Booking for the upcoming Transformational Leadership Conference is filling up faster than Shinay Bowman expected, but she’s not complaining.
Her phone has been ringing nonstop, and it’s grabbed the attention of top academic administrators across southern California.
“It surpassed our expectations because we only opened the conference at the end of January,” she said.
The event, to be held in Indian Wells from June 26-28, will cover several topics to task educators in leadership on reaching students and parents to make sure more kids don’t fall through the cracks. Bowman said they are hosting breakout sessions, and their superintendent’s panel discussion is about as multi-cultural as it gets.
“We invited diverse superintendents from across California and five have confirmed. We have a Latino, white, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander. What race didn’t we get?” she laughs.
Not everyone asks that question, but she feels they should.
The need for equity to reach students and parents is at a critical point. She said they want to ask the hard questions and get diverse perspectives about how school leaders are dealing with these difficult times.
“How they’re overcoming their struggles with English learner students, African American students, dealing with suicides and shootings. In the face of all that’s going on, how do they maintain moving forward for kids to be successful?” she said.
Bowman, also a certified suicide intervention trainer, hosts training throughout San Bernardino. Her own tragic encounter with a local suicide spurred her to get involved with prevention. She was then a teacher when an eighth-grade student killed himself. He wasn’t in her class, but she remembers him from her sixth-grade class, and it was devastating.
Superintendents, assistant superintendents and high-level cabinet members are coming to the event from as far away as Northern California and San Diego. However, she hopes more local teachers, and community members participate to stretch the dialogue for best approaches in education.
The cost of the three-day conference is comparable to other education conferences at $450. If that’s too steep, she said 20 volunteer slots with registration waivers are open for those that want to help work the event.
The Transformational Leadership Consortium comprises teachers, principals and county administrators, that work with San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. She said the seven-member board was established four years ago, and has site leaders and program facilitators at area high schools.
“We are women of diversity, and we felt that there was a huge leadership crisis in education,” she said.
Bowman started out as a teacher at San Bernardino Shandin Hills Middle School, later a literacy coach, an assistant principal, and also an interim principal in Fontana. She works for San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools as a program manager.
There, she oversees implementation of Positive Behavior Intervention and Support, a program in 15 school districts countywide. PBIS is credited with better alternatives to punishment, and helping reduce suspension and expulsion rates for kids of color.
TLC, a project apart from the county, is also strong on social justice and equity to meet the needs of Black and Brown kids, girls, and all students dealing with behavioral issues.
Educational leadership, youth empowerment, community engagement and creating efficient ways for organizations to work together is their main focus. She hopes the conference will remind educators of why they got into the field in the first place.
“We can’t be supermen or superwomen, but we can be a super-community,” she said. “I feel like a lot of individuals focus on their own ability to go up in education and forget that it’s really about the community and village.”
While the consortium isn’t a church, it may feel that way at times with the Master of Ceremonies, who is both an educational and spiritual leader. Derek Harris, the senior director of risk management at Rialto Unified School District, is also an ordained pastor scheduled to MC the event.
“We’re hoping that this is a weekend that rekindles spirits and hearts to do the right thing for kids,” she said.
Registration is open until May 18.
At the conference, Terrance Stone with Young Visionaries Youth Leadership Academy will be presenting on working with the youth and community building.
He hopes to get revitalized in being around like-minded nonprofits, educators and leaders that care about the kids and get great information.
“To put some fire under us for going out, working in the community, because it can be tiresome. People on the outside just don’t know how much work goes into community-saving,” he said.
Working in San Bernardino hasn’t been the easiest task, but he said community workers need to have these conversations to empower themselves and the youth.
“It’s kind of about energizing and re-educating ourselves also, so we can really work in a city such as San Bernardino,” Stone said.
For more information, call (909) 521-0790 or email http://thetlcway.com/
A lot people describe the younger generation as wayward and self-absorbed. But if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see that they’re picking up the mantel in ways that the adults in power have not.
