Chair: Soumountha Keophilavong
Mission Statement
The Committee for Equity and Excellence expects to achieve complete balance, equity, and diversity by focusing and working to minimize educational and financial/resource gaps between District 3 schools.
This committee’s agenda is brought to the District 3 community in order to manifest great change, and relies on the strength of our moral understanding that equitable resourcing and access to high quality education for all students no matter gender, race, zip code, religion, physical capabilities or sexual orientation is obligatory for the families that we serve.
We seek to address any systemic or fundamental behavior that promotes, and sustains any schools in District 3 to have a recognizable gap between the highest achieving, middle achieving, and lowest achieving schools in the district to the point that they are maintained and treated as separate institutions. This committee will work to eliminate the gap in order to abide by the law of the land and our belief that “separate education facilities are inherently unequal.”
This goal will be achieved by providing:
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Support- Create a space for parents and school leaders to share their experiences with inequity and identify funding, resource, and curriculum gaps.
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Assessment - Identifying financial/resource and educational gaps, then through research and data strategizing solutions for building, growing, iterating, and improving our student’s accessibility to resources and robust curriculum across all grades and levels in all District 3 schools.
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Outreach -Partnering and involving District 3 parents, the DOE and elected officials in the elimination of institutional and educational gaps.
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Resources – Creating a clearinghouse of resources for schools to have greater access to funding and in-kind donations.
Download the District 3 Parents Resource and Students' Rights Guide here.
EEC Meeting Minutes
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June 11th Equity & Excellence Committee Meeting
Retrospective - Insights and Data
I was happy to conduct the retrospective exercise and was even more pleased with the conversation and results.
This information has been shared with the Superintendent, principals, and teachers in attendance.
You'll find attached the data and insights put together from the event. This is through the lens as a parent, CEC member, and product developer. What is detailed below is how I've scrubbed and sliced the data so it can be helpful to you. Note that the raw data from the event is in the raw data page.
Themes & Topics
Common themes were put together based on the attendees' feedback. These themes cut across the three original topics (Remote Learning, Assessment, and Special Education Plans).
The original topics were provided so folks had a frame of reference when commenting, and also provided some framing regarding the initial slice taken during the retro. What emerged were themes and topics.
The topics provide an opportunity to quickly understand what the theme covers.
Questions & Considerations
The themes and topics are boiled down to some questions and things to consider as we move forward. I've done my best to stay away from providing solutions. Ideally, the questions should help to realize what a solution could look like.
Couple additional notes:
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Usually, during a retrospective, the facilitator is trying to get unique comments per person, but because this was done in a digital chat, a "riot mentality" manifested where people frequently repeated what someone else said. As a rule of thumb, facilitators are trying to avoid this behavior; although this organically happens during the retrospective when done in person.
In a controlled, in-person environment, people write their own thoughts, and when there are identical comments, it infers something to make note of. When using a chat, it's overwhelming and hard to avoid.
A lot of repeats and "kudos" comments were removed; although I was not overly diligent with this. I did my best to keep the data clean. -
A lot of comments were general statements without a lot of contexts or additional information. I've used these comments as I understood the context, but I am aware that a different meaning might have been intended.
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No one's name was left in the comments, so they are all anonymous.
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If a comment was submitted by a principal or teacher (assuming they could identify by name in the original chat file), their comment is preceded with PRINCIPAL or TEACHER.
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A few comments did not get added as they didn't have a place that aligned to a theme. There were very few of these. They were left in bold in the raw data tab for future reference
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Dennis Morgan
Founder & President
Harlem CoLab
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Equitable Outcomes for All Students
