On the Coatesville Area School District

Open Letter of Appeal to Important Contacts

            If your love for Coatesville goes beyond velodromes, girls flag football, and using censorship as a marketing strategy, you should read this DEI Report by Dr. Jarvis ) of Penn (https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:06118bc7-9f03-475b-8498-ba60575b6192 and listen to the first hour of April 9th's board meeting. Even if you have no connection with Coatesville at all but share the same American humor of fairness, you should give this report a small portion of your time. It's worth thinking about merely from an intellectual point of view.

How can a school district, not to mention a city, sitting on the fulcrum of the most affluent and wealthy county in Pennsylvania (median family income $119K) be ignored by so many? It’s no accident or oversight. It’s intentional.  Jarvis’ Report doesn’t answer that question, but it does describe the effects of the answer. Because of that, Jarvis’ Report is a milestone in the history of Coatesville. It may reveal in the long run the underlying causes of Coatesville’s problems. Our pursuit of a remedy may flush out the corrupt.

            First, I am no fan of DEI. Jarvis’ report is no DEI report. It is a frank description of an ailing institution. It is objective for the most part but at times too kind to the people of Coatesville who have allowed their school district to sink so far. It is also kind to the PDE educational bureaucrats who have ignored it for at least nine years since their last examination and recommendations.

            Second, we need to keep this report out front in all our discussions about the CASD so that we don't forget what we must urgently do and so that others like the school board and Coatesville administrators don't forget what must be done. We have wasted nine years. We must not be afraid of pushback and resistance. According to Superintendent, Dr. Catherine Van Vooren, there have been many changes on the school board since February 2023 when she was hired. Besides transparency, contiguity is an infrastructural concern.

            Third, we must ferret out those who resist change and those who pushback so that we may condemn them. Make their names public. Dr. Jarvis’ report is a great opportunity to move the people who would maintain the status quo in Coatesville out of the way for good. They have had their way too long. Some of those names may be Coatesville icons, contributors to the false Coatesville pride that compares us to Compton and not to Cambridge.

            You can listen to last Tuesday's Coatesville school board meeting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpSv1RnY9kQ.

            Dr. Jarvis presented his DEI Plan. The board was overwhelmed but willing. It is similar to a plan that was recommended in 2015 after the Como debacle (see page 46 of DEI Report) that was never implemented.

            Here's my criticism of Jarvis' Plan. In order to have equity you have to have something to make equitable. The CASD is so far off the scale that there is no measurable point to begin to make things equitable. The Coatesville Problem, be that problem with revitalization or the school district, goes beyond racism, the number one cause of inequity. If we are going to focus on racism we are going to get racialized solutions. The teachers will have two or three years of in-service where they will hear bad things about America and white people that they already know, and the district will hire a dozen or so Black teachers and social workers who will be just as ill-equipped to teach in Coatesville as white teachers. These are racialized solutions, but they are not pedagogical solutions. Jarvis to his credit does recommend that the district leadership form a committee "to look at culturally relevant pedagogy." I would make it districtwide requirement that all employees read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. These two books will provide an appropriate lens through which teacher can present their instruction.

            As Dr. Jarvis stated in his oral presentation, “We want to challenge the status quo.  I think one of the things that we found is again Coatesville is a pretty traditional system and again, I think what this is going to demand is some pretty non-traditional kinds of new, innovative thinking, and approaches to both teaching and learning…”

            Coatesville comes as close as any American population to Freire’s oppressed and Fanon’s wretched. They have, in Richard Farina’s words, been down so long it looks like up. The people of Coatesville are a colonized people occupied by the powerful and affluent of the county. Coatesville is Chester County’s potter’s field home to the county’s walking dead. The county needs Coatesville as the place they send their disabled, traumatized, psychologically crippled, homeless, petty criminals, abusers, and old. It is Kafka’s Penal Colony whose healthy and whole inhabitants seek escape and once gone take pride in having survived there but never return.

            One school board member at the April 9th meeting asked where should we begin. Jarvis said with human resources. In other words, they need to hire more teachers, more teachers of color, and more social workers. That 90+% of teachers are white in the CASD is unfathomable. It brings back memories of when I was President of the Coatesville Library. The library board was looking to hire a Library Director. I recommended that we seek a qualified Black for the job. I recommended that we contact HBCUs. I explained to the board that I was sure that colleges like Hampton had Library Science programs. Within three months I was no longer the president forced out after months of being left out of the loop.

            At the April 9th meeting, the school board was asked to approve the hiring of two more administrators to oversee curriculum changes. (Isn't that what principals are for?) CASD already has more administrators than any other district in the county. Thankfully the hiring was tabled to be discussed in executive session.

            As Dr. Jarvis said the situation is "urgent" and to expect "resistance and pushback" (48:53-50:00). From whom? In our pursuit of a remedy for the CASD, let’s make sure we find out who. Revelation and transparency are justice. As I have said over and over, “There can be no revitalization in Coatesville until the school district is revitalized. With this milestone report, Coatesville’s Revitalization begins.

March 2024