The Richmond Board of Education wants to tackle racism – in policy, hiring practices and instruction.
A motion passed unanimously on Wednesday at the last board of the school year on to start a diversity and anti-racism working group to talk to those who’ve experienced racism and see how it can be dealt with throughout the school system.
Trustee Sandra Nixon, who brought forward the motion, said the first step will be to bring together the group with representation for all staff groups, the Richmond Teachers’ Association, CUPE, students and parents.
“The Richmond way is really, let’s get us all together – let’s look at lived experience,” Nixon said.
This is how the SOGI (Sexual orientation and gender identity) group formed and worked, she added.
While widespread protests have been on-going south of the border and elsewhere in the world in reaction to a Black man killed while being pinned under the knee of a police in Minneapolis, Nixon pointed out, in Canada, there has been a rise in anti-Asian racism and systemic racism against Indigenous people as identified in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
And there continues to be structural racism in the community, she added, and it’s a reality that needs to be faced in schools and workplaces.
“Sometimes it’s overt and sometimes it’s more subtle,” she said.
The working group would be a collaborative, school district-wide effort to look at the anti-racism in a big picture way and from different angles, Nixon explained.
While she brought the motion forward, Nixon said the same discussions have been going on among senior staff, trustees and the community, but with the issue around racism so prominent at the moment, it offers “both a challenge and an opportunity.”
“As a school district, we need to take that opportunity and respond to that challenge and look at we are doing , what we need to do that we aren’t doing and what we might need to be doing differently to address racism however it is manifesting,” Nixon said.
