Sussex Tech, it's Time to Leverage School District Culture

By: Etienne R. LeGrand

Delaware’s Sussex County Technical School District is in a pickle. 

The achievement gaps between minority students, who are entering the district at a rapid rate, and their white peers are significant and persistent. Meanwhile, close to 90 percent of the district’s teachers are white. Last year, the district held a mandatory seminar on race and equity.  Administrators required all teachers to attend.  But the seminar did not go well.  Teachers and staff walked out, accusing the seminar of sowing division.

Then, this year, a white student posted a meme on social media using a racial epithet about a fellow student. A group of teachers, members of the school’s equity committee, took action on their own initiative by attempting to engage colleagues in a wide-ranging discussion on race, equity and pedagogy in the district. 

Again, the discussion was uncomfortable.  Employees did not walk out, as they had last year.  But many call the discussion a botched effort.

So, what went wrong?

I believe the teachers on the school’s equity committee were well-intentioned in wanting to begin a discussion about the role of race in their district. They believed it an important context for how the school might equitably meet the learning needs of their students of color and the causes and potential solutions for closing the racial achievement gaps between them and their white peers. Their open mindedness, initiative and leadership are an asset to the district.  

From the kerfuffle that ensued after the two-day conversation on race, we might conclude that those school leaders and teachers outside of the equity team do not share the same views that county demographic trends aren’t necessarily related to an increasingly more diverse student population or that the increase in minority students may require a more diverse faculty or more culturally relevant teaching practices. Superintendent Steve Guthrie informed me there is no agreement that the underlying causes of racial achievement gaps are not rooted in inequity.

Despite evident gaps in understanding and agreement among employees about what the district’s specific challenges and opportunities are, the team’s efforts motivated district leadership to elevate the equity committee’s work from a school committee to a district committee. Now the group’s responsibilities include reviewing the district’s policies, procedures and practices with an eye toward equity.

In addition, the committee grew to include additional staff and community stakeholders, and the district’s 2019-2022 strategic plan includes a principle and a goal in support of respecting and valuing cultural diversity.

Too many these look like positive steps. Are they the right ones? And if so, are they sufficient?

Superintendent Guthrie, who assumed his role a year ago, described his district’s culture as a positive one due in part to a friendly, outgoing and helpful faculty with close relationships to students and a low student discipline rate. Do Sussex’s employees and students share his view of the district’s culture? Will this culture help employees navigate the conversations and decisions that lie ahead, or will it hinder them in unexpected ways? 

Do they trust one another, possess a “can do spirit”, respect differences and work as a team based on mutual support?

A newly minted strategic plan that gives a nod to cultural diversity is certainly better than one that does not. But strategic plans are just that – plans. They need people to pull them off ,and this is where the district’s culture comes in.

 A positive culture can enable and fuel plan execution, but only if the foundation on which the culture rests has well-defined, core values and shared “rules of the road” to guide employees’ interactions and decision making. These rules or behavior guidelines like being open-minded, being able to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty and a willingness to go beyond their comfort zone become essential when dealing with issues like race and equity.

 If such Sussex Tech’s culture has such a foundation, then its culture can be leveraged to bring alignment, ensuring everyone is rowing the boat in the same direction. Alignment builds momentum and momentum fuels learning and performance. Misalignment reveals gaps between what Sussex Tech says it values and how employees and students behave. Resolving misalignments are Sussex Tech’s opportunity to become better at what it does.

Taking time to ensure everyone at Sussex Tech has all the facts is essential. Using those facts to identify solutions for entrenched problems, like achievement gaps and employee and student racial mismatches, with a willingness to consider that the way things have been done before may need to change can be daunting. We might all agree that change is necessary, unless it’s us that has to change.

But true learning is expanding our mental models to include new or contradictory information that often conflicts with what we believe. Learning requires change, and a high performance culture that can enable learning at the individual, team and organizational levels is what Sussex Tech needs if it is to meet its challenges and opportunities.