Mixed feelings

Auditors presented an equity audit of Belmont Public Schools to the School Committee in March 2022.

The audit covered a lot of ground and brought to light a number of terribly troubling findings. A few that jumped out to me included:

• Black students in particular report feeling much less like they belong to BPS than other racial groups.
• Black students report that teachers don’t learn to properly learn their names.
• METCO students report not being fully supported. They report coming to school tired and hungry.

It’s surprising that BPS hasn’t been more attentive to these and other issues given how much the administration and school committee have talked about the importance of DEI.

This connects to my primary frustration with the audit, which is that BPS didn’t seem to support it very well:

• BPS only provided some of the information requested by auditors in connection with their audit of special education. The additional information requested would certainly have helped the auditors assess bias in identifiation of SpEd students. This is a concern I previously wrote about.
• BPS permitted the use of Google Translate to translate the school climate survey administered in the middle school at least. Google Translate is fine for getting the gist of what something is talking about but certainly is not appropriate for creating valid translations and cultural adaptations of survey instruments on the fly.
• The staff climate survey was imbalanced in terms of the response rates of staff by race. It was unclear if the 60% response rate was considered good or bad.
• Only 12 students were interviewed in total, and 8 Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx students were interviewed as a group.
• Family focus group invitations were not sent to any of the four elementary schools until after the focus group process had started, and invitations to METCO families were sent similarly delayed leading to “limited participation”.

The above are some of the glaring issues in the report. Having attended equity subcommittee meetings since before the contract with the auditors was finalized, I heard over and over from administration and the school committee how important the equity audit was and also heard many times that it didn’t make sense to plan initiatives until the audit was done because the audit would help to define the roadmap. Given this, it was shocking to read how little support the audit seemed to get in its implementation.

I continue to believe there are low hanging fruit (like removing unnecessary credential requirements in hiring) that BPS could pursue now to make progress on DEI concerns. I hope the audit somehow inspires greater attention and investment in making meaningful changes.