Mahomet-Seymour alumni ask district to address racism, Hall releases statement

*Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect a more accurate timeline of communication after receiving additional information from Mahomet-Seymour Superintendent Lindsey Hall. As of Sunday morning, it was understood that the letter Hall sent was only to parents; when in fact, she sent a similar letter to staff on June 5.

By Dani Tietz
dani@mahometnews.com

Hundreds of Mahomet-Seymour alumni and current students are pleading with the Mahomet-Seymour School District to step up to the plate and join the discussion on race issues in an open letter to Superintendent Lindsey Hall, Mahomet-Seymour School Board members and Administrators. 

The letter is organized by an anonymous group, and has made rounds on social media platforms over the weekend.

It states, “Having reviewed the district website, each school’s website, and various district social media platforms including Superintendent Dr. Lindsey Hall’s Twitter account, it is evident that Mahomet-Seymour has not acknowledged the recent tragedy and civil unrest of the nation. 

“It is disappointing that a school district which expects its graduates to “become productive and creative citizens,” “communicate effectively through the written and spoken word,” and “…recognize the need for diversity” has so far chosen not to put those essential skills into practice itself regarding such an urgent matter.”

Hall first wrote to staff on Friday, saying, “The events of the past two weeks or so, including and since the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, have been heartbreaking, staggering, and infuriating.”

She released a similar public statement Sunday morning through the district’s school-wide email system and Facebook page.

“The violence that included and has followed his homicide, in many cases overshadowing the peaceful protests that were taking place, has been challenging to watch and to try to attempt to understand and process. 

“Personally, I struggle with finding the adjectives to describe everything that I have watched and felt, and there is no escaping the constant recycling of news and the replaying of the most violent acts against others. I felt it important to reach out to both our staff and families to address these recent events and also extend information to you about the plans we have for addressing the important issues regarding race and other aspects of diversity that face us locally and as a nation.”

Hall wrote that prior to mid-March, the Mahomet-Seymour School District, including the Director of Instruction Nicole Rummel, building principals and the district’s leadership team had put together a “fairly extensive plan” for diversity training for staff. According to the email, Hall said that the district would have partnered with the University of Illinois to facilitate training and conversation. 

“Those plans have only been temporarily delayed—we will get back on track with everything,” Hall wrote. “However, I know that everyone understands that the pandemic, and the extensive planning that took place and still continues related to COVID-19, has taken precedence over pretty much everything else in our school district since mid-March.”

The plan was to build on the restorative practices that the high school uses and the responsive classroom training at the Pre-K to eighth grade level. 

“This has laid a foundation for future diversity trainings and conversations,” Hall said. “These practices are rooted in research surrounding social justice, equity, inclusiveness and community building. In addition to the future trainings for our staff, we have planned several meetings with parents, and the formation of a district-wide diversity committee, as well as taking a deeper dive to closely examine our curriculum and curricular materials.”

That is precisely what two parents: Susan Jackson and Maggie Kinnamon asked for during a board meeting in November. Kinnamon said that her children have witnessed racial jokes and slurs in the Mahomet-Seymour School District, and asked for a racial equity team to be formed.

Susan Jackson, whose family has lived in Mahomet for two years, said, “Our experiences as a bi-racial family regarding race continually impact our feelings of safety, my children’s developing racial identities and have caused us to question whether this community has a place for us. I could share the countless things we have experienced, but it would be too heartbreaking and take too long.”

Instead of focusing her time on those stories, Jackson said that educating all children, especially white children, to address racism directly in the school system.

“We must prepare our children to engage in meaningful ways with the diverse world community so that they can experience the richness that exists outside of this small town,” she said. 

Jackson had gathered ideas from the community. She echoed the need for a racial equity team, while also suggesting using resources for staff training for racial bias, a diverse staff, making sure that history and literature classes include diverse perspectives and texts and starting a secondary language class in the elementary schools.

During Mahomet-Seymour’s October 2, 2017 board meeting, parent Jennifer Tee stood before the board, asking them to release a statement on a racial slur that was uttered by a Mahomet-Seymour parent during Central’s Marching band performance at the Eastern Illinois University’s Marching Band competition. 

The board did not address the issue.

Hall’s letter to the community on Sunday said that Mahomet-Seymour is no different than other places in the world that has work to do in order to ensure that educators provide students with a supportive, “inclusive, warm, safe and caring environment for every student” in the district.

Part of that, in her opinion, was to hire a School Resource Officer. Hall said that as “conversations in our nation recently have centered around the unlawful and horrible actions of some law enforcement personnel,” she felt it was important that the community understand that the role of the school resource officer. 

