Writing a Letter to Your School’s Administration: A Seven Step Plan
Yesterday, one of our head editors, Aisha Baiocchi, along with two Hunter College High School Students, Chloë Rollock and Durga Sreenivasan, published a guide to writing a letter to your school’s administration. We published an example of this kind of letter on Saturday, the letter from the students of the High School of American Studies to the administration about diversity and race. This guide provides seven steps to producing a similar letter for your school, along with examples, templates, and the resources we relied on while writing our own. Feel free to reach out to any of the authors, their emails can be found at the bottom of the letter.
Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dfZ4bmAcvsZdD--xchIMhP2m4PD8zwOFZtZW0NbLdt4/edit
The letter is also posted down below:
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June 2020
Writing a Letter to Your School’s Administration: A Seven Step Plan to Diversify Your School’s Curriculum, Culture, and Community
On a fundamental level, letters like the ones the student authors wrote should not be necessary. Education, specifically public education, is meant to propel all students towards academic excellence, no matter their socioeconomic or racial status, gender, sexuality, or anything else. But, as we all know, this is not the case.
Our segregated school system creates a variety of problems in each individual school, which tend to be more detrimental to students of color and/or low socioeconomic status than to their white peers. Despite their intentions, administrators and teachers often either fail to see these problems or fail to be active in solving them. This failure ultimately puts the onus upon the student body, often the students of color, to address them and begin to create change. While this is inherently unfair to students—whose job in school should only be to learn and grow—change will not come if student leaders do not speak up and put pressure on the systems (especially the administrators) which continue to allow this systemic failure to continue.
At the Hunter College High School (Manhattan) and the High School of American Studies (Bronx), this student led process began with letters. In our letters, we asked for change and explained how we wanted it to happen. Though it is an ongoing process, the act of writing the letter and making a statement was powerful for both schools. This document shares the step we took to produce the letters along with some of the resources we used. Hopefully, it serves as a tool that you can modify to fit the individual needs of your school and begin to confront the deeply rooted issues that caused them.
We understand that the schools within our city and state are different, and that the biggest issues may vary from school to school. The authors of this document come from specialized high schools, which have the tendency of being overwhelmingly white-washed (in student body, curriculum, faculty, and pretty much all facets of the school climate), which is why we have placed emphasis on things such as admissions and student climate.
Don’t hesitate to disregard some of the suggestions in this outline; the most effective letter you can produce will be one that is SCHOOL-specific. However, all schools in NYC, NY state, and the entire US need to improve their:
Curriculum:
Too often is POC voice/history not included or simply labeled as secondary to the very Euro-centric majority of curricula. This is unfair not only to the students of color who don’t get the chance to see themselves in their curriculum, but to all students who are being taught an incomplete history.
Faculty & Administration representation:
The teaching force of our nation is overwhelmingly white, leaving POC students with few role models and authority figures who can understand and meet their specific needs.
A school climate supportive of students of color:
This can vary the most from school to school, but there is no doubt that our schools need to do more to support students of color and create an actively anti-racist culture and community.
Below is a description of how to start and follow-through with your letter-writing process:
Gather a leadership team of DIVERSE students to begin the letter writing process! Make sure as many voices and minorities are heard throughout your efforts for a more equitable environment. It is also crucial that this letter takes into account the needs of all of the underrepresented communities within your school - this is one miniscule part of the ongoing, intersectional fight we all must be a part of.
Including younger students in this process is essential for their input and perspectives
Make sure to establish which members of the group will be communicating directly with the administration
Decide on your end goals and what the letter will do for your school - set clear attainable goals and be prepared to explain and defend them. See Step 7 for suggestions to pursue conversations with your school’s administration.
Be prepared to defend and thoroughly plan out each goal you have. The specifics may change as you do more research and collect more opinions, but your goals should be defined.
Collect information city-specific and also state-wide information
Research (sources we used listed below!):
School-Specific Information also needs to be found in order to get at the key issues within your school environment (more general information will only go so far, this is really the heart of the information)
Studies and papers by experts to provide a backing for your claim that diversity is important, and better for your school environment
Suggestions for how they can continuously rework and be critical of curriculum, to ensure that it is culturally responsive
Gather student testimonies and anecdotes - make sure to reach out to students of all grades!
