33 minute read
Discovery process dragging in Cantwell case
BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER
The large number of cases associated with the Capitol Riot Jan. 6 is causing some hiccups in the case of Lewis Easton Cantwell, a 35-year-old Sylva resident facing federal charges for his alleged actions that day.
“I have to actually get in line to have that (discovery) produced to defense council,” Frederick Walton Yette of the U.S. Attorney’s Office told U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan during an April 20 hearing. “So while I produced what I think are probably the most important documents for Mr. Cantwell’s case and that I relied upon to actually bring charges, there is additional discovery to produce, and I just can’t say exactly when that would happen given the process.”
Due to the number of defendants, the magnitude of videos and images, and the overlap in evidence for cases stemming from the events of Jan. 6, it will take time to fully complete the discovery process. Yette told Sullivan that his office has developed a formalized discovery process for the Jan. 6 cases.
More than 400 people have been arrested in relation to the riot. Cantwell’s case is being heard by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., but due to the ongoing pandemic the April 20 hearing was held via Zoom, with a call-in line available to the public.
“I guess we just have to wait, unfortunately, given the circumstances with the case and the investigation the government is carrying on,” said A. Eduardo Balarezo, who is representing Cantwell.
The parties agreed to waive provisions of federal law aimed at recognizing defendants’ rights to a speedy trial in order to allow enough time to wrap up discovery. Sullivan scheduled Cantwell’s next hearing for noon Tuesday, June 22 via Zoom.
The influx of Jan. 6 cases is also complicating defendants’ ability to comply with the terms of their release. At the beginning of the April 20 hearing, Sullivan admonished Cantwell for violating his terms, and after setting the June 22 date he asked whether Cantwell had any questions about those terms.
Cantwell replied that the violation consisted of failure to check in with the pretrial office, as he is required to do on a weekly basis. But he told Sullivan that he had tried his best to meet that requirement. “I went to call on a Friday, and the line was backed up for Lewis Easton Cantwell hours,” he said. “I called every hour. I have phone records of it too, where I called and called and I just couldn’t get through.”
Pretrial Officer Christine Schuck, who works out of the office Cantwell is required to call into but is not his case manager, told Sullivan that the large volume of Jan. 6 cases combined with the pandemic protocols have presented a challenge. The sole person now working in the office sometimes answers 100 calls per day.
“If we were back in the office, multiple people can answer it, but right now given the pandemic one person is able to answer that one line,” she said. “Pre-pandemic times it was much different.”
Cantwell is being charged with six counts related to his alleged conduct Jan. 6 that carry a combined maximum sentence of 28 years. In a February interview with The Smoky Mountain News, Cantwell maintained that he was innocent of criminal wrongdoing.
ALE conducts statewide enforcement operation
In recognition of Alcohol Awareness Month, ALE special agents concluded a statewide enforcement operation on Friday resulting in over 200 persons charged and seizures of alcoholic beverages, drugs, firearms and cash.
Across the eight districts, ALE special agents worked collectively to reduce alcohol related crimes and addressed problematic, high-crime areas around ABC-licensed and unlicensed illegal businesses. These concentrated efforts resulted in the service of two search warrants and the seizure of two firearms, a vehicle, various illegal controlled substances, and U.S. Currency. The offenses included 176 alcoholic beverage related charges, 136 drug related charges, as well as 64 felony charges.
“ALE’s primary mission is to reduce alcohol related crimes and proactively reduce crime around establishments where alcoholic beverages are sold,” said Israel Morrow, Assistant Director for Operations of Alcohol Law Enforcement. “By partnering with sheriffs and police chiefs around the State, we’re able to maximize our efforts, connect with our communities and make these locations safer for North Carolinians.”
Throughout the state, 28 ABC permitted businesses were discovered to be in violation of state laws and regulations. ALE special agents will submit violation reports to the North Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission documenting the criminal and regulatory violations which could result in fines, suspensions, or revocations of ABC permits.
The statewide enforcement operation was focused in Brunswick, Caswell, Craven, Dare, Davidson, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Jackson, Johnston, Mecklenburg, New Hanover, Pender, Pitt, Rockingham, Union, Vance, and Wake Counties.
