The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
A four-pronged, four-year plan to ensure equity in education for Franklin Township students was unveiled at the November 21 Board of Education meeting.
The so-called District Equity Plan “signifies a dedication – to our students, our families and our district staff – to attain fair, just, and equitable outcomes for our students and families,” according to a letter to families signed by schools Superintendent John Ravally, Assistant Superintendent Dan Loughran, and Daryn Plummer, the Supervisor of Equity and Inclusion.
The plan is divided into four “domains”: anti-racism, cultural and linguistic responsiveness, equity literacy, and school belonging.
The domains, Plummer told the Board, “grew out of our district equity needs assessment when we really began this journey. And it came out of interviews with our colleagues, our community members, our students, surveys, looking through that data to really come up with what shapes our district equity planning.”
“In each of these domain areas we have focuses that we’re either carrying over from our last district equity plan, or looking to emphasize in this current iteration,” he said.
In the anti-racism domain, Plummer said, “we really want to elevate and think about ways for our students, our staff members, to really think about if anything is coming up for them in terms of their school experience with bias, microaggressions, racism, or any other forms of discrimination, and how does that communication happen within their schools, with their building leaders, so that it can be addressed.”
The cultural and linguistic responsiveness domain, he said, “is responding to the cultures and languages of our students in the classroom and in the teaching environment and how we can do that by getting student feedback on the effectiveness of the instruction in the classroom.”
Equity literacy is “really thinking about equitable classroom practices or equitable practices across school buildings, what does that look like in terms of identifying inequities and responding to them,” Plummer said.
School belonging, Plummer said, is “looking at what our classrooms and our buildings look like, and does that reflect the cultures of our students and our families, and examining our extracurricular programming to see if it responds to our students.”
“We want to increase student belonging, student engagement, student motivation in the classroom,” he said. “That taps into our component of our observational rubric, knowing and valuing students. Once that increases, then real student learning and achievement and opportunity to learn continues to increase. So we look at that theory of action as a cycle that we want to continue as we grow and learn and develop as a district.”
The plan sets a series of goals to be met in each of the school years from 2024-25 through 2027-28.
The overarching goals for each domain are:
Anti-racism: “Increase the awareness of systemic racism and inequities that exist in our school community”
Cultural and Linguistic Responsiveness: “Develop a culturally and linguistically responsive (CLR) mindset that enables individuals and organizations to recognize the implications of race and equity on all aspects of teaching, learning, and leading.”
Equity Literacy: “Develop a shared understanding of the research-based strategies to increase equity in all school environments.”
School Belonging: “Create a nurturing school environment where stakeholders feel personally welcomed, accepted, respected, included, and supported by school staff members in the school social environment.”
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