Published Aug. 2020
By Dani Tietz
Maybe LaShunda Glover, Susie Jackson and Maggie Kinnamon and John and Mindy Spencer were destined to be in Mahomet for this moment.
Their stories span decades, but their message is succinct: they want their children and the children of their friends to feel like they belong in the community they choose to live.
Being a Mahomet resident has always been layered with an ache for John. The south Chicago native moved to the rural town of 3,751 in 1995. He purchased a home with his girlfriend, a black woman, on Prairieview Road.
“We lived in the mobile trailer park, and we didn’t necessarily have many issues in the trailer park,” John said. “I believe that a lot of that was because I was around.”
But the same didn’t hold true for his partner when she went to work at a local store.
“She received a lot of negative feedback for simply just being there,” John said. “There were little snippet remarks for simply being in Mahomet or working at the Jamboree.”
The couple talked a lot about the impact those words had on her.
“We weren’t moving, though,” he said. “We had bought that place together. We settled in there for a bit.”
Fast forward to 2013. At that time, John was living in Champaign with his daughter, who is biracial.
Their experience in the Champaign Unit 4 school system produced an experience where his daughter felt the effects of racism, but when John was considering a move to Mahomet, he had multiple conversations with her about what that might look like.
Mindy remembers the first time John’s daughter visited the Mahomet-Seymour school district. As a junior high student, she came to watch an elementary school performance at Lincoln Trail.
“It was a medley of slave songs,” Mindy said.
Mindy saw something that she’d witnessed many times at school performances and didn’t think twice about a group of predominantly white children repeating songs and dances in a unit they learned about different cultures.
At this performance, an adult narrator used the voice of a little black girl who was a slave to tell a story from the slave’s point of view.
“At first it didn’t even dawn on me,” Mindy said. “But then I looked over and saw her face, and I was like, oh, this is what she is going to experience when she and John move here.”
From ninth grade to her senior year of high school, John’s daughter struggled with being in a predominantly white school where she felt like she was different than everyone else because of the color of her skin.
But as she entered the school district, John quickly learned that he couldn’t always protect his daughter.
“Not a single year went by where I did not hear my daughter tell me there were kids saying the n-word openly in the hallways and that there were kids saying the n-word at football games and in various school activities,” John said.
During her senior year, a teacher used the n-word openly during a class discussion.
“Not just reading it in a book, but outwardly said it,” John said.
His daughter confronted the teacher after class to learn that the teacher thought it wasn’t a big deal.
John reached out to the principal but ended up talking to the assistant principal. For the most part, that’s where the discussion about his daughter’s experience stopped.
“My number one concern was my daughter,” he said.
“I was concerned about her finishing her senior year because if you are not emotionally engaged because everything about the culture is keeping you from being engaged and focused; you don’t feel like you belong, you’re being isolated, you don’t have a voice and nobody is interested in listening to your feelings.
John believes that these issues, racism, and bullying, never make it to the public eye because the board never sees them.
While John and his daughter were fighting for a voice at the school level, Mindy approached Mahomet-Seymour Superintendent Lindsey Hall right as she stepped into the role in 2017.
“I was in her office week one telling her what happened,” Mindy said.
At that time, Mindy began the conversation with Dr. Hall about the possibility of racial bias, diversity, equity and inclusion training.
A few months later in Oct., Mindy and Mahomet resident Jen Tee approached the Mahomet-Seymour Music Boosters and the Mahomet-Seymour School board, respectively, to address a racial slur that was uttered by a Mahomet-Seymour parent during Central’s Marching band performance at the Eastern Illinois University’s Marching Band competition. No action was taken.
“The reputation has been chipped away because they are not addressing the issues,” John said. “They are, in my opinion, embarrassing themselves when it comes to these board meetings. I don’t care how they feel. I do care about creating an environment for these children, for all these children where they feel safe.