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written by Ingles Dietitian Leah McGrath
NutrieNt DeNse versusCalorie DeNse
Have you heard the term "nutrient dense"? This often means something very different than calorie dense. A food or beverage that is nutrient dense is a good source of nutrients like protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and fiber. A food that is calorie dense is a good source of calories- but usually not a good source of nutrients, or the nutrients may be overwhelmed by the amount of fat, sugar and sodium. Hereare someexamples:
Nutrient dense Calorie Dense Apple Apple pie 3 oz cooked baked chicken Fried chicken nuggets with sauce Baked potato French fries 8 oz glass of milk 12 oz sugar-sweetened soda
Make more of your choices NUTRIENT dense - rather than CALORIE dense!
Leah McGrath, RDN, LDN
Ingles Market Corporate Dietitian @InglesDietitian Leah McGrath - Dietitian 800.334.4936
North Carolina ‘driving’ toward more diverse corps of educators
BY CORY VAILLANCOURT POLITICS EDITOR
North Carolina’s population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse every day, but according to a report issued by Gov. Roy Cooper’s DRIVE Task Force, its educators don’t nearly reflect that diversity.
The DRIVE report, which stands for “Developing a Representative and Inclusive Vision for Education,” was issued this past Jan. 1 after Cooper called for a task force that was eventually convened in May 2020.
The report shows that for the 2018-19 school year, more than 50 percent of students in NC schools were of a racially or ethnically distinct background, while only about 20 percent of educators were.
Although that’s not a surprise given the legacy of segregated education in the United States — particularly in the South — Dr. Anthony Graham, provost at Winston-Salem State University and chair of the task force, says it’s still a problem for students of all ethnicities.
“Research shows that all students, but particularly students of color, experience benefits when taught by teachers of color,” Graham writes in a preface to the report. “Students experience not only significant academic outcomes but positive impacts relative to college aspirations and self-confidence.”
The DRIVE report goes on to list a number of goals that would provide a workforce of educators that’s more reflective of the students they teach, including increasing the number educators of color in the pipeline by at least 15 percent each year.
“Data illustrate that people of color become educators at lower rates than their white peers,” Graham writes.
Recommendations from the task force to address the supply of educators of color include offering affordable postsecondary access through scholarships, bolstering student loan forgiveness and tuition reimbursement programs and making diversity goals part of the key performance metrics for schools and school districts.
Another goal outlined in the report stresses the importance of retaining at least 95 percent of the state’s educators of color each year, because Graham says that educators of color also leave the profession at higher rates than their peers.
That retention level could be achieved by strengthening support networks for educators of color and providing professional development opportunities that can sustain pathways for advancement in the field.
Even as some Western North Carolina locals can look back on desegregation in their own schools, others in The Smoky Mountain News coverage area — like a group of educators at Western Carolina University — are now looking toward the future, attempting to take meaningful action that will “drive” the state toward higher academic achievement for all students.
Committed to movement
WCU professors push for diversity in education
BY JESSI STONE NEWS EDITOR
Professors at Western Carolina University are tired of just talking about the importance of diversity within the teaching industry and are committed to turning all the talk into meaningful movement forward. A group of female professors, directors and deans have come together at WCU to implement the Call Me MISTER (Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models) program, a national program that aims to increase the number of Black male educators within a region. The program originated at Clemson University and now it’s incorporated into every public institution in South Carolina. Since 2013, it has resulted in a 40 percent increase in the number of Black male teachers in South Carolina public elementary schools. Nine other states utilize the program, and WCU faculty is proud to be the first university in North Carolina to do so.
Kim Winter, dean of the College of Education and Allied Professions, said there is a nationwide effort to increase workplace diversity and also a statewide effort solidified in 2019 when Gov. Roy Cooper signed an executive order establishing a task force to develop a representative and inclusive vision for public education. “I think there’s this sort of a honed-in specific focus on what we want to do here at Western Carolina and the impact that we want to make on the field of education, but also on our region in Western North Carolina,” Winter said. “But also, I think there’s a really great connection to big picture stuff that’s going on all around the country, specifically in our state.” The task force released a report in January that outlines 10 specific recommendations and calls on legislators, K-12 school systems, educator preparation program directors, etc., to make some changes toward improving diversity. “All of this stems from this idea that right now there are only two to three educators of color for every 10 students in the state. Those are disparate numbers — that’s easy to see — and we really want to make a difference in that,” Winter said. “We want there to be more teachers of color. We want students to be able to interact with people who may come from the same background as them, who may have the same race or ethnicity. We also want all of our children and our students here at the university to be able to become educated and live and learn in an environment that’s much more diverse than it is in some areas of the state.”
