About last night…What happens when parents show up?
People accept what they don’t know they can change. Change is coming, led by parents who know their power, are fed up with the status quo. It’s long overdue.
As I pulled into the parking lot of Camp Creek Middle School and saw all of the cars overflowing campus, I knew that tonight’s community meeting would be different. For months now there have been rumblings of discontent among parents and community members. Truth be told, this has been more than simply months in the making, it’s been years. Change is coming, led by parents who are fed up with the status quo, and it’s long overdue.
Walking into the meeting I saw something important: a roomful of organized, engaged parents, ready to ask the right questions and demand answers. Granted, in my time over the years working with many of these same parents I’ve seen them show up and participate in droves to support their local schools. However this was different. There was a level of public accountability, not simply for the school itself, but for the district that simply wasn’t there before.
There’s no debating the fact that our parents have a deep pride in our community’s schools. What’s up for debate though is how much parents are willing to hold the system accountable in a way that historically our parents on the south side of Atlanta haven’t done.
What happened next wasn’t all that surprising. Given my time working in a district I could have predicted it. The sitting elected official first tried placating parents with pat answers or unrelated diatribes, then routinely veered off course into downright patronizing of parents. But the parents themselves, organized with uniforms, an agenda, and wanting to articulate a clear message kept coming. Eventually the evening devolved into a back and forth open forum that didn’t really solve any problems, but did present a clear divide.
As a parent myself of students in our community, I’m excited to be a part of what comes next. As an educator and a public school advocate, I realize now that most of our challenges are systemic. School districts are slow to change, burdened down by a culture of compliance and a lack of transparency. These behaviors are reinforced by a population that is mostly asleep at the wheel. People accept what they don’t know they can change. Usually only the most vocal are heard, and those are few in number and typically possess power and privilege to assume that they can change things.
What I saw last night was a group of parents of color deciding to become that squeaky wheel, find their power. Let’s see if they get the oil. Sustained progress for students and their families won’t happen until the status quo is disrupted. Last night was the start of that disruption.
