Lafayette Anti-Bias Resolution

Our city, country, and our Lafayette community are experiencing an outpouring of collective grief, anger, and pain at the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and so many others. We acknowledge that the centuries of white supremacy that allowed this to happen have had damaging effects on individuals, families, communities, and school environments. Racism can adversely affect individual happiness and self-confidence, educational outcomes, cultural identity, school climate, student behavior, and school and community relations. As individuals and as a community, it is important to educate ourselves and courageously engage in the necessary, hard conversations that this moment requires. To effectively counter racism, anti-racism strategies need to be implemented across the full range of our school’s and our PTA’s activities.

It is time for us to fight for the education and lives of Black and Brown children and all children furthest from educational justice, including those in the intersection of class, gender, sexuality and ability. 

At Lafayette Elementary, we acknowledge that systemic racism against Black, Brown and other non-white ethnic groups is tightly woven into the American culture as well as the rest of the world.  We are committed and take full responsibility to ensure that our school does not succumb to the unjust practices of racism that have systematically become covert in our day-to-day lives. We stand together and pledge our solidarity in personhood to uphold the undeniable right to exist and be seen in this world as a human first.

We recognize the need to uproot white supremacy culture so that the unique contributions of one’s ethnicity, culture, and race are reflected in our school environment.  We will not subscribe to the dangerous thought process of “color blindness,” which relies on the concept that race-based differences don’t matter, and ignores the realities of systemic racism. We understand that there is no such thing as being “racially neutral.” In order to counter the effects of systemic racism, we must be actively anti-racist. We understand that anti-racism strategies need to be implemented across the full range of our school’s activities in order to have an impact.

We will continue to support our school faculty on how best to combat racism in all forms while evolving to enable our staff to be better educated when teaching our students. The journey to dismantle systemic racism will be ongoing. Victories big and small will be won, but for total change to happen we must make a stand to begin to unravel and eradicate the centuries of racist behavior within our country, state, city and neighborhoods, and in our schools.  

In the 2020 – 2021 year we will seek, listen to and validate the experiences of BIPOC members of our school community. We will operationalize our mission by creating a support group for students of color and their caregivers, providing resources for families as needed and ensuring we repair, strategize, learn from, and change. We will hold school staff to the standards of equity in education as defined by Seattle Education Association (SEA) as the means to achieve justice in educational practices, policies, curricula, and resources, and demand taking action to reverse historical and social disadvantages that prevent learners from accessing and benefiting from education on equal ground. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee will continue to have a representative chairperson present during all PTA meetings to ensure that all parents and students of color have a voice in the decision making that will impact Lafayette Elementary. The PTA will be given the necessary education on issues related to anti-racism while in turn providing relevant resources for families and faculty to self-educate.

Lafayette PTA Membership Voted to Adopt this Resolution in the 2020-2021 School Year