Officials at Niles Township High School District 219 said they aim to provide district faculty with diversity training over the next three years in hopes it will enable educators to provide a welcoming space to discuss issues of race and ethnicity in the classroom.
Last December, the district’s Board of Education approved a roughly $20,000 contract with Pacific Education Group (PEG), a San Francisco-based company that engages “in sustained partnerships with educational organizations to transform beliefs, behaviors, and results so people of all races can achieve at their highest levels and live their most empowered and powerful lives,” according to PEG’s website.
Five staff members from the district—a combination of teachers, administrators, union members and special educators—will receive training through PEG, said District 219’s director of equity and English language learner programs, Corrie Wallace. Wallace is one of five faculty members who will receive this training.
Roughly 85 staff members who responded to a recent district survey indicated they had attended a two-day seminar hosted by PEG, entitled Beyond Diversity, sometime in the last couple years, Wallace said.
“The idea is once we complete our training, the five of us will be able to deliver the two-day diversity training within the district,” she said. This means staff members won’t have to travel to receive the training and the district’s PEG affiliates will be able to tailor the curriculum to fit their needs, Wallace said.
Glenn Singleton, founder of PEG, said his company typically doesn’t engage in what he called “affiliate development” until all board and administrative leaders within a district have received Beyond Diversity training. He said District 219 is a unique situation and he’s become more flexible in the way the program is offered given what he calls “a pattern of resistance” to “developing consciousness and literacy in race” in the Chicago area.
The training itself “focuses on race, specifically” and “is very much focused on racial inequality within education … we know that can be very intense for people, very uncomfortable and (Beyond Diversity training) allows people to work through the discomfort,” Wallace said.
Singleton said the program teaches “educators how to see racial inequity in policy, programming and practices that are transpiring in school systems every day.”
A slew of district educators, all of whom had attended a Beyond Diversity seminar, implored the board at their meeting last December to approve the contract, citing the personal and professional benefits they had experienced as a result of the seminar.
Among the advocates for PEG’s curriculum were two Niles West High School students: 17-year-old senior Justina Jude and 16-year-old junior Claire Embil.
Both students are leaders of a relatively new club at the high school called Students Organized Against Racism (SOAR). Jude and Embil have first-hand experience working with PEG; the two students performed a spoken word piece at PEG’s National Summit for Courageous Conversation in Baltimore, Maryland last October where Jude was also honored with an award.
The students, in a recent interview, said they can tell the difference between an educator who has received diversity training and one who has not.
Jude, an Indian American, said she had a teacher “who did not realize that racism is not just a black and white issue but it also pertains to people who are Asian, who are Indian, who are Middle Eastern.”
Embil, whose mother is white and whose father emigrated to the U.S. from Ghana, said she’s the only African American student in both of her AP classes and that this circumstance results in awkward situations. She recounted a time when a teacher asked her to weigh in on slavery “because I’m black and they automatically assumed I have experience with that.”
Had this teacher received training through PEG or PEG affiliates, Embil said they would not have said such a thing to her.
Another benefit of the training, Wallace said, is helping equip educators with the tools and knowledge they need to discuss incidents of racism, and recently, Islamophobia, occurring outside the classroom.
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“Our students tell us, and I talk to them and other adults who talk with them, that (at school) everything is fine, but in the real world, and what they see on the news is not fine and it’s our job and responsibility to prepare them for the real world,” she said.
Singleton echoed the critical importance of melding curriculum instruction with students’ own experiences of the world at large.
“When a teacher doesn’t resonate or find importance around what’s happening in the lives of students, then they are going to miss these students and the students are going to disengage from the institution,” he said.
Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.