While the Spencers have been happy with Hall’s initiative to address issues as they arise,, they also feel that training the staff and students as a whole is critical.
Susie Jackson, who moved from Ann Arbor with her husband, a black man, and two biracial children three years ago, said that being part of the Mahomet community has been a wake-up call.
Coming from a very diverse environment where children were taught to embrace differences between people and cultures, Susie said that part of what she’s seeing as the district approaches discussions on race is that people don’t know how to have the conversation.
Growing up, Susie got the same message that she believes Mahomet kids are getting now.
“My parents never said to be racist, but we stayed away from certain areas of the town that we lived near,” Susie said. “I went to a Catholic school because the public school was, you know, not good, even though that’s where you had more diversity.”
“Without talking to these kids about it, that’s what they are learning from looking around; they’re assuming things from their environment.”
Susie said that families may be teaching their children that race doesn’t matter or may not even be talking about it at home because talking about race, to them, is racist. But she also believes that produces two additional problems.
Susie’s son, KJ, had a friend over to stay the night a few years ago. The boy used the n-word in front of KJ. KJ told the boy that the Jacksons don’t use that work, and the boy asked why KJ would care, “he wasn’t black.”
The next day they Jacksons talked to the boy’s mother, who was mortified to learn that her son even knew what that word was.
“Where do you think he learned that word?” Susie said. “He learned it from school.”
KJ reports to his mother that racial slurs are used among students at Mahomet-Seymour Junior High School consistently. He also heard racial jokes or students share racist videos almost daily.
“It’s in the culture of the school, and it’s accepted,” Susie said. “Nobody’s stopping it and nobody is talking about it, so it has fertile ground.”
Maggie’s oldest son, Kyle, experienced hearing the same talk when he was a student at the junior high school. Although Maggie raised her children to be culturally aware and sensitive, Kyle came home in junior high repeating some of the racist jokes he’d heard at lunch.
At that time, Kyle didn’t know what to say or do, except repeat what he’d heard.
“I think kids are uncomfortable with it and don’t know what to say, so they just don’t say anything,” Susie said. “That’s why it has to be taught bit-by-bit, otherwise it just going to keep going on.”
Susie, a social worker, said that while comments about race did exist in the school her children attended in Michigan, the staff knew how to talk about it so that the children could process how those comments or actions affected other people and so that they knew how to stand up when they heard hurtful words.
When the kids came to Mahomet-Seymour, it was a culture shock.
“It was almost every day that they would come home, and they were upset and scared and hurt and worried.
“When Kaden went to sixth grade, he was actually in tears because he said that the kids were making fun of (a teacher’s) accent. He couldn’t believe it.
“I felt like I was doing them a disservice by letting them be in this environment where they’re learning that racism is okay. I mean that’s what they’re learning when nobody says anything and everybody laughs.”
The Jackson’s spend a lot of time talking about the kids’ thoughts and feelings.
“Kaden went through a stage where he didn’t want to have his name attached to anything,” Susie said. “He didn’t want me to tell the school when he told me stuff. He was afraid.
“Riley has said, ‘I wish my skin wasn’t a color; I wish I could just blend in. They don’t want to be different.
“We keep talking to them, so they’re coming back around to being more like where they were. They feel, I think, a little bit more empowered to stand up.”
Maggie said that she is proud of her children who have stood up for others when racial slurs are spoken at school. Her daughter, Kara, was in a class with a substitute when a boy calling a girl the n-word.
Kara approached the teacher, asking her to step in. When it kept happening, Kara warned the boy that she would smack him if he didn’t stop. The boy ended up being smacked.
Kara went to the principal to tell him what happened, knowing that she would get in trouble. She did get a detention, and the boy was also reprimanded.
“We keep putting the weight on the kids to figure out how to get the support, and it is not on the kids, it is on all of us,” Mindy said. “It is on the schools, it is on the administrators, it’s on the board to make this better for all of our children.”
