Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Of late I have been limiting posts to this blog on public education and preparing to launch a new one that tackles broader subjects… but an article by Erica Green in today’s NYTimes warrants a post. In “Black Lives Matter, She Wrote. Then ‘Everything Just Imploded'”, Ms. Green describes the heart-wrenching experience of Queen Anne’s County (MD) Superintendent Andrea Kane after she sent an e-mail in June 2020 offering her support for those protesting the George Floyd demonstrations and indicating that systemic racism was a problem in her district as much as it was across the country. After a few weeks, the blowback was horrific. You see, Ms. Kane was the first African-American Superintendent hired in that county and the county included a stronghold of Trump supporters who became activated by the email and eventually ran a slate of candidates who sought to have Dr. Kane removed from office. The article recounted all that happened in Queen Anne’s County since Dr. Kane arrived: the “welcome” she got from some of the white school board members, her efforts to increase the awareness of the community about the effects of systemic racism on the student body, and her decision to fire a central office staff member for racist comments he made. 

In the end, the so-called “Patriot” slate won the three seats needed to dismiss Dr. Kane and, despite her accomplishments, she was dismissed. Near the end of the article, Ms. Green describes Dr. Kane’s farewell speech at a newly created community center:

One day in June, almost exactly a year after Dr. Kane had written the email, her voice rose above a rumble of thunder as she addressed a crowd outside the Kennard African American Cultural Heritage Center, named for Lucretia Kennard, the county’s first “supervisor of colored schools.”

One of the first events held at the center, which had educated the county’s Black students during segregation, had been to welcome Dr. Kane. On this day, she was saying goodbye.

“There’s some noise out there, and it’s an evil noise,” Dr. Kane told the group. “Give it some time; evil will consume itself. Any time we let children express who they are, and set examples for them about what is right, we can’t go wrong.”

The children are always watching us. We need to set examples of the kind of world we want to leave for them… and it isn’t the world Dr. Kane experienced in Queen Anne’s County.