An open letter to our community about our school…. Ardrey Kell High School:
We are proud members of the Ardrey Kell community. We are increasingly concerned about the ways in which our community and our principal have been portrayed in the media. We are not here to claim that racism and racial injustice do not exist, even, sadly, within our community. We are not asking for exemptions from racist behavior and actions – that would be abhorrent and against our own principles. Ardrey Kell has not been, and will not be, silent against racial injustices, even and especially when they occur within our community. We will not be silent against any kind of injustice.
We are much more than the media is allowing us to be. We are young, we are old, we are black, we are white, we are transgender, we are people of color, we are teachers, custodians, cafeteria staff, parents, volunteers, security officers, students and administrators. Together we are led by a principal who has consistently tasked us with making our instruction matter, with giving every student the tools and opportunities to be successful and to feel valued as individuals.
David Switzer is a man of principles with a deep commitment to ALL of his students. He has over 150 teachers under his leadership, and over 3400 students and their families within his care. And care really is the word to apply here. This man cares about every single one of his students, most of whose names he knows. Families flock to this school because they know that he, and his faculty, acknowledge that they matter. Under our principal’s leadership, we have been engaged for several years in a learning journey that will help us to better serve all our students.
Much has been said lately in the media, which is for some reason determined to vilify David Switzer and the entire Ardrey Kell community. Let us tell you what actually happens at Ardrey Kell, and what David Switzer does here. We could begin with his extensive background in education and his military service, his role in the community and as a family man, and we could simply argue that he is a good man, but we know that is not enough of a response to the very real concerns of our time. So we will speak specifically to claims of racism and leadership. David Switzer is a man who feels deeply the hurts of his students and his staff. When our students were struggling in 2016 with the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, Mr. Switzer encouraged them to hold their own protest at school, to share their stories and voice their fears and hurts. He wanted them to know that Ardrey Kell was a place where they could safely express those, and he sat with them, spoke with them, and wept with them. His care for his students goes beyond empathy and into action. Mr. Switzer has been determined to close achievement gaps for minority students at Ardrey Kell. Already our graduation rates for Black students exceed those of the district and the state. Our graduation rate for Black students is 94.8%. The district rate is 85.4%, and the state rate is 86.3%. And still this is not enough for David Switzer. He has long been embarked on a mission to increase participation in honors and AP level courses. This is something we have been working on for several years now, identifying and encouraging the potential in all our students, and specifically in our minority students.
As part of this quest to honor our students, Mr. Switzer has guided his staff in long-term diversity training. For several years we have been engaged in multiple trainings on implicit and explicit bias and on diversity, and last summer he bought copies of The Hate U Give for the entire faculty to read and learn from. We have engaged in teacher-led book studies on this book and others, focused specifically on better serving our minority students. Our training has gone beyond district requirements because of the level of Mr. Switzer’s commitment to this. This is something he was trying to make very clear to us last August in that faculty meeting that the media has been discussing. He told us then that this was not going to be some perfunctory fulfillment of a basic requirement, that we were not here to check a box and move on--no, we were going to be in it for the long haul. Ironically and regrettably, that is exactly when he said the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing. Like the man he is, he recognized his mistake and moved immediately to take responsibility, to make amends, and to pursue the mission of equality at our school with even more vigor. This is the goal of education--to learn and to do better.
We have reports of racial incidents in our school community. These pain us all, and they pain our principal. Rest assured that they are addressed each time. We know the media likes to imply that we are secretive about how we handle these incidents. That is an unjust implication by an organization that should know very well the laws regarding student privacy that prevent the school from publishing disciplinary matters. It is important, too, to note that our students are just that--students. Students do not always make the right decisions. These students are products of much more than AK and when these incidents come to our attention, we handle them immediately. We must take every opportunity to help our students to unlearn implicit and explicit bias and racism, and we do this by modelling the attitudes and behaviors we want them to learn. As much as the media would like to see a public pillorying of these students, that would be both illegal and counterproductive to our goal of helping our students to become better citizens.
We have so many stories of student bonds and life lessons and we cannot for another minute let our side of Ardrey Kell’s story go untold. Ask us for our stories. We will gladly share them because the good most surely outweighs the bad at Ardrey Kell. And just because we have these stories to tell does not mean that we do not recognize that strides still need to be made. We are glad that we have a principal committed to helping us make those strides.
Please sign OUR petition: please help our school keep this principal, whose goal has long been to lead the students and the staff toward a community that continues to recognize that #blacklivesmatter