Katherine Rand is a white mom of a Black child who attends a global majority school in Los Angeles. She also serves as part of the Integrated Schools staff collective.
In August 2021, I brought my child to his first day of kindergarten, the school sight unseen. Because of COVID-era restrictions I still haven’t set foot on campus. This is probably not unique for those of us who enrolled our children for the first time in public school during the pandemic, but I’m sharing my family’s story because it’s important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all integration solution. Ours is outside the “norm” of what the typical Integrated Schools family might choose, and we are also probably one of many families with concerns that complicate a formulaic response to the problem of segregation.
I am an older parent, a solo parent (as in, I am making decisions alone, I am not co-parenting), and a White parent. My son is Black presenting. That is, his skin is brown, his hair is long and very curly (often worn in braids), and he has facial features that most people would associate with being Black. Culturally, he is not particularly Black since I have been raising him alone and my world is predictably very White. As he gets older, this is something that could result in a not so healthy racial identity development–not to mention resentment–if I am not really intentional about the media, books, and music that my son is exposed to, and the community that we both share. As Cornel West put it recently, “as long as white supremacy’s around, you’re going to have the need to stress Black love, Black dignity, Black history—those things that are being excluded and rendered silent!”
We live in Los Angeles, in a centrally-located and densely-populated part of the city that has a $43,711 median household income. Thirty-five percent of this community’s residents are foreign-born and it is considered highly diverse: 38.3% Black, 45.2% Latine, 9.5% White, 3.9% Asian, and 3.1% unspecified (source: Los Angeles Times: Mapping L.A.).
This part of the city is also directly adjacent to Koreatown and, in 2019-2020, my son spent six months in a preschool that was majority Korean, many students primarily Korean-speaking. I was attracted to the school because it professed culturally responsive values, and they assured me he would not experience the “gender policing” he’d received from teachers in another preschool. It was an added bonus that it was trilingual with Korean, English, and Spanish instruction. Had the pandemic not interfered, I think we would have stayed there another year and a half, and the social isolation he experienced likely would have lessened as time went on. But it was definitely hard being the only Black kid and, so, when it came time to enroll in kindergarten, I wanted him to be in a Black majority school environment and particularly to have Black educators.
I really was only looking at one thing, and that was racial demographics. Our zoned school reflects the specific makeup of our immediate neighborhood, with 10.6% Black, 84.4% Latine, 4% White, and less than 1% spread out between Filipino, multiracial, and other enrollment for 2020-2021 (source: California Department of Education, Data Reporting Office). The demographics for the on-site dual immersion program were even less aligned with my hopes, with only 1-2% Black students. Sadly, I felt I had to look further afield than the school a block and a half away.
Viewing all the online data available for the elementary schools within a reasonable radius of our home, I was delighted to find a school within a 10-minute drive that fit the bill. Enrollment for 2020-2021 was 77.4% Black, 13.4% Latine, 6.2% multiracial, 1.2% White, and a little over 1% split between Asian, American Indian, and Pacific Islander (source: California Department of Education, Data Reporting Office). The school was a gifted magnet starting in first grade and could be selected via the annual LAUSD Choices application–which presented other moral dilemmas for me–but, in kindergarten, the only way to get in was through an intra-district permit.
The way an intra-district permit process worked was that I had to get myself on a waitlist for the school of choice (and there was no formal way to do that, I just had to keep calling back to see if it was open), and hope that a spot became available before school started in August. As it turned out, we got a call in late June saying that we could complete the enrollment packet and needed a release signature from the principal of our neighborhood school. So, fortunately, by July, I knew he was going to the school I really preferred for him, and that Plan B–going to the neighborhood school–was off the table. In order for this option to become available to us, I had to really go looking, do my own research, and then be really persistent in order to get what I wanted. Not everyone has the time or capacity to do that and, so, no matter what, I’m starting off from that place of privilege.
I had to ask myself, was it even fair for us to get one of these spots? What would make it fair or not? I feel confident that it is in the best interest of my son to be immersed in Black culture, and that being in other environments could be harmful to him right now. Bringing the per-pupil dollars to this school is also good for other children and families, including many who have far less opportunity than my child, though the flipside is that it harms the kids in our neighborhood school where we chose not to invest. Is it ever okay to put one’s own child’s best interest front and center in these decisions? Or rather, can we make decisions that are good for both our own children and not at the expense of others’ children? What are the acceptable trade-offs as we make these choices?
To be honest, I felt pretty alone in making the decision, not only in my social network at home, but also among the Integrated Schools community, which is part of why I’m writing this now–so others perhaps don’t feel as alone. It is important for us to think about the values underlying the work that we are doing, and to recognize that depending on our positionality, our social locations, we may have different roles as well as different strategies for achieving the larger goal of educational integration. As a White mother of a Black kid, I have different obligations than someone like me with a White kid does. And, a White caregiver of a trans, queer, disabled, or neurodiverse kid would have other things to consider than I would. We cannot be ideological and dogmatic about what we are doing if we want to bring more people into the fold and, in the end, taking such a position is not what solidarity looks like.
What did my school “tour” consist of? Well, mostly looking up the school profile on the LAUSD website, visiting the school’s website and looking at the photos of students and staff to confirm the student data and learn more about who the faculty were, Googling whatever I could about the school to find out any additional information, and a Zoom “open house” they had at year-end in which I saw a presentation from two kindergarten teachers about what their class had accomplished in a year of remote school. I didn’t know anyone who had their kids at this school, hadn’t heard any buzz about it, but I did have an additional bonus of being connected on social media–through shared interests in education and racial justice–with a teacher who’d been at the school for 30 years. As of March 2022, I have yet to set foot on campus, I don’t really know what my child’s classroom looks like (though he took a nauseating 360° video of it one day for me on his school-issued iPad!), and I haven’t really gotten to meet other families. Beyond the small interactions I have with teachers, staff, and other caregivers at the gate at pick up and drop off, there have been very few opportunities to engage with the school community. Is that anxiety-provoking? At times. Did I need to walk the halls or observe the classroom to know this was a good place for my child? I really didn’t.
My child sees himself reflected in his teachers and in his classmates, in a way that he doesn’t at home by virtue of my being White. He is being inculturated into Blackness in the same way that most of us, far more unconsciously, have been into white supremacy. I haven’t been particularly happy with school leadership or the lack of communication from the new-this-year principal. My son has had three different classroom teachers already, and while supposedly someone has been hired they still haven’t been able to get a permanent teacher into the classroom three quarters into the school year. There’s no on-site school nurse, no garden, no healthy food. But the walls are covered with bright, African themed murals and designs and his teachers wear natural hairstyles, dashiki, and BLM shirts and, most importantly, they love my kid. And for us, right now, that’s enough.
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