Thanks to Dan Haley and Wednesday Journal for your sensitive and accurate reporting [Time to hurry up at OPRF, New, Nov. 17] and your commitment to challenge our community to see and act in fresh ways to end the many forms of conscious and unconscious racism at OPRF High School and throughout our community.
In recent months numerous individuals have made observations about our persisting struggle to make OPRF a school where all students feel safe and welcome and grow socially and academically. Their insights inform much of what CEEE (Committee for Equity and Excellence in Education), APPLE (African American Parents for Purposeful Leadership in Education) and SUA (Suburban Unity Alliance) argue is necessary to ensure an aggressive implementation of the District 200 Strategic Plan around racial equity. Key parts of the plan offer possibilities for rooting out the institutional and cultural racism that harms everyone, especially our children of color.
Ralph Martire, president of the District 90 school board, while serving on the D200 board committee studying Climate, Culture and Behavior earlier this year, lamented the high school’s lack of institutional memory around both more successful and less successful equity efforts in the past — a shortcoming that repeatedly sends us back to square one, never seeming to learn and build on our experiences and our own research evidence.
UIC Professor David Stovall on Nov. 14 was more caustic, but truthful, in calling this institutional and community flaw a tragic, debilitating “racial amnesia.” Amy Hill, director of Institutional Data and Research at OPRF in 2015, reporting the 10-year trend of making no progress in reducing racial inequities in student learning, poignantly and courageously stated that if solutions to the learning community gap were technical issues, our problems would have easily been solved. Instead, she stressed that the critical dimension for moving forward was an institutional cultural issue — having the commitment to change how we think and act about racial equity.
Most importantly for me and others today has been the repeated messages from our students, their widespread sense of discomfort, of being seen as the marginalized “other,” and the racial micro-aggressions, the emotional scars and deep disappointment they daily experience in the racial dynamics at OPRF. I am sure many of the 300 people in the South Cafeteria on Nov. 14, like me, fought back tears of pain and sadness as students told their stories.
As OPRF continues to wrestle with racial justice and we try to get the dominant culture to act differently, Wednesday Journal must remain close to what I hope and pray is a developing turning point at OPRF.
In its advocacy and reporting, I believe the Journal can serve one additional role — to help refresh our long-term institutional memory. I invite the WJ to do this by revisiting, reviewing and highlighting the current relevancy and guidance of landmark powerful documents like the 2003 Learning Community Gap Report and the Blueprint Assessment of 2011. We certainly don’t want to live in the past, but we cannot forget how our own history can critically inform understanding of our present predicament and guide our future actions.
John Duffy chairs the Committee for Equity and Excellence (CEEE) and served on both the Steering Committee and Task Force on Transformative Teaching and Learning for the OPRF High School Strategic Plan.