THOMPSON continued from Page 6 By Rebekah Schroeder
To better uplift students with multicultural backgrounds, Clifton J. Thompson, III, heads the latest department in charge of change at Lawrence Township Public Schools. He is the new director of equity, diversity and inclusion, a position created just for him. The job, which looks to take on matters of empowerment as well as promoting acceptance, is tailormade for the former teacher, current administrator and Englewood native. “It’s about understanding how we all feed and play off of each other,” Thompson said. “If we believe we’re all human beings worthy and valued and belong in this space in our communities, even if we’re going through a rough patch and a tough time, we’ll get treated with value and concern, because there’s very few humans that don’t go through a rough patch, through a tough time. That’s about what this work is about.” He is also serving as the district’s affirmative action officer and Title IX Coordinator with a 25-year career in varying levels of education. At the beginning of July, he began to work towards his future goals of an improved, welcoming Lawrence. Thompson grew up in Englewood, and in seventh grade, his mother, a lawyer, received a promotion in California. They moved there, but when his mother died during his senior year of high school, his grandmother came and stayed until his graduation from Crespi Carmelite High School in Encino. Thompson has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Hampton University and a master’s degree in urban education from New Jersey City University, which comes with a specialization in administration and supervision. He will be enrolled again this year for his doctorate at Seton Hall. He played football in college, just like his son would too. Inspired, Thompson wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps rather than set off on his own path. “The only thing I did not listen to my mother about was to major in physical education,” he said. “She told me that my love for sports, and helping people
do better in sports, was aligned with being a physical education teacher that coached, and if I did that, I probably wouldn’t work a day in my life, because I would just enjoy what I was doing.” Rather than pursuing that passion, Thompson started teaching different grades with plans of applying to law school in the future. Education pulled him in a direction that he never expected. “It’s something about seeing a child learn something, discover something, and when you’ve had a role in that learning or discovering, it becomes infectious. You just want to do it again, and see it happen again, and again, and again, and you just can’t get enough because it’s just a wonderful thing to experience,” he said. He was doing what he loved, but with two of his own children to raise, Thompson made the transition into administration rather than stay in the traditional teaching environment. “Even though the classroom was really fulfilling, the pay scale didn’t provide for growth in a way that was going to allow me to do [it] for my children and their extracurricular activities,” he said. “I did what I wanted to do as a father, along with raising two healthy, smart, kind, loving, caring, young adults. It was that he recognized that I was there for him,” Thompson said of the significance. “But I also recognize there were times in school districts where I didn’t feel that they were treated appropriately, and I was an educator. It’s like, if my kids can run into situations where they’re not treated right, where they’re made to feel as if they don’t belong, then there has to be other children that are feeling worse.” Wanting to help from his background in a classroom, Thompson became a consultant for Collaborative Equity Solutions and CREED Strategies. “Sometimes, those things are done by who we would consider ‘good people,’” he said. “It’s just that you don’t realize sometimes what you’re doing when you’re trying to make several decisions in a moment for several different children or students, and you end up working on what we call ‘autopilot,’ and then a bad decision was
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