Montgomery County Schools Release Action Plan To Combat Systemic Racism

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD — Montgomery County Public Schools released a three-year action plan on Thursday designed to combat hate, bias and racism in the school district.

The Antiracist System Action Plan, released at a Board of Education meeting, addresses the findings and recommendations from an Antiracist System Audit released last fall.

“The plan has been developed to remove the barriers that impact our most marginalized students,” MCPS said. “It is designed to address the report's recommendation that the successful planning and implementation of a districtwide racial equity vision requires coherence, accountability, equity centered capacity building, continuous data collection and relational trust.”

The action plan is divided into three sections: system-level, domain-specific and school-level. A goal of the action plan is to make students and parents at each school in Montgomery County feel welcome and a part of the school community.

Teachers and staff will be trained with a goal of understanding how their students are doing emotionally as well as academically. Training for MCPS staff is scheduled to begin on Thursday, May 18.

Anthony Alston, MCPS director of equity, said at Thursday’s Board of Education meeting that the school district has developed an antiracist system action plan that will be implemented, Montgomery Community Media reported.

“And we will get results,” Alston said at the meeting.

Last fall, MCPS released the 200-page “Anti-Racist System Audit” of the school district that showed a need for an effort to enable all students, regardless of their background, to be able to succeed in school and be prepared for the future.

The two-year study found that MCPS’s policies and programs contain ways to achieve racial equity. But the study also found that the policies and programs are not followed at every school.

At Thursday’s Board of Education meeting, Board President Karla Silvestre said the action plan will be a “critical piece to our success” and that no longer will it be acceptable for students of color to score at the bottom, MCM reported.

Board of Education member Brenda Wolf questioned whether the new action plan will produce a training regimen that will make a difference. “We’ve been training ever since I’ve been on this board about racism,” Wolf said. “I think training is masking the issue.”

In the action plan released Thursday, MCPS noted that it has studied the impact of racism before. "But those past initiatives focused on addressing issues in isolation and didn’t consider all of the structural barriers that can contribute to student outcomes," the school district said.

MCPS will work to ensure each school in the district has a clear school improvement plan that "operationalizes an antiracist response to hate bias and race-based bullying," the action plan says.

In the addendum to the report, MCPS says that "equity" and "antiracism" are too often used interchangeably, even though they mean different things. To have success with the action plan, MCPS said the school community needs to have common definitions so that the school district can better communicate, collaborate and evaluate its work.

The MCPS Equity Initiatives Unit, for example, is scheduled to finish creating a more comprehensive glossary of terms by June 15.

MCPS notes that "equity" means that every student, family and staff member has the opportunities, resources, and supports necessary to succeed. Equity is the goal, while "antiracism" is one process to support equity.

Antiracism is actively working to ensure racial justice by identifying, interrupting, and dismantling racist practices, policies, and attitudes that disproportionately harm communities of color, according to the definition adopted by MCPS.

MCPS also plans to take further steps to increase the retention and advancement of teachers of color.

The school district said it will increase engagement with its teachers of color and create and implement "comprehensive, culturally responsive professional learning for newly hired employees and for leaders who hire and provide evaluations, to ensure an increased knowledge base of the experiences and barriers of bias and stereotypes of those within our historically marginalized communities."