What challenges are Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous students facing?
Mauri Friestleben: Children of color are hurting. They are displaying anxiety and depression as a collective whole. They are keenly aware of the sense that, in our city, they are not proactively protected by law enforcement, but are reactively killed after the dams break. They are keenly aware that whiter children across the metro area went back to school much quicker than they did and, in their minds, appeared to live their best lives.
It is imperative that we, as the adults surrounding them, steady ourselves to provide strong, firm, structured environments that are regulating and reassuring.
Cherise Ayers: Children of color have always faced challenges in all of our nation’s systems, and COVID has exacerbated those challenges. I think a more appropriate question is how do we, the educators, plan to change our systems so that we are addressing the challenges that children of color are facing. In order to do that we have to sincerely interrogate our disproportionate outcomes and our own biases to ensure that while in our care, our students are getting what they need to thrive in the rest of the world.