Racial Problems in my Community
My high school is known as the white, preppy, rich high school to many neighboring communities. Lake Forest High School is the public high school for the Lake Forest/ Lake Bluff community, which is located 30 miles north of Chicago. The school was created for the help of the rich people that lived on the lake, but since then the community has grown and most household income is over $100,000. Over 90% of the students are white and only 1.2% are African American. Lake Forest High School has become as good as any private education you could pay for. Leading up to the 2015-2016 school year my high school was in search of a new principal and one of the final candidate was a young African American lady who had previously been the assistant principal at another northern suburb school. Chala Holland went to undergraduate at Northwestern and played basketball, similar to the 80% of my classmates that play sports. When the school board announced that Dr. Holland was likely to be our principal some parents were furious. The most upfront parent was Jennifer Neubauer who wrote a letter to the school board expressing her opinions about the qualifications about Dr. Holland. I will link it down below and take a moment to look it over.[1] It blew my mind that one of my peer’s mother could write this to the public about a woman that would likely become her daughter’s principal (her daughter has continued to go to my school, even though Dr. Holland is principal).
My high school historically has had this tracking system. Basically, when you are in middle school you are tracked in the low, middle or high track for the rest of your high school education. It is very hard to move tracks once you are in one. Most educators know that children learn at different speeds and ages. This is especially true in minorities that may not get the early education that my community gets. Mrs. Neubauer’s idea was that eliminating tracking would only benefit blacks and Latinos, which is not relevant to Lake Forest because we are mostly white. Lake Forest is MOSTLY white, but there are still children that are not white. Lake Bluff has a trailer park and most of those children did not attend the pre-schools the rest of us attended. Some children do not enter kindergarten knowing their number or ABC. My personal experience in school with tracking was not a good one because I had a learning disability they would not track me into any classes that were honors or AP even though I had test scores and grades to be in there. In Dr. Holland’s first year I was able to move to honors Latin with the approval of my parents, teachers and department chair. That year my teacher told me I had grown so much more as a student than I would have in the normal class, even though I did receive as high of a grade I had the year before.
Academic tracking does effect more on minorities, but negatively effects anyone who is seen as substandard. There were many ways Mrs. Neubauer could have approached her opposition to Dr. Holland, but the path she took made our whole community realize that there is still a large presence of racism in our town. Even though we are in the north our community needs to grow up and realize that everyone is the same.
DNS Contributor, and Jennifer Neubauer. "Questioning LFHS Principal Search ..." DailyNorthShore. May 21, 2015. Accessed February 22, 2018. http://jwcdaily.com/2015/05/21/letter-raises-questions-about-lake-forest-high-school-principal-candidate/.
[1] DNS Contributor and Jennifer Neubauer, “Questioning LFHS Principal Search…” DailyNorthShore, May 21, 2015.
Unfortunately, I am not shocked at all by this incident. My high school, like yours, was predominately white with a terrible lack of minority. Being a minority myself, I struggled to identify with my peers. It came to the point that I no longer wanted to be a part of that specific community. As a minority, I felt targeted and underappreciated for what I contributed to the school. Oftentimes, my friend group and I were observed as “token Black students.” This basically meant that when we walked together to go to lunch, it was almost guaranteed that a photographer for the school would stop us and as to take our pictures. This became to routine, that we began to dodge cameras, knowing that they were simply going to use our faces to represent the school’s diversity-or lack thereof. This blog post is really interesting, though, because I am able to see it through a different perspective. You discuss the stupidity of racism (and I heavily agree), while managing to bring up the stigma of learning disabilities. Learning disabilities are misrepresented in too many schools, as “prohibiting success” of both the students with learning disabilities, and those without them. For some reason, most schools believe that these two types of students cannot learn in the same environment as one another. This enforces seclusion of those with disabilities, forcing them to feel less than. This is a major issue that reaches both minorities and majorities.
ReplyDeleteI respect your idea that “the community needs to grow up,” because I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I agree with you in the sense that there is a lot of “social norms” within society that goes unnoticed because we are so used to that way of life. I also went to a mostly white private school, but the difference was that I lived in Mississippi. A large portion of the time Mississippi is most notably known for racism. With that being said, it was very hard for my school to accept protests of racism because they wanted to deny that instances like such take place a number of times. This social norm trapped and still traps many individuals from being able to realize what they actually are doing because it is a comfortable place rather than being uncomfortable. It seems that “academic tracking” was a norm for your school so the idea of it being gone created this conflict that is so overwhelming because the north is supposed to be classified as having no racism, but this situation showed the norms we are trapped in.
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