School district has a one-year, $150,000 contract with consultant for antiracism audit and trainings, staff recognizing their ‘culpability in uploading whiteness,’ and ‘affinity spaces for Black students.’
Incidents
The West Contra Costa Unified School District approved a one-year contract with Harvest Consulting on August 2, 2023, for $150,000 to train administrators and staff in recognizing their “culpability in uploading whiteness,” “curate affinity spaces for Black students and Black leaders,” and for the school board to “interrogate racist board policies and disrupt weaponized whiteness.”
According to documents provided with the contract, the consultant “Work Strands & Action Plan” includes antiracism audits, monthly antiracism training and meeting sessions, a student antiracism summit, and district leadership and school board antiracism training.
The “Detailed Timeline, Outcomes, and Fees Year One” document states that outcomes will include curating “affinity groups for leaders of color,” building “awareness around antiracism change model,” and “employee groups begin to recognize their culpability in uploading whiteness.”
Other outcomes include “participation from at least 200 students of color around creating and developing antiracist school site goals,” “Black and Brown student perspectives around racialized harm” in district, “senior leaders, school site leaders, and school board leaders begin understanding their culpability in upholding whiteness,” that “‘Anti-Blackness’ is used in the WCCUSD lexicon and nomenclature,” “school site personnel participate in conversations around whiteness and antiblackness,” “school site personnel commit to eradicating racial harm for students of color,” “curate affinity spaces for Black students and Black leaders,” and that “school board members commit to interrogate racist board policies and disrupt weaponized whiteness.”
Harvest Consulting’s Anti-Racist Leadership Development Specialist Rachelle Rogers-Ard ran a session at the 2023 Hawai’i International Conference on Education titled “Why Educational Leadership Ain’t Educational: Castigating the Wackness of Whiteness.”
In 2023, Rogers-Ard co-published an article titled Critical Race Teacher Leadership: Leading Antiracist Systems Change. The abstract states that “antiracist systems change must continually counteract the Whiteness of schools.”
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