Here are some of the resources we used while writing ours:
GENERAL:
Why we must diversify:
Two documents about how students work better in a diverse environment https://he.kendallhunt.com/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/Kendall_Hunt/Content/Higher_Education/Uploads/Henson_Eller_Ed_Psych_2e_Ch1.pdf
Speaking to culturally responsive classrooms
https://guides.library.pdx.edu/c.php?g=527355&p=3623937
Advice for how to go about inclusivity training/ tackling the cultural aspect by a student led advisory group
Article talking about the benefit of POC groups/organizations for strengthening academic communities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/253956
“Standardized Testing and School Segregation: like Tinder for Fire?” Race
Ethnicity and Education :
https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2015.1121474
Four Nation-wide Case Studies of Schools That Have Baked Diversity Into Their School Design
“Black Teachers Improve Outcomes for Black Students” U.S. News
Resources for your school/faculty to use:
“Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12, Multicultural, Anti-Racist Education and Staff Development,” Teaching For Change: https://www.teachingforchange.org/books/our-publications/beyond-heroes-and-holidays
“What We Do,” The Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning:
https://www.culturallyresponsive.org/what-we-do.
“About Teaching Tolerance,” Teaching Tolerance: https://www.tolerance.org/about.
NYU Resource: Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard:
https://research.steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/resources/culturally-responsive-scorecard
NY STATE-SPECIFIC
Really long comprehensive New York State Education Department paper about diversity - we highly recommend looking through the subsections:
NYS Spring 2019 State Test Equity Assessment:
CITY-SPECIFIC:
“School Diversity in NYC,” New York City Council.
https://council.nyc.gov/data/school-diversity-in-nyc/
“Policy Implications of Specialized High School” Paper by CUNY Professor Johanathan Taylor, M, Phil
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2168&context=gc_etds
“DOE data at a glance”
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/reports/doe-data-at-a-glance
"Too Many Asians at this School": Racialized Perceptions and Identity Formation - Jenny Tsai, Harvard (some sections about NYC elite HSs)
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abed/aae643efcc81185643308515397b94bbc2a0.pdf
Discovery Program Information:
Eliza Shapiro, “Segregation Has Been the Story of New York City’s Schools for 50 Years,” New York Times, March 26, 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/nyregion/school-segregation-new-york.html
SCHOOL-SPECIFIC:
Diverse Teacher Organizations/Programs
https://www.educatordiversity.org/what-we-do/#our_approach
With this information, you can now write the bulk of your letter. Here is a simple outline for inspiration/guidance:
Our examples: HCHS Letter , HSAS Letter
Condensed statement highlighting your school’s history
Page (or two) of student demands stated plainly
Include a deadline for a response from your administration to set up a meeting
Body
Organize by sectioning off information into a few main sections (i.e. Admissions, Curriculum, Faculty, Student Climate, etc.)
Establish the issues seen within each section and then follow this with student suggestions/demands to fix these issues (should align with part iii’s plain-stated demands)
Conclusion
Student Anecdote Section
Also included throughout the letter
Once the letter is completed, have a few trusted teachers have read through and fact-checked before publicizing - they know the inner-workings of your school’s administration better than any of us do!
Publicize letter!
A letter should clearly state your goals and reasons/be a rough outline of what you hope to achieve
It’s important to getting support and to make an initial statement
Include the letter that we wrote along with some explanation of how we publicized
Collect Signatures
You can use this template to create the google form for your own school! Copy the google form template below [click three dots next to the “send” button on the top right → click “Make a copy”]
Follow through with conversation with the administration
The letter can only do so much; it will allow for you to garner enough power/support to institute effective change within your school, but you need to be prepared to follow-up on this letter
Suggestions for next steps (can also be used as demands):
Get supporting groups (parents, alums, maybe even teachers) to make their own statements of support (can be much shorter)
Establish a school leadership team which will maintain the voice of the students throughout the school year. Make sure that this team is inclusive of underrepresented students and is connected to the entire student body.
A team or council meant to represent the interests of the student body can do a lot to hold the administration and other students responsible. Though it may vary depending on the needs of your school, they can work with teachers and administrators throughout the school year to address issues as they happen.
Work with teachers/departments to fix current student-identified holes/issues with curricula
Demand current curricula/syllabi per grade OR the school’s core curriculum, and take notes on what must be added for a representative as well as culturally responsive curricula (You can take a look at our letters for examples of the concepts you want to include, listed in Step 4)
Work with student leaders to find measures that the student body can take to create a more anti-racist school environment (w/o administrative approval)
Student unions and cultural clubs are also imperative to this process. If these organizations don’t exist or the systems to create them are unnecessarily complicated, changing that is another possible next step.
Request for information and transparency
Ask to understand faculty hiring through reaching out to department chairs, and how they can be fixed
Meaning, how many POC teachers are applying
Email us if you have any questions! We are happy to set up a call to help
Aisha Baiocchi
bee.aisha333@gmail.com
Chloë Rollock
chloerollock@hunterschools.org
Durga Sreenivasan
durgasreenivasan@hunterschools.org