Charmion Rush, assistant professor of Inclusive and Special Education at WCU, said she realized more diversity programs were needed when she was the only person of color within her department and that there weren’t any people of color in the program that was supposed to be inclusive. As a member of WCU’s accreditation committee, Rush said she understands the importance of student and teacher diversity to the university.
“I was very interested about what programs we could implement because I know Western in general is big on inclusive excellence,” she said. “I know that the idea is there, but until now I hadn’t seen action behind it. I dug a little deeper to find out that we have a lot of projects that were already in the mix, but simply again, it hadn’t come to fruition.”
A report issued by the DRIVE task force says N.C.’s educators don’t sufficiently reflect
classroom diversity. File photo
particularly isolated.
“Not many men of color consider this (education) a profession worth coming into for many reasons,” she said.
When asked why focus on a program specifically for Black males and not all people of color, Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford, an associate professor in the College of Education and Allied Professions Human Services, said Black men are not doing well compared to their peers across the education spectrum.
“If that is suspensions and expulsions, if it is achievement, if it is placement in special education, Black men tend to get the short end of the stick,” she said.
When you start to unpack some of those issues, she said, research shows that part of why this happens is because teachers with different cultural backgrounds can perceive the behaviors of young Black men as aberrant or abnormal.
“But if you have more Black men in those spaces who can look at and interpret those behaviors and see giftedness in a little chatty boy instead of problematic behavior, you would have different outcomes,” HinnantCrawford said.
While it is expected that a majority of students will be “minoritized” by 2024, Hinnant-Crawford said it is also expected 80
Local story remains largely untold
BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER
For Lin Forney, the end of fourth grade was the end of an era.
The year was 1963, and the world was changing. Nine years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision struck down the “separate-but-equal” precedent that allowed racial segregation in schools, and the Civil Rights movement was spurring change — or at least talk of it — in communities across the South. Now, that change was coming home to Haywood County. The schools were desegregating.
Before integration, Forney attended the all-Black Pigeon Street School, which now houses the Pigeon Community Multicultural Development Center, of which Forney is executive director. Her teachers and classmates were also her neighbors in the closeknit community that was her world. She loved it.
“It was just one big community whether you were in school or at church or at home,” she said. “Your path crossed with all the people in the community. If you were in trouble, your parents heard it faster than you could get home to try to dispute anything.”
The school was small and underfunded, with only three teachers for the couple dozen kids enrolled in grades one through six. Each year, students had to sign their names on the inside cover of their “new” textbooks. Forney remembers how the covers were always full of the names of kids they’d never met, white kids whose books had made their way to the Black school after years of use.
But Forney still loved the school — the community she felt with her classmates; the way the teachers invested in her, believed in her. In her memory, they were always willing to do whatever it took to make sure that the kids understood their lessons, even if it meant staying after school.
In fifth grade, everything changed. Forney went to the formerly all-white Central Elementary School, but even though the rest of her Pigeon School classmates were there too, she rarely saw them. They were all in different classes.
Except for one substitute teacher in high school, Forney never had a Black teacher again.
“I know that people thought that integration was better for everybody as a whole, but to be quite honest, I don’t think it was the best for Blacks,” she said. “I feel like we lost a lot in that changeover.”
Losing the role models she’d had in the Pigeon School’s teachers left a hole. It always seemed like the white teachers expected her to be less academically able, just by looking at her.
“I think I felt less than, just simply because I had no mentors right there to look at, to say, ‘We got this. You can do this,’” said Forney. “Encouragement wasn’t often given, and I think it’s just a fact that I didn’t feel that investment in my education by the white teachers.”
WHAT ABOUT THE TEACHERS?
When political leaders in the Civil Rights Era talked about integration, they were mostly talking about putting Black students into classrooms within formerly all-white schools — not about welcoming white students into Black schools, or about melding the staffs of the then-separate educational systems. In most cases, the Black schools were shuttered or turned into support buildings.
According to a 2009 journal article in Ethnic and Racial Studies titled “The Impact of Desegregation on Black Teachers in the Metropolis, 1970-2000,” after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision 38,000 Black teachers and administrators in 21 Southern and bordering states lost their jobs.
“With integration, all they wanted to do was integrate the kids,” said Carrie Rogers, an associate professor in Western Carolina University’s School of Teaching and Learning. “They didn’t think about the teachers.”
