Hoover schools to hire more minority teachers, revamp access to gifted education

The Hoover school system plans to hire more minority teachers and revamp its gifted education program and higher-level course offerings to encourage more minority participation, the school board’s attorney said Thursday night.

Those efforts are just part of an action plan revealed Thursday night by attorneys for the school board, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and U.S. Department of Justice.

About 90 people showed up for the community meeting at Trace Crossings Elementary School, which lasted about 2 ½ hours. The meeting was just a first step to help the Hoover school system remove any remaining vestiges of the segregated school systems that existed in Jefferson County until the 1960s, attorneys said.

The Hoover school system eventually would like to be released from federal court supervision of segregation issues but first must show that goals of desegregation have been met.

School officials are working with attorneys for black families in Hoover and the Justice Department to ensure that all students are treated fairly, regardless of race or ethnicity, Superintendent Kathy Murphy said.

“Our school district is very committed to making certain that we get this right,” Murphy said. “It’s about every child, every student, being given every opportunity. That’s an opportunity to be respected and loved and cared for, opportunities for learning and achievement and success. Those are all of the things we want for all of our children.”

From time to time, school officials may get things wrong or hit a bump in the road, but “under no circumstances does this school district stand for any level of racism or bigotry,” Murphy said. “We are here to support all children, and all means all.”

ACTION PLAN

The action plan discussed Thursday night dealt with the hiring and assignment of minority teachers and ensuring equity in student discipline, gifted programs, course offerings, extracurricular activities, facilities and transportation.

Whit Colvin, an attorney for the Hoover school board, said data shows that Hoover schools are lagging in terms of minority representation among faculty.

While more than 24 percent of students are black, only 9.6 of the teaching staff are black, Colvin said. But that is up from about 7.5 percent in November 2017, said Natane Singleton, an attorney for the civil rights division of the Justice Department.

The Hoover school district plans to increase the hiring and retention of minority teachers, and the central office will have more oversight of hiring decisions, Colvin said.

In the past, more of those decisions have been made at the school level, but the school district will implement a uniform application, interview and selection process for the entire district, Colvin said. While school officials want to retain some input from individual school leaders, the central office will be paying more attention to how hiring decisions impact the goal of increasing minority representation, he said.

School-level hiring committees will be made more diverse, he added.

The Hoover school district also has identified racial disparities in its gifted programs and the number of black students in honors and Advanced Placement courses, Colvin said.

The district will revamp its gifted program to better identify kids who are eligible to participate, he said. That includes starting a talent development program for students in kindergarten and first grade and expanding the amount of testing to determine which students can enter the gifted program, he said.

Hoover schools also will do targeted outreach to minority students and parents to make sure they are aware the gifted program is an option to consider, Colvin said. “It’s not really recruitment, but it kind of is,” he said.

EQUAL TREATMENT

School officials also will be re-evaluating the criteria for higher-level courses to make sure they are being applied in an equitable way and are less reliant on teacher recommendations for more rigorous courses, Colvin said.

Hoover schools also have racial disparities in student discipline and will be looking for ways to reduce exclusionary discipline practices, said Peter Beauchamp, another attorney with the civil rights division of the Justice Department. They also will continue to implement more positive behavior intervention and support practices, he said.

Staff training is a huge part of this, Beauchamp said. Some of these changes do not happen overnight because it requires a culture shift in how discipline is handled, he said.

Monique Lin-Luse, an attorney representing black families in Hoover schools, said the action plan for the school system also includes making sure there are no racial barriers for extracurricular activities, particularly those that require auditions or tryouts.

And while the physical condition of Hoover schools is pretty good, the parties in the case want to make sure that schools are maintained at equal levels and that maintenance is not allowed to slip at schools with higher minority populations, Lin-Luse said.

The school district also will have to continue to seek federal court approval for new schools and major renovations, she said.

Having access to school buses is an issue that already was put to rest in recent years, but the school system still will have to continue monitoring and reporting how students use the buses and how bus routes are designed, Lin-Luse said. The student makeup on school buses should reflect the overall school population; there should not be buses with students from only one race, she said.

Lin-Luse and other attorneys stressed that the Hoover school system is not about to be released from court supervision over all these issues. There is still a lot of work to do, but this action plan is a way for the district to move forward with a lot or reporting and monitoring to ensure accountability and results.

Beauchamp said no definite timeline has been established, but it will take a minimum of three years before the district will be ready to seek release from court supervision.

PARENT FEEDBACK

Traci Jones, a black parent of four students in Hoover schools, said all of this is not just about black students making the cheerleading squad or having access to the gifted program. It’s about students being treated fairly on a daily basis.

