Current and former students in Winooski, Vermont’s only majority-minority school district, are demanding their schools enact sweeping racial justice reforms including changing the district’s hiring and curriculum to better reflect the school’s demographics.
The group, Winooski Students for Anti-Racism, is also asking the district to create a Racial Truth and Reconciliation Commission to collect testimonials from students and families about instances of bias and racism in the district. And they want a permanent anti-racism committee where students can report incidents of bias and discrimination.
Student organizers presented a list of eight demands to the school board on Wednesday evening during a meeting held over Zoom, and told board members that white district leaders had repeatedly failed to meet the racially diverse student body’s needs and ignored the covert – and overt – racism students had endured.
Indra Acharya, a 2014 graduate of the district, said he had been racially profiled by administrators and subjected to daily bag and body checks in the principal’s office while in high school.
“For 30 days, you all searched my body,” he said.
Abdikhafar Yussuf, another alumni, said he had no one to turn to – save Acharya – when, at an away game in 2013, a player on the opposing soccer team had called him and his teammates “monkeys doing tricks.”
In the chat running alongside the video call, Acharya chimed in: “Brother, we talked about these in our track field runs. That’s what we had to endure.”
So, too, did Hiba Laaroussi, a student representative on Winooski’s school board who plays soccer.
“
We were called brownies,” she wrote.
Yussuf said he didn’t begrudge white educators and administrators for being ill-equipped to understand his experiences. But he said it was still incumbent on them to do better.
“Because of your skin color you will never have to go through this trauma. And I don’t blame you – you’re born with this. But I will blame you if you don’t take action right now,” he said.
Winooski is a refugee resettlement site, and about 55% of the district’s students are non-white. A little under 900 students attend Winooski schools, and a significant portion of the student body originally hail from Somalia, Nepal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The nationwide Black Lives Matter movement has once again put the spotlight on police, and the officers who are regularly posted inside the country’s hallways are also coming under scrutiny. The group in Winooski also wants administrators to get rid of the district’s school resource officers and replace them with trauma specialists.
The students also want a fully funded ethnic studies program in place by the beginning of 2022-23 school year, and demand that the district commit to a teaching staff where at least 15% of educators are people of color within three years.
Andy Siki, who graduated this spring from the high school, echoed several peers when he told the school board a nearly all-white teaching staff meant students had few role models to identify with.
“We can’t look forward to becoming successful if we have an old white guy teaching us or if we have someone that doesn’t look like us so we can picture ourselves,” he said.
A growing body of evidence indicates that teachers of color can significantly boost outcomes for non-white students. One recent Johns Hopkins study found that the chances of low-income Black boys dropping out of high school fell by 39% if they were assigned at least one Black teacher between grades 3 and 5. Another showed that non-Black teachers have significantly lower expectations of Black students than do Black teachers.
“It cannot be overstated how important it is. And I see that every day,” Mugabo Thierry Uwilingiyimana, the lone teacher of color at Winooski’s middle and high school, said in an interview before the school board meeting.
The former Rwandan refugee, who grew up in upstate New York, said the all-white spaces in which he had gone to school – and later work – had often required him to erase those parts of himself that didn’t conform to the dominant culture. When his students are policed in the same way now, they know he can relate.
“Students look to me sort of with the expectation that surely I understand,” he said. “This one Congolese girl saying ‘Why don’t they want us to be African? You know that we’re loud.’”
The group also wants the district to hire a consultant or expert to host biannual workshops educating parents and students about their rights under special education and civil rights laws. And they are asking the schools to establish a mentorship program for English-language learners that would match students with community mentors.
The board ultimately voted unanimously to recognize the demands, and promised to address them one-by-one at a meeting scheduled for next Wednesday. One school board member, Alex Yin, even offered that the board issue a formal apology to students, and particularly Acharya.
Mike Decarreau, the board’s chair, said he had lived in Winooski his entire life and was “struck” by the student’s testimony.
“This was probably one of the most powerful evenings to understand the viewpoint from the students who have just come out of our system – or are still in,” he said.
Margaret Bass, another school board member, urged her peers to make firm commitments as quickly as possible.
“The testimony tonight has spoken to years and years of longstanding abuse and racism,” she said. “The fact that nothing, nothing has happened in all this time is stunning to me. So I would not trust to do anything more than to give lip service. I would not trust us. They have no reason to trust us.”