It’s still a bit of a mystery how that played out locally. How many Black teachers were there in Western North Carolina prior to integration, and how many were offered jobs with the integrated school system? How many accepted those jobs, and how many kept them?
“No one knows,” said Rogers. “We know where the kids went. The teachers are harder to track down.”
The answers are hidden in paper Board
of Education archives and library microfiche, and Rogers recently launched a research project aiming to uncover Jackson County’s local story.
Libba Feichter, now 81 years old, was in her early 20s when she began working as a traveling music teacher for Haywood County Schools, giving weekly lessons at many of the smaller elementary schools across the county. Pigeon School was one of them.
“James Bryant, who was the principal at the Pigeon School, was so good to work with and such a remarkable leader,” she recalls. Though she was the only one in the room who wasn’t Black, she always felt welcome.
Feichter visited Pigeon School for only a year before integration and continued to teach in the school system afterward. Black teachers were offered jobs in the county after their schools closed down, she said.
“They were not just dumped,” she said. “I can guarantee you that. A lot of them stayed.”
How long they stayed, though, is a different question. This all happened a long time ago, but Forney is rather certain that many Black teachers left the school system soon after integration.
Regardless, they certainly faced obstacles.
In a 2017 interview recorded for WCU’s Oral History Collection, Scotland native Norma Kimzey spoke of her friendship with Elsie Osborne, who taught the combined first/second grade class at Pigeon School and transferred to Hazelwood Elementary School after integration. In 1968, Kimzey taught first grade and Osborne taught second. Their grades took recess at the same time, and the two would chat while their students played. When the students lined up to go inside, Kimzey noticed that Osborne had fewer kids in her class, despite the fact that every other teacher was “loaded up.”
“One day we were all out on the playground, and these first graders that I had — they say everything and anything to you — and this little boy came up to me and he said, ‘My daddy said I’m not going in that lady’s class next year.’ And I thought, that’s why she doesn’t have a full load of kids,” Kimzey said.
Over the next three years Kimzey worked there, things changed. She began to notice more and more kids in Osborne’s classes. But she did not notice an increase in Black teachers. She recalls meeting only one other Black teacher while in Haywood County, a former Reynolds High School teacher named Wilbur Eggleston who taught at Pisgah High School.
EDUCATOR DIVERSITY
The Reynolds High School Class of 1962 poses for a photo. In the front row serving as “mascots” are Nicky Davis and an unnamed female student. In the front row are (from left) Stanley Gibbs, Betty Ruth Sheppard and Raymond J. Sheppard. In the back row are (from left) Henry Dorsey, Charles Vincent Thompson and Charles Simpson. Photo courtesy Haywood County Public Library History
Collection for research and educational purposes
STRUGGLES WITH ACCESS
If Black teachers lost their jobs or stopped teaching, it likely wasn’t because they weren’t up to snuff with expectations at the formerly white schools. In fact, WCU History Professor Elizabeth McRae said that at the time of integration, Black teachers in North Carolina had a higher average level of educational attainment than their white counterparts. It’s hard to say exactly why this was the case, but McRae has some thoughts.
“In part, North Carolina had a pretty strong higher education system for African Americans as opposed to some other states,” she said. “And I think that teaching was a really good job, particularly in a segregated world where a lot of professional economic opportunities were closed off to Black women and men. In the Jim Crow era, education was a path to real economic security, and there was a deep value for education.”
It’s unknown how many of the teachers in Western North Carolina’s segregated schools came to the area originally. Rogers believes that many of them likely came from somewhere else, for the simple reason that in the local area there were woefully few opportunities for Black students to receive even a high school education, and none for college.
WNC behind state average in educator diversity
BY HANNAH MCLEOD STAFF WRITER
North Carolina has about 1.5 million public school students, and according to a report from the Department of Public Instruction, 52.3 percent are minority students, while only 20.5 percent of teachers are minorities.
It’s a disparity Gov. Roy Cooper hopes to improve with the creation of the DRIVE (Develop a Representative and Inclusive Vision for Education) Task Force, which he created in 2019 to work toward increasing diversity in education.
According to the task force’s report issued in January 2021, studies have shown that teachers of color improve the test scores of all students. There is also evidence to suggest that students of color are less likely to drop out if they have a teacher of color.