The racist video by Hoover and Spain Park high school students that recently gained national attention is a reflection of parents and administrators who have similar conversations regarding black and Jewish people, Jones said.

School leaders held assemblies to address the video but offered no apologies, and students recognized that, she said. Now, she has to wonder whether the people charged with educating her children are fairly grading them or treating them differently because of their race, she said.

Jones said all the lip service about training teachers sounds good, but she wants to see some action.

“This case is over 60 years old,” Jones said. “I’m sorry. I’m impatient. I don’t have another 60 years to give Hoover an opportunity to get it right. You have the resources. You have the access. It’s not been a priority in Hoover.”

She and other parents asked to see some timelines put on this action plan, saying these are urgent needs.

Ali Massoud, a 2011 graduate of Hoover High School, specifically asked about a timeline with goals for increasing the number of minority faculty in Hoover schools.

Lin-Luse said it’s hard to have clear targets for that because it depends on the number of openings for new teachers each year.

Terry Lamar, Hoover’s new director of equity and educational initiatives, said he already has started recruiting students for a diversity focus group and plans to start meeting with that group immediately after spring break.

The human resources department already has plans in place for summer hiring, and all new teachers will have diversity training at the beginning of the next school year, Lamar said.

Autumm Jeter, Hoover’s director of curriculum and instruction, already is having conversations about diversifying the curriculum, and training is planned for principals and certain departments about how to discuss racism with students. Some of that is taking place in April, Lamar said.

HARSHER CONSEQUENCES

Romel Williams, a parent of two students at Hoover High, said she was very disappointed with the lack of swift discipline for a Hoover High teacher who used a racial slur in her classroom in January 2018.

The teacher initially was allowed to return to the classroom and make an apology. Parents who thought she should have been fired complained, and the superintendent placed her on administrative leave before she resigned just five days after the initial incident.

Williams said the initial reaction by school administrators angered her and she wondered if she should take her children back to Birmingham schools instead of keeping them in Hoover where they have to deal with racial tension every day.

“School should be place where you feel safe, where you feel comfortable, where you’re enriched, where you’re loved, where you’re encouraged to grow,” Williams said.

But how can students stand up for themselves if they don’t have administrators backing them up, Williams asked.

Wonlia Blain, a mother of three children in Hoover schools who moved to Hoover from Houston in 2013, said her children have been called the n-word every year they have been here. “It has been very traumatizing for my child,” she said.

One of her children has attention deficit disorder and was constantly pulled out of class, while white students who did the same things were not pulled out of class, she said.

There needs to be a zero tolerance policy for staff and students who act or talk in racist ways, and curriculum needs to include the positive accomplishments of black people and not just white people, Blain said.

Another mother who moved her children from Jefferson County schools to Hoover schools four years ago said her oldest daughter was in the gifted program in Jefferson County and she assumed her youngest daughter would be tested for the gifted program in Hoover. However, her youngest daughter was not tested, despite having straight A’s and coming from a family of very educated people, she said.

“I felt like she should have been tested,” she said.

Loni Curtis, a white woman who is married to a black man and who moved to Hoover from California in 2013, said the environment here when it comes to race is “crazy weird to me.”

The recent racist video could have caused a riot, she said.

“We can’t go into individuals’ homes and see how people are speaking, but we’ve got to do better as parents,” Curtis said. We’ve got to do better as a community. … This is ridiculous.”

Her friends in California and Ohio are wondering what in the world is happening here, she said. “We’ve got to have harsher consequences.”

OVERSIGHT

U.W. Clemon, a former federal judge who is helping represent the black families in Hoover, said the federal judge handling the Jefferson County desegregation case, U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala, expects the Hoover school board to give her a report of what has happened as a result of the recent conduct by students.

Haikala is extremely dedicated to ending segregation and racial policies in the Hoover school system and is sometimes harder on the school system than the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Clemon said.

Also, if the school system doesn’t follow through with its action plan, attorneys for the black families in the system will report that to the judge, he said.

Colvin said there likely will be modifications to the school system’s action plan based on Thursday night’s comments by the public. Also, Haikala will give the public an opportunity to talk directly to her in a public hearing, he said.

“I think we’re all after the same thing to make sure that there is equity and that there are equitable opportunities and that we do what we need to do for kids,” he said.

Murphy said school officials are working exceptionally hard to do the right thing.

“There are so many great things about Hoover, but we’re not walking on water, and we’re not perfect,” she said. “We’re all trying to get better, either as human beings or as a school district.”