One member of the Oak Park and River Forest High School Board of Education is questioning whether promoting racial equity should be the number one priority at OPRF.
As the administration is updating the school’s strategic plan, board member Mary Anne Mohanraj said that she believes focusing primarily on race in an equity goal is too narrow.
“I would like to see this changed … Priority 1 to either be equity, or even better I think, intersectional equity, to really remind everybody that we have to look at it from these different angles,” Mohanraj said at the March 21 school board meeting. “I don’t know why Priority 1 is racial equity. I wasn’t here when this was put in. It seems an odd thing to call out race above everything else that our students are dealing with, all the other, as they say, other social factors.”
Mohanraj said that equity efforts typically prioritize those most at risk or those who suffer the most severe consequences from discrimination. She pointed to the case of Oklahoma transgender student Nex Benedict, who the day after being attacked in a school bathroom, died from suicide. Mohanraj pointed out that girls have to deal with sexual harassment and sexual assault that affects them emotionally and academically.
“There is so much research, there is so much data showing that primarily girls are dealing with sexual assault, harassment,” Mohanraj said, adding that such experiences often result in depression, absences from school and lower academic performance.
Mohanraj also said that the text explaining the racial equity priority seems to suggest looking at more factors than just race. The subheading of the racial equity goal states that the goal is to “[E]liminate race, socioeconomic status, and other social factors as predictors of students’ academic achievement and social emotional growth.”
To achieve this objective, the updated strategic plan proposed by the administration sets a goal that by June 2028, the school would “implement a comprehensive set of strategies focused on ensuring that students have access to opportunities and resources, using specific metrics such as graduation rates, reduced achievement gaps, increased access to honors and advanced courses, and enhanced student and family satisfaction with school experiences.”
The plan also states that by June 2028, the school will “implement a data-driven Resource Allocation Plan to equitably distribute resources.”
Other board members did not respond to Mohanraj’s comments. The strategic plan may be discussed at the April 11 school board meeting.
At the March 21 meeting, Supt. Greg Johnson asked LaTonya Applewhite, OPRF’s executive director of equity and student success, to address Mohanraj’s argument to expand the definition of equity.
“The goals are based on primarily the priority of racial equity,” Applewhite said. “However, within the equity umbrella there are more policies, intersectionality is achieved.”
The strategic plan was last updated in 2017. Promoting racial equity has been a prime goal at OPRF for the past decade, but has become more focused with, among other initiatives, the adoption of the Honors for All freshman curriculum. It is designed to increase the number of Black students taking advanced courses.
Under the second priority of “transformative education,” the proposed updates to the strategic plan sets some detailed academic goals and focuses on Black and Hispanic students. For example, the proposed strategic plan for 2023 to 2025 sets a goal of increasing by 2% the number of OPRF students who meet growth targets in math as measured by the improvement from the PSAT to the SAT math tests by 2025. For Black students the goal for meeting growth targets in math is 10%. The target for the increase in the number of Hispanic students’ growth is 4%.
The proposed update to the strategic plan also adds communications as a new priority. Under that heading, the plan sets a goal that by June 2026, the majority of parents of color and non-English speaking parents report they are satisfied or very satisfied with school communications.
