‘It would seem OPRF is ready for the work.” That’s the view of Dr. LeVar Ammons, three weeks into his critical and newly formulated post as executive director of Equity and Student Success at Oak Park and River Forest High School.
Well, it’s now or never from our point of view. The pain and the hope, the grief and the nonsense, the denial and the timidity that have marked this school’s haphazard approach to racial equity have now reached their culmination.
We shredded the yearbooks. We got a good shaking from 10 episodes of America to Me. We ejected an underperforming principal. We listened to students and discovered they are both powerful and still children. We hung tough on a teachers contract that finally addressed equity. We budged on a capital plan that fixes the library and other student gathering places, invests in technology and lets the leaking pool go on leaking. We adopted a racial equity policy with some teeth. We elected and re-elected school board members who pledged to keep faith with this equity imperative. And now we have hired a seemingly strong and charismatic equity leader and charged him with infusing the vision of equitable education through a lens that finally acknowledges, simply and powerfully, that each individual starts with their biases, that this critical institution was built on those biases.
Starting her fourth year as OPRF’s transformational superintendent, Dr. Joylynn Pruitt-Adams has aligned this institution into one focused thoroughly and forcefully on connecting every student to a constellation of resources. She has burned the excuses and replaced the excuse-makers. She has listened with generosity. And even with, or because of, her passion for this work she has, so far, brought all the long back-sniping constituencies with her. A neat trick.
So, Dr. Ammons, we agree. It would seem OPRF is ready for the work. It had better be — because this is the moment.