Using data on North Carolina public school students, a 2017 study found that having a Black teacher in elementary school leads to a 31% decrease in the high school dropout rate for Black high school students and a 39% decrease for the most disadvantaged Black male students. In addition, the study found that exposure to a Black teacher in elementary school raised college aspirations for these students and their probability
INTEGRATION, CONTINUED FROM 7
West of Asheville, Reynolds High School in Canton was the only standalone high school for Black students. While the Central Consolidated School in Sylva began offering high school classes in the 1940s, correspondence between Principal William Wade and state administrators indicate that situation was tenuous at best.
In a letter dated Feb. 2, 1938, Wade wrote N.C. Division of Negro Education Director Dr. N.C. Newbold to ask that the school be allowed to keep the five teachers currently on staff. At the time, the school enrolled only 106 students but served grades one through 10. Wade hoped to add eleventh grade classes the following year. It seems he was allowed to keep the teachers and add a grade, because in a letter dated April 3, 1949, Wade asked N.C. State Board of Education Chairman Hiden Ramsey for a sixth teacher so that students could receive a four-year high school education.
“There is an urgent need that we have six teachers so as to offer four years of high school to the students in these two counties,” he wrote. “Failing to do so causes 95 percent of them to stop school after fishing the tenth grade.” of taking a college entrance exam.
Much of the research on what makes this difference comes down to expectations. Researchers have found that minority teachers are more likely to have high expectations for minority students. Minority students are usually more sensitive to teacher expectations than their white counterparts.
Research also shows that minority students are more likely to be punished than their peers for the same misconduct, due to teacher interpretations of student behavior, informed by racial biases, conscious or unconscious. However, minority students are less likely to be punished at a higher rate than their white peers by minority teachers.
Researchers believe this is due to less racial bias and higher expectations for academic performance and behavior for minority students from minority teachers. Research shows that disciplinary incidents can have long-term consequences for student achievement.
At the local level, diversity rates among educators in Western North Carolina are far lower than the state average. According to the Department of Public Instruction, Jackson County Schools employed 241 classroom teachers across nine schools in the 2019-2020 school year. Of those, nine teachers are races other than white, or about 3.7 percent.
Dr. Kevin Bailey, executive director of human resources, said that in an effort to recruit more minority teachers, Jackson County Schools advertises in more diverse areas such as Asheville, but that the school system struggles to find qualified applicants.
However, even in Buncombe county, as of 2019 just 6.25 percent of teachers were minorities, and less than 2 percent were Black.
In Haywood County, the Department of Public Instruction reported 494 classroom teachers across 15 schools for the 2019-2020
SLOW TO INTEGRATE
Even after the Brown decision made segregation illegal, African Americans in North Carolina continued to contend with inferior educational access and facilities.
A Jan. 26, 1950 article in The Sylva Herald includes “indoor toilets” in the list of planned upgrades for the Black school at the time, and a series of letters between Jackson County Public Schools Superintendent Vernon Cope and Division of Negro Education Director G.H. Ferguson exchanged after the 1954 Brown decision indicate that four years later the upgrades still had not been made. In the exchange, Cope and Ferguson discuss whether the county should move forward with plans to build a new Black school or wait for integration. Cope and Ferguson concluded that due to the “tragic condition” of the present school, the county should build as soon as it was able.
The new building — the site of the current Jackson County Board of Education — opened in 1961 and served students for just a few years before integration finally came to Jackson County in 1964. Something similar happened in Haywood County. The original Pigeon School was on the opposite side of Oakdale Road from the present building, which opened in 1957.
In a 2015 WCU Oral History Collection interview, Mary Sue Casey — a Jackson County native and one of the few Black women to have taught in the school system — said that she doesn’t believe integration ever would have happened if it weren’t for the friendship that existed across racial lines between local football players.
“They would get together and play during the summer,” Casey said. “The way I understand it, one said to the other, ‘You should play with us instead of Webster.’ And they said, ‘OK, when does practice start?’ And they just showed up. The Black guys just showed up for practice, and the coach said, ‘You can only play here if you go to school here.’ And they said, ‘OK, where do we go to register?’ Not knowing what a big deal it was. When they were confronted with that, they had to deal with it in some way.”
Nearly 60 years have passed since then, and to most people alive today, segregated schools were only ever a reality in history books. But racial tensions still simmer, and the dearth of African American teachers is still evident in school systems across America. Despite the decades in the rearview, Forney still finds herself thinking less-than-fond thoughts about her experience on the front lines of integration.
