We can do better: How to make schools welcoming places for all learners

If you take away nothing else from a visit to Lebron James’s I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, you will leave with an understanding of why the hit song “We Are Family” is such good shorthand for the school’s core philosophy. You will feel a sense of belonging while you are there.

“Belonging” is one of those strange words (not unlike “family”) because it means slightly different things to different people. But in school, the sense of belonging is palpable – when you have it. If you think about your own childhood, you either felt you belonged at school, or you didn’t. But it turns out a sense of belonging is about more than whether you ate alone or with a group of friends during lunch period.

Belonging is a core condition for learning. Without it, students don’t feel safe. And this is what the I Promise School understands.

Mr. James’s school, which is actually a part of the Akron Public School district, is three hours from my state senate district in Montgomery County, Ohio and it has garnered a lot of attention so I wanted to see it for myself. Money alone has never been known to turn a school around so something beyond Mr. James’s philanthropy had to be in play.

It doesn’t take a visitor very long to be struck by the feeling in the school. Things like the food pantry, clothing pantry, and parent resource center are more than just important wraparound services. They are part of creating a school family that wraps its collective arms around kids – not to save them or patronize them or treat them as helpless, but to let them know they are seen for who they are: bright young learners eager for opportunity and a place where they can be themselves, exercise agency, and be intellectually curious independent learners.

The technical term in education for this idea of meeting kids where they are is “culturally and linguistically responsive practice.” For a Republican like me, it sounds like you might have to pay taxes just to get to the end of that sentence. However, the idea is grounded in what are sometimes thought of as conservative values: the critical role of parents, an emphasis on local community context over top-down decision-making, and the importance of school to the future of work.

Aspen Education recently released a set of policy recommendations that can advance culturally and linguistically responsive education. These actionable insights build upon earlier recommendations for furthering school connectedness during the pandemic era. All the recommendations are sound and merit debate, but three interest me even more deeply given my visit to the I Promise School.

1. Improve and prioritize school climate measures. We need to include survey data in accountability frameworks, and we must provide tools to disaggregate the data by race, gender, disability and home language.
2. Enable community partnerships to bring cultural capital into schools. Schools cannot do this work alone, and local organizations and families have a wealth of cultural capital to invest in healthier learning environments and provide opportunities for real-life, project-based learning.
3. Amend laws to define “school safety” in ways that encompass psychological safety and belonging. Updating school safety planning requirements and templates to address the identification of signs of trauma and stress and shifting resources away from School Resource Officers toward school counselors, social workers, psychologists, and parent liaisons will go a long way toward institutionalizing safe and respectful environments where it’s easier to feel you belong. When you belong, you feel safe and you learn.

We are living through a time when political divides seem insurmountable. We cannot agree on public health recommendations to stop the spread of disease. We are engaged in a long-overdue reckoning for centuries of racial injustice and yet we lack a common language to even begin to address those issues. Emotions are so high that dialogue and discourse are fraught with danger.

We know our education system is full of inequities, some of which have been painfully exposed by the current pandemic. Rather than address those inequities that have festered for decades – even centuries – we appear to be more focused on the White House than the schoolhouse, when both demand our attention. In short, we have lost connectedness and a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves: civil society.

No matter where you sit in the American family, it doesn’t feel very good right now. Imagine what that feels like for a student of color every day in school. Then imagine trying to learn in such an environment.

We can do better. We can be responsive to the moment, the need, the inequities and injustices. We can. I promise.

Peggy Lehner is a Republican state senator from Ohio. She chairs the state Senate Education Committee.