozito sued West Contra Costa Unified last year, claiming that the election of school board members from the entire district violated the 2001 California Voting Rights Act because some minorities lacked the voting power to elect board members that represent their interests.
She also argued that winners came from the district’s affluent areas with significant financial backing from special interest groups. She hopes smaller voting districts will make it easier for candidates to run successful grass-roots campaigns. Smaller voting districts should help level the playing field, she said, because each candidate will only need to reach about 25,000 voters instead of 125,000 voters, which could be accomplished with less money.
And…
“Now, they’re working for kids and voters and not the special interests that fund your campaign if you run at-large,” Rafferty said of board members who will be elected based on the new voting map.
Most of the other districts in the state that have converted to district-area elections did so without entering into costly litigation. For the San Ramon Valley school district, the county’s Committee on School District reorganization approved its proposed maps on March 11 and the California State Board of Education approved a waiver on Wednesday that allows the district to convert from at-large elections in 2020. The district will be divided into five voting districts and each will elect its own representative.
Between 2008 and 2017, the proportion of Latino board members in school districts that switched from at-large to by-district elections went up 64 percent, Kousser said. Meanwhile, in districts that remained at-large, Latino board members increased by 15 percent.
District Deeds Synopsis:
“Across California, more than 190 school districts are electing board members to represent specific geographic areas in hopes of improving the representation of diverse communities.”
Unlike those “more than 190 school districts” in California, the partisan San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) and San Diego City Council blocked all efforts for real representation for the poorest communities in the 2018 election by not even allowing “by district” elections to be on the ballot.
We exposed Board of Education Trustee “Tricky Dick Barrera”, who has been elected by well-funded special interest groups, in San Diego City Council “Voters Rights” Democrats Vote Against San Diego Unified Community “Voters Rights”
In that article, we quoted the self-serving logic of Tricky Dick that actually was the OPPOSITE of what his profile states on the SDUSD website – the claim that he stands for “equity and excellence for all public school students”.
“Currently we have five school board districts. Three of the districts are roughly north of interstate eight yet the majority of students live south of there so this proposal would in fact disenfranchise voters where the majority of students live that have no ability to elect the school board.” – SDUSD Trustee Richard Barrera
A ridiculous and ignorant comment by Tricky Dick.
District Deeds Deciphering Barrera’s twisted logic:
“If you allow School Board Districts south of Highway Eight (like Lincoln and Morse Clusters) to elect their own Trustee through “Vote by District” they would decide not to vote because they couldn’t vote for the University City Trustee.” – District Deeds Decipher of Barrera Statement
Tricky Dick Barrera is a joke…a joke that injures Students and Families in District D every day.
What a miserable excuse for an elected official.
My District Wanted to Build Trust, So We Started a Black Student Union
Quote from Article:
I was raised in Round Rock, Texas, the only Black student in my elementary school. I remember how hard my parents fought to get me and my brother into accelerated math, how my mother was the only parent of color on the school’s steering committee, and yet I was brought up to believe that race didn’t matter. Today, I teach marketing at the same high school I attended. Only 9 percent of students and 4 percent of teachers are Black district-wide.
In 2012, as a new teacher, I recognized what I believed to be a lack of positive campus culture. Many students referred to the school as “ratchet Round Rock.” Round Rock High School celebrated its centennial in 2013, and while our school buildings were not quite 100 years old, it sure felt that way to some students. Our campus has since been beautifully renovated, but back then some students didn’t feel their physical environment was at the same level as other schools in the district.
At the same time, the same small percentage of students participated in multiple activities, while much of the student body seemed disengaged. Although I taught only a few Black students I started to notice that students of color across campus often sought refuge in my room.
And…
Then, in the summer of 2017, another student, Micah Moore, approached me. She had attended a women’s leadership camp and left wanting to form a Black Student Union (BSU), an organization that had not existed at Round Rock High since a six-month attempt back in 1982. Micah needed a faculty sponsor. I agreed immediately and brought an additional sponsor on board.
“This space is open to everyone, it just prioritizes Blackness for 50 minutes at a time,” Micah said at the first BSU meeting, to a full room of students. At our weekly community circle, we cover hot topics like the recent college admissions scandal. In our first year, we printed 217 posters of lesser-known heroes in Black history and provided one per classroom in our school. We plan viewings and discussions for films like “Black Panther” and “The Hate U Give” and bring in guest speakers like Rodney Page, the first Black head coach of a collegiate team in the South. We partner with organizations like Texas Appleseed, Undoing Racism Round Rock and the Round Rock Black Parent Association.
We are raising a new crop of leaders. Students have advocated at the district level to hire more teachers of color and more counselors than cops, and at the state level to address disproportionate discipline. Parents of color have come together to learn and support. When students were not being provided information about Historically Black Colleges and Universities at school, parents decided to put on an HBCU fair to fill the gap. There are now five active BSUs across our district and several more campuses who are interested in forming their own Black Student Union.