“It was very traumatic for me, having that move and that change when it happened in my life,” she said. “I was a little bit upset and I am today, if I’m being honest, that I didn’t get to go to Reynolds High School. I looked forward to going to Reynolds.”
school year. Of those, 14 are races other than white, or about 2.8 percent.
“As far as recruiting minority employees, HCS uses two national and state-wide job posting websites. HCS attends six to eight regional job fairs each year,” said Human Resources Director Jason Heinz. “HCS also posts a recruiting advertisement on a minority recruiting site each year. HCS is an equal opportunity employer.”
The DRIVE Task Force’s report came with 10 major recommendations to improve the diversity of educators in the public schools of North Carolina. This report came after the Program Evaluation Division of the General
EDUCATOR DIVERSITY
Assembly found a “lack of state-level effort challenges North Carolina’s capacity to increase teacher diversity.”
The evaluation was undertaken because of evidence that people of color become teachers at lower rates than their white peers and leave the profession at higher rates due to a variety of factors. The evaluation found that although there is no dedicated statelevel effort to promote the recruitment and retention of teachers of color, many local education agencies, charter schools, and educator preparation programs within the state have developed and implemented initiatives to promote diversity in their teacher workforce.
The recommendations from the task force include offering postsecondary access through scholarships, loan forgiveness and tuition reimbursement programs; expanding entry points into the educator pipeline; creating diversity goals for districts; providing sustainable investments in educator preparation programs at North Carolina’s Historically Minority Serving Institutions; adopting evidence-based elements of successful national residency models across the state’s educator preparation programs; revising the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards to directly incorporate anti-racist, anti-bias, culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy; investing in state- and district-level initiatives that increase the sustainability of the profession by strengthening support networks for educators of color; developing and sustaining pathways for advancement that are tailored to the needs of educators of color; releasing an annual statewide Educator Diversity Report that tracks state progress in developing and sustaining a representative educator workforce; and establishing an independent body to monitor progress implementing the task force’s recommendations.
The report cited the Teaching Fellows Program, a program that gives affordable loans and training to become science and math teachers to students attending five public or private colleges or universities. Students who receive the loans can repay them or commit to four years of teaching in North Carolina Public Schools.
None of the five schools in the program are Historically Minority Serving Institutions. Last year the North Carolina Legislature passed a law increasing the number of colleges and universities in the program up to eight schools total, but the law does not specify which schools have to be added. The DRIVE report suggests passing legislation that requires at least one of the institutions added be a HMSI.
The report from the Program Evaluation Division also recommended mandating at least one HMSI in the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program.
In an undated photograph developed from film brought to George Dexter Sherrill’s Waynesville studio for developing in the early 1900s, an African American man leans on a
school bus. Hunter Library, Western Carolina University photo
COMMITTED, CONTINUED FROM 6 percent of teachers will still be white women. The effort to increase teachers of color — particularly Black men — can help change the culture of schooling to reflect the changing demographic of students.
So why are there so few teachers of color these days? Hinnant-Crawford said integration had a lot to do with the number of Black teachers in the South. She said teaching was once a profession held in high esteem, especially in the African-American communities. Before Brown v. Board of Education, Black principals were all called professors regardless of whether they had a Ph.D.
“But with integration came the wholesale dismissal of Black teachers and leaders and so those numbers that you had in the field of education never rebounded. Now what we’re trying to do is counteract what happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” she said. “To some degree that’s more difficult because growing up when you don’t see teachers who look like you, you don’t say, ‘Oh, well, that’s what I’m going to be.’”
She referred to the theory of self-efficacy coined by psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977, which posits that “Seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers’ beliefs that they too possess the capabilities to master comparable activities to succeed.”
“There’s a meme going around on Facebook that asks people ‘When did you have your first Black male teacher?’ and people’s answers were either ‘It was in college, or I still haven’t.’ And so that is the reality for the children, not only in this region but throughout the state,” she said. “And so that’s why we have to be intentional with recruiting and showing folks that this is a viable pathway and a viable career choice.”
Winter said it’s equally important for white students to have teachers of color, and the younger they are when they are exposed to diversity in education the better the outcomes when they are older. Seeing people of color in positions of authority when students are young creates what is called a “legacy of competency.”