As a teacher in Urbana for 20 years, Maggie said that the administration and board decision to make racial equality part of the school improvement plan five years ago has been beneficial to everyone in the district.
“I have learned so much,” Maggie said. “I truly believe that this is an essential part of what we are asking for because if the teachers don’t learn to embrace what we’re talking about, then they aren’t going to teach that with authenticity.”
Maggie said that not everyone in the Urbana district was keen on having racial equity be part of their vision. Staff was asked to go back into their childhood to examine when they were first made aware of race.
But the internal work the staff has done has led to teachers being able to have conversations with their students when the color of their skin comes up.
Maggie said that one teacher had to address the class when a student said that brown skin looked like poop.
“She did not stray away from the conversation,” Maggie said. “She leaned into it. She wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s move on to the next thing.’ She was like, “Why do you say that? Why do you feel that way?’ And then they had a whole broad conversation with the entire class contributing and the kids were speaking authentically from them themselves, and she wasn’t shaming them, of course, she was just guiding the conversation.”
But, the conversation may not have happened without the training District 116 provided.
“Until the adults in the school feel like they are competent to have these critical conversations, then they’re not going to have them, and things are just going to keep getting brushed aside,” Maggie said.
Part of the curriculum needs to be in social skills, Susie said. It’s actually part of the state’s educational mandate.
“It ties into how we treat each other, what’s our society’s way of handling our emotions and communicating our dislikes or our uncomfortableness,” she said.
Developing that common language will help students and teachers be equipped with the tools to handle difficult situations.
The ongoing ramifications of allowing racial jokes, racial slurs, and racially insensitive conversations to continue to happen only hurt one group, the children.
“The children who are the children of color are going to be the ones that are left with this feeling of nobody cares enough,” Maggie said.
When John’s daughter entered the Mahomet-Seymour School District, she was placed in honors courses. But over time, her focus drifted away from her studies to “her eating this negative idea” about who the world wanted her to be, according to John.
“Whether it was they wanted her to sit there so they could touch her hair, whether it was she was supposed to be the Ebonics Queen, whether it was that you know she was supposed to be the person who could validate whether they could say these nasty things or not about people, it was painful. It was horrible.”
As eighth-grade students in 2019, LaShunda’s children, Teri and Janae Hall, had a similar experience.
In separate Literature classes, the girls read the 1960 novel “To Kill A Mockingbird.” The story written by Harper Lee follows Scout, Jem and Atticus Finch as during three years of the Great Depression when a black man, Tom Robinson, is accused of raping a young white woman. Tired of waiting for white people to help him regain his freedom, innocent Tom Robinson is shot while trying to escape prison.
The girls’ teachers read the book aloud in class. Janae and Teri also listened to the book at home. That’s when LaShunda heard the n-word being read over and over. According to the teacher LaShunda talked to, the n-word is used 29 times in the text of To Kill A Mockingbird.
Although the teenage girls felt uncomfortable as their teachers and peers read the text aloud, without instructional context or discussion around what they were reading, they didn’t know how to approach the teachers or tell their mother.
As the only black student in each classroom, the girls saw other students’ eyes point toward them each time the word was uttered.
LaShunda did what all mothers in that circumstance would do, she began to advocate for her children and the children within the community.
At student-led conferences, LaShunda approached the teachers, handing them “Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey. One of the teachers, who accepted the book, told the mother that she was concerned that because the issue was being brought forth that To Kill A Mockingbird may not be able to be in the schools anymore because the district “doesn’t like controversial things.”
“I felt at that moment that they just thought it was controversial,” LaShunda said.
LaShunda asked to know more about the unit. She involved the school’s principal, asking questions and to see a lesson plan. The district ELA curriculum shows that students are supposed to learn about “empathy, social, political, and world issues, how to remove barriers, promote change, and be change agents, and how to see things from multiple perspectives or points of view. Students will also explore world, social, society, or community issues and write an argumentative research paper to explain the issue and encourage or bring about change.”
