Sam Gurwitt Photo
Carmen Parker (standing in back) with husband Josh.
After finding out that her daughter’s teacher had been placed on administrative leave for planning a play that would have black children playing slaves, Carmen Parker had a message for the Hamden School District: The problem is not the teacher, it’s the system.
Parker, whose daughter is a fifth-grader at the West Woods School, showed up to the Hamden Board of Education’s Equity Committee Tuesday evening to deliver that message.
The room was packed with parents and community members who showed up to express frustration and demand accountability from the board after a teacher tried to teach a lesson about slavery by having students act it out.
Last week, Parker’s ten-year-old daughter, who is biracial, came home and told Parker that she had been cast as Enslaved African 2 in a play in class. The play, called “A Triangle of Trade,” is a read-aloud about the trans-Atlantic slave trade published in a 2003 Scholastic collection of short instructional plays about colonial America. Parker called the school to express her concern, and the teacher canceled the play. She did not get an apology from anyone, she said, until she met with district administrators on Friday. Read a full previous story about that here.
On Monday, the teacher, who is white, was placed on administrative leave.
“The teacher in question has been placed on leave with pay, without prejudice, pending the outcome of [an] investigation,” said district Director of Human Resources Gary Highsmith.
Director of Human Resources Gary Highsmith:Teacher has been placed on paid leave.
Blaming the teacher, is not the solution, Parker argued.
“Teachers are not the scapegoat for a system that is clearly broken and has been suppressing minority voices and the voices of those with disabilities,” she told the committee. “I would like to support [the teacher] to learn how to make a better community for our minority students.”
She read an email she had written to the teacher. It began by saying her daughter loves the teacher, and had made a birthday gift for her, which she had been unable to give to the teacher because she was not there on Tuesday.
“Hamden is trying to scapegoat you and I will not stand for it. With all my heart, I want to support educators, not make them terrified of minority children,” the email read. “I will not let you get fired for working in a system that never supported you in the first place.”
Parker then gave a list of demands she asked the board implement. She said she wants the district to hold the administrators who dismissed her concerns accountable, especially Principal Dan Levy. The district must find a way to support the teacher, she said. It must also create a system for reporting and quickly responding to incidents, she said.
Parker is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale. She said that in medicine, there is a system where people can report an incident, a committee reviews it, triages it for severity, and then the hospital implements a plan to fix the problem. She suggested that model as a way of dealing with complaints about personnel in the future. Finally, she said, the district needs to get the input of minority leaders when it creates curricula.
Teachers Need Support
Board Chair Arturo Perez-Cabello and Member Roxana Walker-Canton.
Once public comment had closed, the committee launched into hours of updates on various initiatives aimed at increasing equity across the district and diversity in the curriculum. Director of Language Arts Julia McNamee described the many books by authors of color that students are now reading. Director of Social Studies Jennifer Vienneau discussed the work she’s doing to improve the social studies curriculum. Assistant Superintendent Chris Melillo described the many professional development trainings the district is giving its teachers in diversity. Highsmith talked about his efforts to recruit minority teachers. Hamden School Diversity Advisory Committee Facilitator Sarah Medina Camiscoli discussed the committee she will lead to discuss diversity with community members in the district and compile a report the district can use as it moves forward with its 3R redistricting plan.
Hamden’s student body is about 60 percent students of color, while its teaching staff is 90 percent white. Parker acknowledged that achieving diversity will take a long time, and that first, the district must focus on helping the teachers it currently has.
Doing so in a substantive way, however, may require more than just setting goals and offering occasional professional development.
Connecticut College Associate Professor of History David Canton said the district should enlist the help of local scholars and experts who can instruct teachers in how to teach topics like black history and other materials they don’t feel comfortable with. He said it will require devoting real time and money to the effort.
Kathleen Kiely: Support teachers more.
Adding to the curriculum requires supporting teachers better, said Ridge Hill Teacher Kathleen Kiely. If you want teachers to start teaching with a new curriculum, “you need to be able to support that with your budget,” she said. The district has increased its curricular demands on teachers, she said, but has not provided the materials required to meet its new demands. That has left the burden on teachers to find and create material with time that they do not have.
In order to vet new materials, teachers need time, she said. But while the district has increased its demands on its teachers, it has decreased the time they have to prepare for class. She is lucky, she said, because she has time outside of school to read through new materials. That wouldn’t be possible if she had three kids. She added that she has the privilege of knowing where to look for materials. Not every teacher has that.
She said she was just at a meeting where the teacher who assigned the slave play in class asked for more resources. “We are trying to do way too much without really investing in it,” she said.
It is amazing how much affirmation teachers require and the need to hear that they do "A+" work at all times and, yet, they require support to not be racist when they have a majority of students of color in the seats before them.
And wasn't a Hamden school official videotaped have a racist meltdown at a grocery store in East Haven? Perhaps it is time to evaluate the tendencies of all white employees in Hamden's school system.