COHORT COMMITMENTS
The Call Me MISTER program will begin this fall with a three- to five-member cohort of students. Eventually, Winter said they’d love to have 20 MISTER fellows at one time, but in the meantime it’s more important to ensure a small cohort that can receive personalized attention and guidance through the program.
“There are many reasons to keep that a little bit smaller in terms of the cohort. Part of that is the experiences we want them to have, the other people that we want to bring in to work with those MISTERS and to mentor them, but also one of the major goals of Call Me MISTER is for them to graduate with as little debt as possible,” she said.
Participants in the program will receive financial support for tuition and fees, a technology package, academic support system, a mentor program for leadership development and personal growth, career support and summer internships.
In return, participants are required to major in elementary, inclusive or middle grade education and satisfy all requirements for admission to the education program. They will reside in the living-learning community cohort for the duration of their undergrad program and will commit to teaching one year at an elementary or middle school for each year they receive program funding.
FUNDING THE PROGRAM
Supporting the new program will take additional funding, but it’s something WCU will make a priority through budgeting, sponsorships and fundraising.
“What folks have heard me say over and over again is that our commitment means we have to put our money where our mouth is — and that literally of course means that we need to devote resources, time, effort, money, but it also means that we need to take action,” Winter said. “And so that’s really what we’ve been trying to do.”
WCU will use some funding that’s already allocated toward recruiting teachers and will prioritize other allocations already in existence toward this effort. It will also take making proposals for new funding and aligning the university’s goals with the program’s strategic plan.
“If you look at those, we have very specific goals and initiatives tied to inclusive excellence and so that helps us justify use of the money and requesting new money,” Winter said.
She added that Chancellor Kelli Brown was a major proponent of the Call Me MISTER program, which was successful at the university in Georgia where she served before coming to WCU. She said she’s talked to Brown and other leaders about the importance of reviewing processes and policies at WCU that have created barriers to making headway in the past with diversification efforts.
Implementing the program will also draw interest from employers, civic groups and other institutions that have a vested interest in developing a more diverse workforce in the region.
“We’re also talking to corporate partners and others who have a vested interest in having males of color become leaders in our communities,” Winter said. That effort will include working on raising scholarship funds for the MISTER cohorts, with the goal of being able to award each participant with $3,000 to $5,000 to assist with their education costs. Winter said she feels confident they’ll be able to do that once the fundraising campaign gets going.
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CHALLENGES TO DIVERSITY
Working toward diversity in Western North Carolina can be even more challenging because a vast majority of the population is white. However, there are still ways to incorporate more diversity at every level in the education system, Hinnant-Crawford said.
“There may be some steps you can take even in a region that is predominantly white to get folks of color in the schools. For instance, I live in Waynesville and here in Haywood County, there is not a huge Black population, but there is one that’s here and you could tap into that population,” she said. “Even if they’re not necessarily teachers, you could start by tapping into that population to get volunteers within the classroom.”
Rush added that geography is definitely a challenge in Western North Carolina, and though it would be great to keep these Black teachers in the region, she’s more focused on the bigger picture.
“It would be ideal to keep them here in the region, but it’s not my intent to keep them in this area because this is not just a local problem. This is a national problem. And so I want to contribute to try to fix this problem in general,” she said.
Participants will be committed to teaching for a limited amount of time, but Winter said part of this program will also include working on retention strategies, because it will be important to make sure teachers of color feel welcomed and comfortable teaching in WNC.
“(Participants) will have intensive clinical experiences in all of the schools around Western North Carolina. And so even if someone says, well, I really want to go back to Charlotte or wherever, maybe they’ll have these experiences along the way that enriches them as human beings and as developing teachers and enriches all of our community and our schools in the process,” she said.
If participants want to stay in the region to teach, Rush said she doesn’t think they’ll have a problem finding a position. In talking to the school systems in the region, she said, they are all eager to have more teachers of color on staff. They’ve also partnered with Asheville City Schools to create a memorandum of understanding to offer MISTER participants jobs when they graduate.
“We have a partnership advisory council that includes representatives from many of the school systems in our region, and we were talking about these initiatives. There was incredible interest in hiring people who are diverse to teach, and there is a collective challenge in finding people of color, so I think if we have people who want jobs, they will snatch them up really quickly,” said Patricia Bricker, professor and associate dean for Academic Affairs.
For more information about the Call Me MISTER program, visit https://tinyurl.com/x6cecs2k or contact Rush at cbrush@wcu.edu.
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