According to the girls, those discussions did not happen. Instead, the lessons focused on the events within the book and grammar correction.
Students were asked to wrap up the unit with a “Tea for Tom”, a student in-class gathering where children dressed up like a character from the book and made a dessert to share.
LaShunda said that the unit focused on developing sympathy instead of empathy. She also offered suggestions on teaching students about rewriting the end of the story through petitioning the governor, writing to the judge, or connecting Tom’s situation with current events that focus on equalities in the judicial system.
The girls did not want to participate in the tea after being through the unit, but they also did not want to be the only ones left out. The girls were given the choice to participate in the tea or to do another assignment on their own.
“I don’t want my child to be alienated,” LaShunda said. “Why would she want to alienate herself? But it makes it hard for me, as a parent, and it makes it doubly hard for a child who has an authority figure to tell her you either have to isolate yourself for the rest of the class, or you do something that makes you uncomfortable.”
Janae and Teri said that they feel like they have to deal with stereotypes often. When a balloon popped in a classroom, a boy asked if that is what it sounded like in the neighborhood they lived in in Chicago.
“Was that what it sounded like at night,” he asked.
“I got so mad I went off on him,” Teri said.
She believes that giving children the opportunity to learn about diversity in public schools is the right place to begin when moving toward racial equality.
“Kids’ brains aren’t fully developed so they can have a change of mind,” she said. “If he knows that what he said was wrong. It’s like that towards Black people, Asian people, Hispanic people, and gay people.
“It’s harder to change an adult’s mind because they’re very different and set in what they know.”
Although the parents have tried to go through the appropriate channels in order to provide a safe environment for their children, they have felt like there’s a lot of rhetoric with little action.
Maggie and Susie finally decided to approach the board of education in Nov., asking the district to educate all children, especially white children, to address racism directly in the school system.
“Our experiences as a bi-racial family regarding race continually impact our feelings of safety, my children’s developing racial identities and have caused us to question whether this community has a place for us,” Susie said. “I could share the countless things we have experienced, but it would be too heartbreaking and take too long.”
Hall asked the women and LaShunda, who was present at the board meeting, to meet with her privately. The women advocated for teachers training and a community committee to begin the process.
Being so close to the holidays, Hall suggested that the process begin in Jan. 2020. When Susie asked about the committee in Jan., she was told that one would be started in the spring.
Jackson said that the committee keeps getting pushed further and further down the road.
The parents believed that when a Mahomet-Seymour alumni group banded together to ask more from the school district they grew up in, change would happen.
The alumni asked the board of education to guide changes in diversity through policies and curriculum.
“While we value the public education we received and lessons we learned, we cannot ignore the curriculum gaps and harmful pedagogical practices which also accompanied our education at Mahomet Seymour,” the alumni wrote.
“Our K-12 education did not prepare us to recognize, acknowledge, or engage with the current and historical social injustices in our society, nor were we prepared to enter a diverse, global workforce. Additionally, various lesson plans, assignments, and the framing of historical events and timelines of our nation have further contributed, likely unintentionally but with a negative impact nonetheless, to the social injustices of our society.
“While it is true that Mahomet and the surrounding communities have historically been, and continue to be, predominately white, there is no excuse for the District to not engage students in meaningful, developmentally appropriate education about power, race, and privilege.”
Maggie thought that the alumni petition, signed by over 600 alumni, and the policy put forward were spot on.
“It came from people who graduated from the school district not too long ago,” Maggie said. “ They were not prepared to go out into the world outside of Mahomet after they graduated. They did not feel prepared to engage in communities that were diverse and workforces or colleges that were diverse.”
With a few changes to the alumni’s policy proposal, Hall put forth that she believed the district should adopt the policy. Prior to the discussion, board members Jeremy Henrichs and Lori Larson gave statements that centered around the Declaration of Independence’s promise of “all men are created equal” and Jesus saying “love your neighbor as yourself” in the Book of Matthew.
