Community concerns about a district equity audit have prompted the Sartell-St. Stephens school board to vote to cut ties with Equity Alliance Minnesota.
According to their website, Equity Alliance Minnesota works to, “support systemic equity and integration through careful and intentional use of professional development; external supports, including equity audits, facilitation and action planning; and student programming.”
Jeremy Snoberger is a board member in the district and he joined Paul Douglas on the WCCO Morning News to explain the goal of hiring the firm and why they’re now cutting those ties.
“We were looking to try to meet the needs of every student in our district through equity lens,” Snoberger explains. “The first step of that was to start with this equity audit. The audit itself brought some great ideas, some understanding. But there were a number of questions that came up that just weren't able to be answered and weren't able to be kind of dealt with.”
One family alleged students were told to “hide” the survey from their parents, which Snoberger says teachers were not instructed to do.
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Snoberger does tell WCCO he hopes that some of the backlash from parents and community members gets toned down.
“Everything we're doing, we're doing with these kids in mind,” Snoberger said. “Everything we're doing, we're trying to say, how can we meet the needs of every single student in our district? And so really, all of this divisiveness, all of the rhetoric, all of the things that are being kind of thrown out there and social media and things like that are so hurtful and so divisive to the amazing teaching staff and the students who have stepped up and said, we can't let this continue to happen. So all of the kind of rhetoric and news and noise that's going on around is really hampering that work. So the more we can just let our teachers and our students really deal with the issues in the classroom and in the school that will be the best road forward for us.”
Snoberger added that the decision to cut ties with the firm doesn’t mean that the district’s work is done when it comes to results from the audit.
“It brought us to the point where it wasn't going to be able to continue, to finish out that contract,” says Snoberger. “The work that was done and the work that needs to be done will continue to go forward and actually will probably ramp up as we continue to try to meet the needs of every student in the district.”
Snoberger says they'll try to recoup some of the $80,000 spent on the survey.
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