Is it time to boycott Seattle Public Schools? Is there another answer?
/To renew Superintendent Denise Juneau’s contract, or not to renew Denise Juneau’s contract?
That has been the big question in Seattle these past several weeks, and an answer has arrived:
Denise Juneau has resigned, effective at the end of the school year.
So, the conversation has changed. Seattle Public Schools are now without a long-term leader, and the time has come to take matters into our own hands.
If we want radically different schools, we need to follow a radically different path forward. In this case, we need to not just be “committed” to centering BIPOC student leadership in the pursuit of educational equity, we need to show the world what that looks like. The NAACP Youth Council has demonstrated time and again these past few years that their voices can lead us where we want to go, and they’ve written down the way to get there in the form of their nine demands.
They began calling for Juneau’s termination last month and remained steadfast in that opinion despite backlash. I should have stopped thinking so hard and followed their lead sooner. Members of the council wrote eloquently explaining their position — and their urgency — in an article published yesterday in the South Seattle Emerald. They also ask some questions that we need to take to heart as we look to move forward:
How long will we have to wait?
How long will our school district choose to ignore Black and Brown students and uphold white supremacy?
We aren’t asking for perfection. We’re asking for an anti-racist leader to lead our school district who centers students’ voices and experiences, especially when Black and Brown students are the ones sitting at these desks, receiving the short end of the stick.
This is bigger than terminating the superintendent’s contract. This is bigger than the adults sitting on the dais or at the decision-making table that students are not a part of.
Our demands seek to change institutions that uphold white supremacy. We seek change for ourselves and our Black and Brown peers so that we won’t have to face the oppression we have faced in Seattle Public Schools.
Seriously, how long will they have to wait?
They shouldn’t have to wait another day, but if we have learned anything from the past 70 years in Seattle, it’s that there is no end in sight.
How long will the district ignore BIPOC students and uphold white supremacy? Again, we have been given that answer repeatedly in Seattle: forever and ever, if we let them.
I agree that this is bigger than Superintendent Juneau — bigger than any one person or any one contract. We’ve been spinning our wheels over the same issues for years and years. It’s going to take all of our leverage and all of our power to force this system to change, and it’s not going to be a comfortable process.
So I don’t hear it as a rhetorical question when these young people ask how long they should have to wait.
I feel like they’re asking us: when are you going to step up? When are you going to act like the building is on fire and we’re locked inside? When are you going to draw a line in the sand and mean it?
The first time I heard from the NAACP Youth Council in person was in January 2019 at the annual MLK Day event at Garfield High School.
I left with two major impressions, the first being that my educational advocacy should follow the NAACP Youth Council’s leadership as much as possible.
Second, in reading their list of demands, I couldn’t help but feel that all of this needed to happen before they ever stepped foot in a classroom again — before any of my kids walked into a school building again.
We have the power to do more than just ask for change. We have the power to do more than work and fight for change, too, within a system that keeps showing us that won’t be appreciated. The students and families — we have all the leverage, when it comes down to it. But we have treated the oppression and racism in our schools as something that needs to change, not as something that could never be accepted for even a moment under any circumstances. We’ve seemed to believe — myself included, for a while — that some factor, some element could be fixed or understood that would alter everything.
For most of us, we’ve waited for someone else to take us there — convinced ourselves that the next superintendent will be the one, or the next wave of school board directors, or the next year.
In the meantime, we’ve continued enrolling our kids, continued to make sure they do their imperial homework, continued playing along, and continued believing things would change. We convinced ourselves that change takes time and that we’re making progress.
We’ve had seven superintendents in Seattle Public Schools since 2000. We’ve proven to ourselves exhaustively that the next person (doesn’t matter who it is) will not be the one to save us.
We have to right this ship ourselves.
And so when I think about what that line in the sand would look like for myself and my kids — when I consider how I could throw everything I have behind this, once and for all — I have a question of my own:
Is it time to boycott Seattle Public Schools?
Now more than ever, we have so little to lose. Our lives have already been upended. We’ve already spent most of a year making the best of a terrible situation, so we’ve already cleared the childcare hurdles and gone through the pain of initial separation from routine and supports and expectations. Our kids have already been at home staring at a damn screen most of the day for months — and now they’re doing so under a district with a lame duck in the superintendent’s office.
And of course it’s more than just that. We’ve all come to realize that the same root cause — the same evil — that had us out in the streets last summer after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Manuel Ellis and Sean Fuhr and so many others were murdered — that’s the same sickness we are fighting in our schools right now.
What if we looked at the inequity in our schools and said, each of us for ourselves, my participation stops now. I will not stand by another day.
What would we really be losing, and what would we stand to gain?
Matt Halvorson is a writer, musician and father living in Seattle.