My involvement has fundamentally changed how I think about race and inclusion in our education system. Black students need to see people who look like them in positions of authority and white students need to see people who do not look like them in positions of authority.
District Deeds Synopsis:
What a great idea!
Unfortunately a great idea that the Elementary School Superintendent (ESS) Cindy Marten “White Woman Mafia” would never allow.
To be sure we searched the SDUSD website for ANY reference to Black Student Unions:
As expected…nowhere to be found!
ESS Marten and her cronies are afraid to empower students and families of color because ESS Marten and her cronies are afraid of the truth that students and families of color speak like this:
And this…
It’s time for the totally incompetent Marten to go.
A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions
A primer on the impact of implicit biases in schools and how they can be expressed by students and faculty.
Quote from Article:
Like everybody else, I possess unconscious biases about people that are contingent on how they talk and look. Such instant judgments, called implicit bias, involve “automatically categorizing people according to cultural stereotypes,” Sandra Graham and Brian Lowery write in “Priming Unconscious Racial Stereotypes About Adolescent Offenders.”
The consequences of implicit bias in schools are both powerful and measurable. A 2017 study by Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, for example, found that “math teachers perceive their classes to be too difficult for Latino and black students, and English teachers perceive their classes to be too difficult for all non-white students.” In English, these biases lower the affected students’ “expected years of schooling by almost a third of a year…. The effect of being underestimated by math teachers is −0.20 GPA points.”
Implicit bias also leads to inequitable punishments for students of color. A 2012 investigation found that “17 percent, or one out of every six black schoolchildren enrolled in K–12, were suspended at least once,” compared with “one in 20 (5 percent) for whites.” Black girls ages 5 to 14 have been viewed by adults as “less innocent” than white girls of the same age, which may be a factor in the disparity in suspension rates, according to a 2017 report by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality.
And…
In a 2007 article for American Psychologist, Sue and six other researchers identified three categories of racial microaggressions:
- A microassault is a “verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name-calling, avoidant behavior, or purposeful discriminatory actions.” Example: Students wear Confederate flag clothing.
- A microinsult is insensitive communication that demeans someone’s racial identity, signaling to people of color that “their contributions are unimportant.” Example: A teacher corrects the grammar only of Hispanic children.
- A microinvalidation involves negating or ignoring the “psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person of color.” Example: An Asian American student from the U.S. is asked where she was born, which conveys the message that she is not really an American.
Over the years, the concept has been extended beyond race to include similar events and experiences of other marginalized groups, including women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, etc.
And…
And…
Once during a faculty meeting, I witnessed an educator tell a white male colleague that he’d committed a microaggression. At the time, I didn’t know precisely what that meant. Nobody talked for a few uncomfortable seconds until someone changed the topic. Calling the man out in the moment was justified. After all, it’s everybody’s job to make diversity-sensitive norms explicit. But that moment was also a dialogue killer. Had there been previous conversations among the entire faculty about microaggressions, perhaps the entire incident could have been avoided.
Thoughtful conversations are also halted by whataboutism (“Why do they get to use racist words and we don’t?”), name-calling (“snowflakes,” “thought police”), and the unfortunate formula “strategic denial plus conjunction plus racist comment” (“I’m not racist, but…”).
How do you have a meaningful classroom dialogue about microaggressions? The trick is to plan a conversation on this topic before microaggressions ignite tensions. Set discussion ground rules, like “commit to learning, not debating,” and then show examples of microaggressions as a prelude to discussing why they’re hurtful.
District Deeds Synopsis:
Do ANY of our readers think that ESS Marten and Tricky Dick Barrera have the aptitude, empathy or the ethics to even understand implicit bias and microaggression?
Marten, Barrera and the rest of their useless Board of Education and Senior Staff minions have no empathy and don’t care to understand the EXPLICIT bias and MACRO Aggression in the racism, sexism, assault and bullying in their district policies that only serve the special interest groups that get them elected and appointed.
Marten, Barrera and the rest of their useless Board of Education and Senior Staff minions are BLIND to anything that doesn’t provide them money. power or an ego boost.
Sad and disgusting…SDUSD Students, Families, Teachers and other Stakeholders deserve much, much better.
Now for our Quote of the Week:
“Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’ – Neil deGrasse Tyson
Have a great week!!!
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IF
- Your family has been injured by the San Diego Unified School District, go to the District Deeds Complaint Forms page to find instructions to fight for your Civil Rights!
- YOU ARE TIRED OF THE COVER UPS AND LIES BY SUPT. CINDY MARTEN…
Please Click the Link Below and sign the Petition Today and READ the COMMENTS to Support the REMOVAL of Marten by SDUSD Stakeholders!
District Deeds 