Board member Meghan Hennesy put forth a motion that the board of education should develop a community committee that would focus on diversity to help the board through future plans.
“I thought it was an amazing idea to have this community involvement and get everyone involved from the board level, and really figure out some solutions,” Mindy said.
The board of education voted the measure down 4-3 with Merle Giles, Lori Larson, Max McComb, and Jeremy Henrichs in opposition.
“It was totally deflating that nothing happened.”
“They’re not listening to the people in the schools. They were not listening to everyone because if they weren’t listening to everyone, they would have responded differently, and they would have been more open to community-based solutions,”.”
John said that part of the problem is that the board never hears about the bullying and incidents that happen within the district.
“I would love it if every single racial incident, every single bullying incident, every single incident where somebody is affected or assaulted because of their gender goes straight to the board,” he said. “If they are not seeing these issues, it’s because the administration in the schools is muffling it.”
“There are people hurting,” Maggie said. “There are people telling you, their stories and they’re telling you that they’re hurting.”
Susie whose face looked desolate on the board of education video as she watched the discussion said that the vote was devastating.
“It was a complete blow to the gut like I just didn’t think that we were that far behind. I mean, I thought that we have made some progress,” she said.
Susie knows that there are teachers within the district who want to be trained so that they can make the environment better for all students.
“I’ve had teachers call me, I have friends that work in the district,” Susie said. “They are dying to participate, to grow, to learn, to share the information that they have. Literally, if the board and the superintendent are the barrier, they’re preventing the staff who know what they’re doing and want to learn and want to work. They’re preventing them from doing the work.
“We have smart teachers, so they could handle this. They could get this together. This is not something that would be hard to do. It just needs to be allowed.”
She liked the idea of a board-led community committee to address diversity issues because she said that lack of diversity in any community is a community issue.
“If the community is not involved, it’s only going to be half hearted,” Susie said.
“Getting the community in on the ground level, and having them work together to say, what are the problems, what are the things that we could address, how can the community come together and work with the board and work with the administration to help to really get that change, moving; you have to get the members of that committee in on the ground level.”
The parents said that they are not going to give up, though. They know that there is so much to lose for their children and for other children in the community.
“We keep trying to enact change,” Mindy said. “And we keep trying to help the kids.
“I will still keep reaching out to Dr. Hall,, and we will keep talking to the school board.”
LaShunda and Susie would like to see a group started for children of color in the Mahomet-Seymour community.
“It is really hard to be a person of color in this community and to be alone and to figure out how to handle these things,” Susie said.
“I hope that at some point, if Mahomet gets far enough down the road to where they ever even acknowledge this, they will consider what can we do to help our children of color to get support from each other?”
Incoming freshmen Janae and Teri are scared to go back to school this fall.
Over the summer Janae has lost a few friends because of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Teri said that knowing that the news and conversations are racially charged, she feels like she will be the center of jokes and conversation as students gather back together.
Knowing that her children’s grades slid in all grades after the To Kill A Mockingbird unit, LaShunda is considering not sending her girls to Mahomet-Seymour in the fall.
“I’m afraid that when they go back, it’s still going to drop,” LaShunda said. “Or it’s going to get worse.”
She worries, though, that not knowing the situation her children went through last fall, other school districts may look at their last semester grades and judge them, instead of looking at the A’s and B’s in the years prior.
Whether or not the girls go back to school, LaShunda said there is still work to do at home and in the community.
“I just have to love them,” she said. “And hopefully strengthen them.
“When they go to bed, they don’t feel secure. They’re afraid. They’re like, ‘Mommy, what if somebody does this and that?
“My children are still hurting from this.”
LaShunda also knows that this is a moment when something can be changed for her children and the children to come after them, too.
“I know that something has to happen,” she said. “I want them to be able to say, ‘I made this happen.’ I want them to know that they can do anything. So I’m still hopeful.”
