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Starting a conversation: Houghton alums rally support for antiracism programs

Photo courtesy of Finn Storer Finn Storer, a 2016 graduate of Houghton High School, is one of a group of four alumni looking to help the school address racism and social justice.

HOUGHTON — Four recent alumni of Houghton-Portage Township Schools have launched an initiative to get the district to add more education on racial discrimination and social justice.

Three of the graduates — Boris Busov, Adeline Grier-Welch and Cassandra Van Dam — spoke to the Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Houghton in a virtual forum Sunday.

The three 2012 graduates, along with 2016 graduate Finn Storer, began talking after the murder of George Floyd last year, Grier-Welch said. They wondered if their alma mater had done anything since they graduated to discuss racism.

The students sent an email to the superintendent and school board. Both were responsive, but said with the district dealing with the more immediate challenges of COVID, it hadn’t been looked at district-wide, Grier-Welch said.

To gauge the interest of community members in addressing issues, they began drafting an open letter to the school board. It called on the district to add an advisory board of faculty, staff, alumni, current students, and community stakeholders to create an action plan. More than 500 community members have signed.

“That shows us this is something the community cares about and would like to see,” Grier-Welch said.

The letter laid out a minimum of four items the plan should address:

– Revise the student handbook to include hateful language in any form used by students, faculty, and staff as a Level 2 offense with an emphasis on education surrounding the offense. Hateful language should be defined at a bare minimum as language that is racist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and/or sexist.

– In keeping with principles of restorative justice, the emphasis would be on education rather than punishment.

“If someone does engage in hateful language, then there would be a system set up for education surrounding the impact of what that language meant and how that has affected the person on the receiving end,” Grier-Welch said.

– Incorporate and highlight the work of Black authors, artists, and thinkers in mandatory school curriculum, particularly in history and language arts classes.

– Encourage discussions of racism, unconscious bias, and white privilege through lesson planning, schoolwide events such as documentary viewings and assemblies, and annual anti-racism training for students, faculty, and staff.

– Teach an in-depth, unfiltered version of the history of race and racism in the United States covering topics such as slavery in the Americas, the Jim Crow Era, the Civil Rights movement, the war on drugs, police brutality, and how history has informed racial inequity in our modern day institutions.

The alumni stressed they supported and valued their interactions with Houghton school and staff. They had talked with some of their former teachers, who shared some of the work they had done, Busov said.

“All three of us, Finn included, really value and look back on our education in a positive way,” he said. “It informed the kind of people that we are today.”

In addition to its letter, the group solicited comments and feedback from other alumni, which they also submitted to the district. The group said they had seen instances of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and anti-Semitism during their time at the school; many of the respondents shared their own experiences.

“We recognize that racism is not coming from the school,” Van Dam said. “It is not necessarily the fault of the school that racism and bias exist in our society. But it exists. We see it right now. And we believe that it is the responsibility of our public education system to interrupt that harmful behavior and to equip students with the tools to identify when they are perpetuating racism or any other forms of discrimination, and to be able to interrupt that.”

The group called for more training and resources to support administrators and teachers to deal with those instances.

“It can be overwhelming, just speaking as myself, a white educator, to recognize the impact racism and bias has on other folks in our community and to be able to interrupt that it is really important to have that training and resources to make sure you’re going about it the right way,” said Van Dam, a garden-based educator at a food justice non-profit in Ypsilanti.

Schools should also equip students to deal with the wider world, they said. Grier-Welch recalled a survey in high school showing that about half of Houghton students left the area to pursue education or work. While racism had been covered in their schooling, the focus on slavery and the civil rights movement had given the impression of racism as a past-tense issue, while ignoring the continuing effects of things like redlining, Grier-Welch said.

“This would include having an emphasis and celebration on BIPOC (Black, indigenous and people of color) work as well as providing students with skills and tools to address their own bias,” she said.

The group members were careful to acknowledge the limits of their own experience. They hoped to partner further with educators and the district to see how those actions could be worked into the curriculum. And as people who no longer live in the area, they are also trying to form a working group including current community members who can continue the work locally.

Community members participating in the Zoom commended the group’s efforts, and made suggestions on ways to expand or improve their plans.

Jan Dalquist, whose children attended Houghton in the 1970s, had also been a librarian at Suomi College, now Finlandia University. She recalled the way Suomi included information about women not just in history or English, but across the curriculum. Students learned about how “Peter Rabbit” author Beatrix Potter did important studies on the interactions between mosses and lichens — published under a man’s name.

“Look at your musicians, your art teachers and your librarians, because they can inject into their teaching these little bits of knowledge that otherwise the kids would not know,” she said.

Wayne Gersie, vice president for diversity and inclusion at Michigan Technological University, said an emphasis on training can encourage a checked-box mindset. Coaching, on the other hand, conveys ongoing work that can be difficult, and allows for people to make mistakes while encouraging them to continue.

He applauded the group’s approach of reaching out to influencers within the school system and having them take ownership.

“Having done diversity coaching for a long time, that’s the key,” he said. “If you talk down to people and say, ‘This is what you need to do,’ they get defensive. But the approach you’re taking can work.”

The open letter is available at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeJZazXrfYujKJAZEI0wrzev3MGFBPRY3h8Qo0A9FoMgzeu_w/viewform.

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