Students Organizing Against Racism
My school in South Burlington, Vermont, like so many, has not been immune to the spread of hate speech. Data collected from SafeHome indicated a 177% increase in reported hate crimes in Vermont from 2013 to 2017. Teaching Tolerance has reported increases across schools in the United States as well. Locally, our school district and surrounding community grappled with acts of racism and violence following its 2017 decision to change the district identifier, which had been linked to Confederate iconography.
It was upon this backdrop that our school district intensified its efforts to create more just and equitable conditions for learning. As part of that effort, in January 2019, we established our first Students Organized for Antiracism (SOAR) group. The structure, name, and foundation of SOAR comes from Courageous Conversations About Race (CCAR), a project of the Pacific Educational Group, a nonprofit founded by Glenn E. Singleton in 1992 and committed to achieving racial equity in education. After a number of us on the faculty attended the CCAR Summit in 2017, we developed a district partnership with the Pacific Educational Group and engaged in conversation and training with the remarkable Dr. Lori Watson, CCAR’s equity transformation specialist. It is due to Dr. Watson's years of work that SOAR organizations exist in our school and across the country. For us, this active antiracism work among faculty, paired with incredible student leaders, helped create the conditions for SOAR to begin at schools in our district in 2018.
As educators, we recognized that although we had shifted the conversation in many of our classrooms to encourage and support diversity, equity, and inclusion, there was a limit to our ability to effect broader change. In order to improve the culture of our school, we also had to shift the conversations taking place in the locker rooms, hallways, school buses, and bathrooms. It is in these loosely, if at all, supervised spaces that we needed to support courageous students in disrupting racism.
In early 2019, we invited students to join us for the first SOAR meeting to use CCAR Protocol and engage with the Speak Up at School strategies from Teaching Tolerance. The strategies include four ways to respond to a biased or hateful remark: interrupt, question, echo, and educate.
Our first meeting attracted about 20 students. From there, we have continued to grow. This fall, 61 students came to our first meeting of the school year. Although we are still developing our understanding and deepening our practice, we have identified a few components that feel important to share for those educators considering developing a SOAR chapter at their school:
It was important to us that we engage through interracial facilitation. We wanted to be sure that our student participants could see themselves reflected in their advisers and that we were prepared to host racial affinity spaces as needed.
We did not immediately begin a student group. SOAR came after years of diversity work, training, and practice among faculty.
All are welcome to join. We meet during the school day and welcome all interested students. We sought to take down as many barriers to participation as we could identify.
We are grounded in the CCAR Protocol, using work from fantastic organizations such as Teaching Tolerance to support our learning and practice.
In our first year, SOAR students attended conferences, presented at workshops, designed T-shirts, led nonviolent actions in our school, and spent significant time in conversation, learning, and reflection. This fall, we read Book One of March, a graphic autobiography by U.S. Representative John Lewis (D-GA), and attended a presentation by Representative Lewis, hosted a movie showing of Selma, and facilitated a workshop at a statewide conference for educators. Our students are currently working in action groups to create a mural, engage in nonviolent protests, petition the school board to raise the Black Lives Matter flag at our middle school, and develop a week of action during Black Lives Matter at School week in February.
It is our hope that SOAR will not only continue to transform the culture in our school but will also support all students in developing positive racial identity. We recognize the need to connect students with tools and strategies to interrupt bias and racism, and also the need for students to experience a positive sense of self. We know that racism is experienced on the individual, interpersonal, institutional, and system levels — and for this reason, we know we must be engage with each other at every level. This is only way to fully partake in antiracism work.
I’m grateful for all of the work of my colleagues and the support of the school and district leaders that has enabled us to move forward with this work. And I deeply appreciate the students who have stepped up to address racism in their lives and communities. At the end of the school year, I plan to report back on our collective progress. In the meantime, I encourage educators everywhere to embrace antiracist teaching practices and, when conditions allow, organize SOAR groups in their schools.
Christie Nold teaches sixth grade at a Vermont public school on Abenaki land. Together with her students, she loves learning about the intersection of identities and experience. Christie also co-facilitates courses for educators. You can catch her on Twitter at @ChristieNold.