Superintendent Reynolds shares his vision and plans with New RoAR News

Advocates for a charter school in New Rochelle have claimed that the city’s public school system is failing to meet the needs of its students, particularly its students of color.  It is no secret that, like most public school districts, New Rochelle’s schools do not serve everyone equally, with significant disparities in opportunities and outcomes between various groups of students. Students challenged by systemic racism, poverty, immigration issues, and disability do not achieve at the same levels as students who face none of these challenges.  

Unlike charter schools, public schools have the responsibility to educate everyone, from the most privileged to the most disadvantaged.  Meeting the needs of a large, diverse student body is one of the greatest challenges our public schools face. 

In an environment of pervasive inequality, the schools alone can’t solve all the challenges faced by all their students.  Still, parents and the community have a right to expect that the public schools will do everything possible to enable every student to meet his or her fullest potential. 

To better understand how New Rochelle’s public schools are addressing the challenges faced by disadvantaged students, New RoAR News spoke with school superintendent Dr. Corey Reynolds.  New RoAR News sought to understand how the district views the differences in performance between racial, ethnic, and economic groups in the schools; how the district is trying to reduce or eliminate these disparities; and how the district is monitoring its own progress to see if its programs are working.

Here we present the third part of our interview with Dr. Reynolds, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Competence.”  To read the full introduction to this series and Part 1 of the interview, “Literacy and Testing in the Early Grades,” click here. To read Part 2 of the interview, “Opportunities and Achievement in the Later Years,” click here.

PART III: CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL COMPETENCE

NRN: Do you have qualitative data that describe the subjective experiences of students and families who feel disenfranchised or alienated in New Rochelle’s public schools?

CR: This is the first year that we’ll be collecting that. We actually just released a few weeks ago our climate survey that will go to students, parents, and to faculty, and we plan on collecting this data annually. This is our foundational year. I can tell you what qualitative sentiment might be, but you know, the squeaky wheel is often heard first. So this allows us an opportunity to really collect some qualitative data.  We don’t have that information yet, but we should by the end of this year.

NRN:  What about cultural diversity and cultural competence among the frontline teaching workforce?

CR:  I don’t know how you measure cultural competence.  It’s very difficult to measure. We’re trying to ensure that all of the resources that we’re utilizing in the classrooms are culturally relevant to the students. We want our students to see themselves in the materials that they’re using. We want to ensure that teachers are not myopic in terms of their approach to students, and not only understand where the students come from, but also celebrate where students come from. In New Rochelle, our diversity is our strength. So we have to ensure that that translates into our classrooms as well.

I’m very pleased that for the last four years we’ve been working with our administrators on cultural competence, and here’s a reason why.  You can train on a building level, you can train teachers in cultural competence. But if the building administrator is not rooted in it, it kind of dissipates over time. So we wanted to do that backwards mapping type of experience in cultural competence. We’ve been working with all of our district administrators for the last four years–we’re talking directors, executive directors, assistant superintendents, as well as principals and assistant principals.  Every administrator in the district has been receiving cultural competency training and exploration over the last four years.

Our goal again is to train the trainer.  We want our building administration to be so fully culturally competent that even if we were to bring in outside consultants, they would be able to partner with the administrators. So we’re almost at the point where we’re able to begin training our teachers in isolation and with specificity.  We feel that we are a lot closer today than we were four years ago.

Here’s the reality of cultural competence. People go through training, but their biases are still intact.  It’s all about recognizing the bias, and that is the conversation that we’re currently having. It’s exploring our own innate biases, and recognizing them in real time. That’s very private work because we don’t ask people to fully tell on themselves.  But we do have a very strong group of administrators in this district that are not very shy about sharing their own personal information. You often will find tears in this work because people are exploring who they are and recognizing things.  

I’ll give you one example. In one of the initial conversations, I brought up the word “picnic.”  My family does not use the word “picnic,” you might know why.  Many people didn’t know the reason behind it.  Just recognizing how culturally we have assimilated derogatory and deadly terms into our everyday vernacular, having those conversations was uncomfortable.   There are some people who are very strongly resistant to it, and it’s OK. We tell them you still have to be here.  But you find that those icebergs are melting and we want to ensure it, at least for our leadership, because ultimately they have the deciding power in what happens to our students. A student may have a classroom infraction, but a teacher has no power to suspend a child. It has to happen at the administrative level. That’s why we’re focusing on our administrators at this point.

NRN:  Your online data shows the suspension rates are way down, by more than 35% for Black and Latino students between the 2019 and 2022 school years.

CR:  So much so that the state has actually given us a commendation for the level of suspensions that we decreased within a one year period.  They actually interviewed us a couple of months ago to ask about our programming. 

NRN:  What about the level of staff diversity in the classroom?  There’s some EEOC data online which seems to be moving in the right direction. Do you see that as a key area? And can you talk a little bit about what’s being done to move those? 

CR:  Our security monitors and our monitors for students in classrooms are highly represented by Black and African Americans. Our teaching assistants, we’re starting to see a shift in the demographics. So teaching assistants historically have been those people who might have wanted to be teachers but didn’t go to school or finish their training to become a teacher.  So they became a teaching assistant. Monitors aren’t licensed, anybody can apply for the job and get it, they’re mostly hourly. TAs are licensed, you have to maintain your license. So we’re starting to see a shift in that demographic where we’re getting more African-American and Latino individuals coming into the teaching assistant positions.

Recently, looking at the demographics, we’ve hired more teachers of color.  But here’s the difficulty. In New York State in particular, we have a teacher shortage, and, I’m going to use the term, a minority teacher shortage. We don’t have very many people of color coming into the profession, so we’re scrambling for people to have opportunities to come into the profession.

We have changed the way that we are recruiting individuals. Rather than going to and partnering with just the private colleges like Iona and Pace, we’re now working with the CUNYs.  We’re looking at those schools that have more minority students and we’re pushing into those spaces for recruitment efforts. When I was in HR, it was a part of my plan to use the historically black colleges and universities in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. We’re starting to go out there because we know that a lot of our students from this area who are Black and Latino go to that area for a school experience and then more than likely stay there. We’re trying to bring them back into this area. But New York is outpaced. Even though you make a nice amount of money, it’s expensive to live here. People can make a similar salary in education elsewhere and have a better quality of life. So we’re really trying to get people to come back.