The intergovernmental agreement that was signed in 2018 outlined that the SRO was to “establish a trusting channel of communication with students, parents and teachers,” “serve as a positive role model to instill in students; good moral standards, good judgment, respect for other students and a sincere concern for the school community,” “promote citizen awareness of the law to enable students to become better informed and effective citizens, while empowering students with the knowledge of law enforcement efforts and obligations regarding enforcement, as well as, consequences for violations of the law,” and “serve as a confidential source of counseling for students and parents/families concerning law-related problems they face as well as providing information on community resources available to them.”

According to Hall, the Mahomet-Seymour’s position has been to address racism and racial diversity alongside diversity in sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, faith, ethnicity, among other topics.

“Public schools are uniquely and powerfully positioned to make a positive impact and bring about change by choosing to address, talk about, and most importantly, listen to issues of race, justice and equity,” Hall wrote. “But, it can and likely will be more challenging and difficult for us to talk about race as a majority-white school district and community. That doesn’t mean we should back away from this.”

The alumni letter takes a different perspective to how Mahomet-Seymour School has operated in the past while agreeing that the topic of race should not be something that educators should stray away from.  

“While we value the public education we received and lessons we learned, we cannot ignore the curriculum gaps and harmful pedagogical practices which also accompanied our education at Mahomet Seymour,” the alumni write. 

“Our K-12 education did not prepare us to recognize, acknowledge, or engage with the current and historical social injustices in our society, nor were we prepared to enter a diverse, global workforce. Additionally, various lesson plans, assignments, and the framing of historical events and timelines of our nation have further contributed, likely unintentionally but with a negative impact nonetheless, to the social injustices of our society. 

“While it is true that Mahomet and the surrounding communities have historically been, and continue to be, predominately white, there is no excuse for the District to not engage students in meaningful, developmentally appropriate education about power, race, and privilege.”

The open letter said that they continue to be concerned that current students will leave the halls of Mahomet-Seymour with the same educational deficiencies. 

The group calls on the district to take several concrete actions to address both the current political climate while also implementing immediate changes to ensure that students receive the historical education they deserve.

The petition demands the following steps:

I) Respond appropriately to the killing of George Floyd and the greater Black Lives Matter movement

While this would largely be a symbolic gesture, silence sends a message. It is not sufficient to not be racist; one must be anti-racist. The silence from MS-CUSD#3 is indicative of passive acceptance and signifies complicity with the current climate. In the year 2020, it should not be viewed as radical or political to agree with the sentiment that “Black Lives Matter.”

II) Create a comprehensive curricular plan for addressing issues such as inclusion, race, power, privilege, and more at the Elementary, Middle, and High School levels

Children develop awareness of race at an incredibly young age, and develop racial biases around 3-5 years old. Therefore, it is vital that conversations related to race and justice begin at a young age, in a developmentally appropriate manner, and continue throughout elementary and secondary schooling.

Updating and developing a high-quality social justice-oriented curriculum is a long process, but we would like to see the following practices included:

• Reading and literacy materials should represent people from a wide variety of backgrounds and which hold a wide variety of identities (racial, religious, socio-economic, ability, and so on)
• Reading and literacy materials should be sourced from authors which hold a wide variety of identities. While white men have contributed important works which deserve the attention of our students, it is also crucial that students are exposed to the work of non-white, non-male authors.
• Social studies and history units and courses should be historically accurate narratives which do not center exclusively the experiences of white, affluent people and colonizers.

III) Provide professional development and continuing education for teachers which focuses on cultural competency, implicit bias, and developing culturally responsive lesson plans

New information related to social justice and inclusion practices is constantly being published, and there is never a stopping-point when learning about these topics. Even for recent college graduates, the coursework in teacher preparation programs does not always adequately prepare them to engage in difficult conversations about race and social inequalities. We would like to see teachers, staff, and administrators receive ongoing training on how to diversify their syllabi and decolonize their classrooms.

With so many resources available online, as well as opportunities for coursework and training from nearby University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Illinois State University, there is no reason not to make progress in this area.

IV) Share the developed curricular and professional development plans with the greater Mahomet Seymour community to allow for accountability by the community

We recognize that this is challenging work; mistakes will be made, and these changes are not all practices that can be implemented overnight. Knowing this, we believe that the District should respond publicly and release a plan of action to the community so that it can be held accountable. Any plan to address these issues can only be made stronger by inviting as diverse a group as possible to comment on it, now and into the future.

“We recognize that full implementation of the above actions will require investments of time, energy, and resources at a time when so much is already happening in our world.” the alumni letter states. 

“We acknowledge that we are not the experts in the area of social justice and culturally competent teacher preparation. We consider the four requests we have outlined in this letter to be an initial response plan, but that with the support of colleagues in the field of education this will be an ongoing effort on behalf of Mahomet Seymour Schools. 

“With COVID-19 already further exacerbating the inequality gap between students, we believe the time is now to take clear steps to incorporate social justice elements into Mahomet Seymour schools at all grade levels.”

The Mahomet-Seymour School Board will meet at 7 p.m. after the Promise March for Humanity, which begins at 5:30 p.m. on June 8.