Marble Equity Team to Host Social Justice Workshop on May 1

Above: members of the Marble Equity Team

A group of parents at Marble Elementary formed the Marble Equity Team in the fall of 2018 to advocate for inclusivity, respect and equity at Marble school and beyond.

The equity team is the first of its kind in East Lansing’s public schools, and in its short tenure, members of the group have accomplished a number of goals, including obtaining more inclusive books for the school library, reaching out to at-risk groups in the community and hosting community-wide workshops.

Monica Fink, the group’s board president and a parent of a kindergartener at Marble, said she joined right away last fall. “I’ve always been very interested in social justice issues,” Fink said, “and anything I can do to help out the school, I sign up for.”

The equity team is made up of five board members and a number of other active members, including a group of teachers at the school and principal Josh Robertson.

The group’s latest initiative is a workshop for the entire community that will focus on social justice work. The workshop will be held at Marble on May 1 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., and there is no cost for the event. Titled “Increasing Our Appetites for Social Justice,” the workshop will be interactive, and its facilitators, Greg Myer and Lois McCullen Parr, both have experience working within school systems on social justice issues.

Equity team board secretary Tali Faris-Hylen said learning about equity issues has been eye-opening for her, as it has for many other parents who would not necessarily think about certain school practices as equity issues.

For example, one of the school practices that the group has been working collaboratively with principal Robertson to change is early dismissal on special days. In the past, on holidays or other special days—particularly the last day of school—some parents have taken their kids home early, while children with working parents or caregivers remain at the school until the end of the day.

“I didn’t think about that as being an equity issue until really recently,” Faris-Hylen said. “But it’s excluding kids whose parents aren’t there.”

Principal Robertson said that most of the parents who attend on the last day of school are middle-income or high-income families, while a lot of children from low-income families remain at the school until the final bell. Thinking about it as an equity issue, Robertson said, is important, because such practices can have a negative impact on some children.

As a result of discussions about the issue, Robertson did things differently last year. Parent volunteers set up a lemonade stand outside and encouraged other parents to wait there until the final bell, which allowed all children to stay together and have a final moment with their teacher and their class.

“It’s really about being able to analyze what we do to meet all the needs of our students in a very equitable way,” Robertson said.

Marble parents have, on the whole, been encouraging and supportive of the changes, according to Fink. “It’s been very warmly received,” she said.

Equity Team members have also worked to bring in outside groups and resources to the school, such as the Alphabet Rockers, a hip-hop Grammy-nominated music group whose members “create brave spaces to shape a more equitable world through hip hop,” according to the group’s website. The Alphabet Rockers came to Marble for a school assembly in the fall of 2018, and equity team members helped with the organization of the event.

Equity board member Faris-Hylen said the kids loved the performance. “Bringing in this touring performance group was pretty awesome,” she said.

Another effort of the equity team has been to expand existing outreach programs the school has for low-income students. Faris-Hylen said the group is achieving this through purchasing snacks for children as well as covering the cost of school t-shirts for all children.

Equity members are also working with principal Robertson and teachers to make kindergarten roundup—which will be held at the school on May 21—a more welcoming event. Member Alissa Cohen said they are helping to organize a group of fourth- and fifth-graders who will give tours of the school to the new kindergartners. Kindergartners will be presented with school “passports” that Cohen designed. The passports contain pictures of the rooms and school staff so that kindergartners can become more familiar with everything.

“There are a lot of us involved in the kindergarten roundup,” Cohen said, “to make it a welcoming environment for all kids coming in.”

The equity team’s main initiatives are funded by the Marble Parent Council as well as fundraising events and donations. Funds for the work the group is doing have also come from outside the school system. Members of the equity worked in collaboration with teachers at the school this year to obtain a $1,270 grant through the East Lansing Education Foundation for more diverse books for the school library.

Diverse books are those that are defined as having “protagonists and experiences that feature underrepresented ethnicities, disabilities, cultural or religious backgrounds, gender nonconformity, or LGBTQIA+ orientations,” according to the School Library Journal. Providing children with such books is a major movement among librarians and in the publishing world, and it is important because it allows children to see themselves reflected in stories.

Board members collaborated on the grant with third-grade teacher Rebecca Spitzer, resource teacher Kathryn Farr, fourth-grade teacher Renee VanRemmen and first-grade teacher Jolene Roseth at Marble on the initiative. Principal Robertson said staff are in the process of ordering books.

Members of the equity team have created a book club for themselves, as well, which is open to all, to discuss equity issues beyond the regularly scheduled meetings.

This month, for example, the group is reading the book “Classroom Cultures: Equitable Schooling for Racially Diverse Youth,” by Michelle Knight-Manuel and local MSU education professor and Marble parent Joanne Marciano. The book club plans to meet on April 28 from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at the East Lansing Public Library. Future book club meeting information is posted on the equity team’s web page, which is located within the main page of Marble Elementary School.

The school year may be winding down, but the equity team is already gearing up for future projects. According to Fink, the equity team has a number of goals for the future, one of which is helping to promote the recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce. The group has, in fact, already been in communication with the East Lansing Board of Education to discuss members’ concerns about the lack of diverse teaching faculty at the school.

Another goal for the group is to increase community involvement to create a safe and welcoming environment for diverse families, and to help facilitate the navigation between families and resources they may need.

For more information about the Marble Equity Team, visit Marble school’s main webpage and check under the “parents/community” tab at https://elps.us/our-schools/marble-elementary-school/.

Tickets for the May 1 workshop may be reserved here.