Hello Marvista Families,
The past two weeks have been incredibly hard for our nation in many ways. It is important for me as the Principal to make clear where your Marvista Staff stands on these matters.
Your Marvista staff is appalled by the murder of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and the many other black men and women before them and we are committed to doing all we can to develop as a staff to become anti-racist educators in order to impact real and substantive changes in our nation.
One key strategy we are utilizing to impact change is to provide education on issues of Race, Identity and Racism to our students K-5. We strongly believe that properly educating our youth on these matters is our best chance at real change. To guide our work, we are implementing the board adopted Social Justice Standards by Teaching Tolerance.
This week, with input from several African American Families, our Race and Identity Instruction Committee planned an optional lesson for all students in grades K-5 which will be shared with families in the coming days. We hope all families will choose to participate in this learning. There is a substantial body of research that proves that children notice differences in race and other aspects of identity and begin to develop biases very early on. We believe that all kids are ready and have the capacity to learn about these subjects in developmentally appropriate ways and to begin to consider ways they can take actions to impact change. By not talking about race to white children, we are teaching them that it is not something that matters to them or that they need to learn. Conversations around race, injustice, and acceptance are hard, but can and should happen.
In addition to the optional lesson that will be shared, we will be holding optional Zoom meetings for students to meet with their teacher and class to follow up on the lesson and to discussion George Floyd. Your classroom teachers will be sending the lesson and Zoom discussion questions via parent email in the next day or so. Our hope is that your student will complete the lesson before coming to the class Zoom discussion so they have background knowledge for the conversation.
It is important for us to also name, while we have done several years of study as a staff on issues of White Privilege, Racism, Systems of Oppression impacting our families of color, etc. we are a nearly all white staff and most of us will never know what it feels like to be Black in America today. We will never claim to “get it” but we will stand in solidarity with our Black and African American students, families and staff and we will do everything we can to be allies and abolitionists alongside of you.
We hope to see your students complete the optional task and join us for the optional zoom meetings next week.
Sincerely,
Melissa Pointer
Principal
Marvista Elementary