Northshore School District reviews progress on racial and educational justice; students highlight conference and classroom work

Superintendent Irish opened a study session by asking district staff to report on Superintendent Parameter 9, the district's racial and educational justice policy, and said he was "very impressed with the work" done across the system.

Dr. Thomas and members of the district's racial and educational justice team framed the update around three goals: building and sustaining leader and staff capacity; building and sustaining structures of support at the school level; and building and sustaining cohesion across schools. "We structured this slide deck for you and the presentation for you into 3 themes," Dr. Thomas said, outlining an approach that pairs training with tools and measures.

Rena Harb, the district's organizational change and student-advancement specialist, opened the substantive presentation with a land and people's acknowledgment, noting the district meets on "unceded Coast Salish lands that have been colonized, occupied, and renamed to Bothell, Kenmore, Redmond, and Woodinville." She described materials the district is creating to make acknowledgments age-appropriate and actionable for students.

Student leaders from the Student Justice Collective described how the program operates. JD said the collective is "a cross district community" that expanded into a student conference at Cascadia College; Jasmine said the student-led space has become "family oriented" and now facilitates workshops on microaggressions, slam poetry and identity work in schools. The presenters said the collective facilitated workshops to seven elementary schools and one middle school this year and drew nearly 200 students to its district conference.

On staff development, presenters described a districtwide, live-streamed three-hour REJ training offered in August, and a new requirement for professional learning hours focused on racial and educational justice. The district centralized materials in a staff toolbox and distributed tangible classroom tools, including badge-sized sentence-stem cards for calling in or calling out microaggressions, grade-banded two-part short videos (definition then response), and multilingual "North Shore values" posters for school front offices. "We located or relocated everything into our staff toolbox," Rena Harb said, describing the goal of easier staff access to resources.

Nikki Smith discussed the P–12 ethnic-studies framework and a high-school ethnic-studies elective. The district offered the elective in three of four comprehensive high schools last year and has been expanding teacher leadership through professional learning communities (PLCs): an initial cohort of lead teachers followed by a second PLC of 35 staff members. Smith said the goal is to embed ethnic-studies themes into content areas without bypassing curriculum standards.

On measurement, Dr. Craig Foster (director of research and evaluation) and Dr. Thomas described efforts to pair discipline-report data with new survey and qualitative measures. The district added six Panorama questions aligned to the REJ framework to capture identity-based bias and students' perceptions (for example, whether students feel their identity is valued or whether they experience identity-related bias). Dr. Foster said discipline reports are "useful in a particular way" but limited as a broad sampling measure; the team plans root-cause analysis and a mix of quantitative and street-data (student voice) approaches to understand spikes in incidents.

Board members asked whether an observed rise in staff reports of microaggressions reflects more incidents or improved identification. Dr. Thomas said the district is treating the two possibilities as complementary: higher reporting may partly show increased recognition and naming, while the district will also look for patterns and overlay them with regional and national events to anticipate trends. Dr. Foster added that a formal qualitative study can help distinguish reporting changes from incident prevalence but cautioned about the resources such a study requires.

Board members and presenters also described other implementation work: AVID alignment with funding for field trips and classroom supplies; collaboration with Tulalip educators to adapt a "since time immemorial" curriculum and tribal perspectives into classroom lessons; and the REJ committee's five-team structure (toolkits for student clubs, community panels, guidance on religious/cultural observances, and a calendar).

The presentation closed with next steps: continuing to scale REJ work across departments, refining the measures of adult practice and student outcomes, and planned follow-up conversations with the board in January or February. Presenters noted a November 24 meeting item on FAFSA and Strategic Goal 5 for members who wanted a deeper follow-up. The superintendent thanked the student speakers and the board adjourned the study session.