Twelve new faculty, including one counselor and one social worker, were hired to work at Oak Park and River Forest High School this school year. While six are individuals of color none are Black. Five of the new faculty members are Hispanic, one is Asian American and six are white according to a report that was presented at the Sept. 10 OPRF school board meeting. Just over 40% of those who applied for an OPRF faculty post this year classified themselves as non-white.
While Roxana Sanders, OPRF assistant superintendent for human resources, described the diversity of the new hires as “an encouraging result” and noted the change from last year when only five of the 22 new teachers that were hired were teachers of color, Fred Arkin, a veteran school board member, had a different reaction.
“I’m very disappointed in what’s in the report,” Arkin said, noting that for the last decade or so OPRF has been trying to increase the number of Black teachers at the school so that the percentage of Black faculty matches the percentage of Black students at the school. “I haven’t seen an appreciable change since we started talking about this 10 years ago, specifically talking about the importance of having our faculty and the racial makeup of our student body mirror each other. The biggest problem is we didn’t hire one African-American faculty member this year and I understand the difficulties and we’ve talked about the difficulties and I’m just not seeing any kind of improvement.”
According to the report 15% of current OPRF students are Black while 10% of OPRF teachers are Black. Currently 71% of OPRF faculty members are white while only 53% of OPRF students are white. Meanwhile, 13% of OPRF teachers are Hispanic, up from 10% in 2023-24, while 16% of OPRF students are Hispanic. Right now, 6% of OPRF teachers are Asian or Pacific Islander while 4% of students fall into that category. The percentage of OPRF teachers who are white has dropped by two percentage points since 2023-24 dropping from 73% then to 71% this year.
Sanders noted that the 12 openings for new faculty this year was a relatively low number and that close to 30 teachers will be retiring over the next two years which will allow for more opportunities to increase the diversity of its faculty. Because OPRF typically has few teacher openings in any one year it is difficult to meaningfully change the composition of the faculty quickly.
“We don’t have a lot of faculty openings,” Sanders said.
Janel Bishop heads employee relations and recruitment. She told the school board that OPRF will be taking a number of proactive steps in the future, including hosting a job fair, to boost the applicant pool. Bishop said that OPRF has implemented a new more user friendly application system. She also said that OPRF gives implicit bias training to anyone who serves on a hiring committee.
“We plan to expand our advertising through social media and professional organizations and job boards that specifically reach candidates of color,” Bishop said. “We hope to engage employees and alumni as recruitment ambassadors and monitor recruitment sources, selection stage, and hiring demographic data so that we can identify which strategies are producing the strongest results.”
Audrey Williams-Lee, president of the school board, said she wanted to find out more about the availability of teachers of color, especially Black teachers.
“Do you have data, accurate data, on actually what’s the availability of teachers of color, particularly Black teachers, because some of it is that there is sometimes, in certain areas or over certain specialties, just simply only so many people,” Williams-Lee said. “I would love to understand how we’re attracting people relative to what’s available because sometimes the talent pool just isn’t there and we may never be able to have it match our student population because there may simply just not be enough teachers that we could hire for these roles.”
Sanders said it can be particularly difficult to find science teachers of color.
Arkin pointed out that OPRF pays teachers very well and should be able to attract good candidates to fill teacher vacancies. He wondered what has happened to the “grow your own” program that OPRF began some years ago to try to recruit minority alumni to come back to OPRF to teach.
“What we’re doing isn’t working,” Arkin said.
The percentage of both Black students and Black faculty at OPRF has decreased in recent years with the percentage of Black students dropping from 20% in 2023-24 to 15% this year while the percentage of Black faculty fell from 12% in 2023-24 to 10% this year.
While the percentage of Black teachers at OPRF is less than the percentage of Black students the percentage of Black employees overall at OPRF, 23%, exceeds the percentage of Black students. The percentage of Black OPRF employees was 25% in 2023-24.
Blacks make up the plurality of two employee groups at OPRF: the campus safety team and “classified” employees, mostly teacher and student aides and secretaries. Just under 50% of the members of the campus safety team, security guards, are Black while 28% are Hispanic and only 18% are white. Among the classified employee category 45% are Black while 33% are white and 17% are Hispanic.
Whites make up 62% of employees in the administration category while 28% are Black and 7% are Hispanic. Among buildings and grounds workers 44% are white, 32% are Hispanic and 24% are Black.