SOUTHLAKE, Texas — In the wake of the search for a new superintendent, the board of trustees for Southlake Carroll Independent School District announced last week it was delaying taking action on a plan that would address racism in Southlake schools.
Board President Michelle Moore announced via video, saying that the board is currently facing a school year interrupted by the pandemic and the search for a new superintendent after David Faltys announced he was retiring in mid-August. As a result, all action on the cultural competency plan, or CCAP, has been pushed until a new superintendent is put in place, which Moore said would not be until early 2021.
“It is increasingly clear that CCAP has taken a life of its own, and the dialogue community-wide has become hostile and unproductive and is overshadowing other immediate priorities for the board and administration,” Moore said in the video statement. “As a result, I’m slowing down the process of review of CCAP.”
The District Diversity Council presented a new timeline to the board at its meeting on Monday. According to the revisions, the DDC plans to solicit community and school board feedback between now and Oct. 30. Throughout November and into mid-December, the council’s subcommittees will revise the CCAP based on the feedback, and in December the council will release the revised CCAP. In January, the council will hold a workshop with the school board to describe the revisions and then hold another community workshop to answer questions. Then sometime in January or February, the council will present the officially revised plan to the board.
At the board meeting Monday, the trustees advised the DDC to be flexible regarding their revised timeline.
The largely student-led Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition expressed disappointment at the delay on Instagram and Twitter, calling the decision “cowardice” and accused the members of capitulating to the “racist opposition.”
“This reaffirmed what we always knew: BIPOC (black, indigenous and people of color) and marginalized students are not a priority to this district,” SARC said in its statement. “Our tireless efforts to secure the bare minimum protection for students of color is, evidently, ‘overshadowing’ other priorities of our leadership — as if they haven’t had decades to address the issue.”
The need for a cultural competency action plan arose when, two years ago, two separate videos went viral showing Carroll students repeatedly chanting the N-word. After the first video went public, the board of trustees appointed the District Diversity Council and tasked it to come up with the cultural competency plan. Since then, the DDC has held a series of workshops with the school administration and the community.
The CCAP was initially presented to the school board in August, but an outspoken group of community members criticized the plan based on misunderstandings of what was included in it. Among the opposition’s concerns were the definition of a microaggression and the incident tracking system.
As a result of the amplified misunderstandings, the school board voted in August to continue workshopping CCAP with the community, a vote proponents of the plan criticized as deflection.
Since then, SARC and other community members have held protests outside the Carroll ISD administration building and throughout the city, calling for the school board and the administration to pass CCAP and protect the district’s students of color.
“Make no mistake, the board has played directly into the hands of the racist opposition,” SARC said on Twitter. “This reaffirms that every platitude the board granted about the ‘importance’ of this plan was nothing but performative.”