There are several examples of this but perhaps none stronger than what high school students across the country did today. At 10 am. students took 17 minutes to show solidarity for the 17 students killed during the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They were pushing for increased gun legislation—just something to ensure their safety when they’re trying to get an education.
This moment is one of tumult for our nation. In the past year, multiple mass shootings have left hundreds dead. Wide exposure of workplace sexual assault has prompted challenging reflections, conversations, and reckonings. Kneeling athletes and protests in the streets have launched a national dialogue about the experiences of communities of color and the meaning of patriotism.
Unprecedented political divisiveness has contributed to a national discourse simmering with anger and suspicion. For students and educators, it can be terrifying, it can be overwhelming, it can be uneasy. It can also be incredibly powerful.
As educators, school leaders, and school partners, it’s easy to exist within the illusion that we are able to script our students’ educational journeys. We agonize over curricular development and homework completion. We mandate graduation requirements and work tirelessly to perfect course schedules. And yet, students’ lives exist within and beyond those bubbles. And their eyes are wide open to the travails of broader society. Rather than luring students back onto our prescribed paths in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., tragedy and other moments of upheaval, we must make our schools a space where they can make sense of the world…
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HISD trustees will continue their slate of public meetings at schools labelled “improvement required” campuses by the Texas Education Agency, with the next one taking place at Worthing High School to discuss its fate and that of feeder school, Woodson Middle School.
The meeting is Wednesday, March 21 at 6 p.m. at Worthing, 9215 Scott St.
“Worthing is part of 10 schools slated for closure, so we want to update parents and the community on what the two bills mean – House Bill 1842 and Senate Bill 1882,” said HISD Trustee Wanda Adams.
According to HISD, Worthing and Woodson have fallen behind academically over the last four years and per state law (HB 1842) must meet all state standards this year or face closure or have an appointed management entity run the schools.
Senate Bill 1882 offers what some see as a ray of hope in the form of options allowing these schools to form outside partnerships, avoiding closure and total takeover.
Adams said such a partnership “would give Worthing two more years [to meet state standards] and up to $1000 per student.”
“Students have been working hard to show some growth. Still, closure is a real possibility. Unfortunately, this is what Worthing is facing because of the long history of not meeting standards. We want people to know the truth,” Adams added.
Adams said current plans for Worthing – making it an International Baccalaureate campus or a career and technology school – will also be discussed at the meeting. She added that discussions have begun with potential partnership institutions, including Texas Southern University.
Whatever plan will be enacted must be voted on and passed by the board by April 30, though the board’s only meeting before that date is April 10, increasing the sense of urgency for the March 21 meeting even more.
From Maine to Hawaii, thousands of students planned to stage walkouts Wednesday to protest gun violence, one month after the deadly shooting inside a high school in Parkland, Florida.
Organizers say nearly 3,000 walkouts are set in the biggest demonstration yet of the student activism that has emerged following the massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Students from the elementary to college level are taking up the call in a variety of ways. Some planned roadside rallies to honor shooting victims and protest violence. Others were to hold demonstrations in school gyms or on football fields. In Massachusetts and Ohio, students said they’ll head to the statehouse to lobby for new gun regulations.
The coordinated walkout was organized by Empower, the youth wing of the Women’s March, which brought thousands to Washington, D.C., last year. The group urged students to leave class at 10 a.m. local time for 17 minutes — one minute for each victim in the Florida shooting.
Although the group wanted students to shape protests on their own, it also offered them a list of demands for lawmakers, including a ban on assault weapons and mandatory background checks for all gun sales.
“Our elected officials must do more than tweet thoughts and prayers in response to this violence,” the group said on its website.
It’s one of several protests planned for coming weeks. The March for Our Lives rally for school safety is expected to draw hundreds of thousands to the nation’s capital on March 24, its organizers said. And another round of school walkouts is planned for April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado.
After the walkout Wednesday, some students in Massachusetts say they plan to rally outside the Springfield headquarters of the gun maker Smith & Wesson. Students and religious leaders are expected to speak at the rally and call on the gun maker to help curb gun violence.
At Case Elementary School in Akron, Ohio, a group of fifth-graders have organized a walkout with the help of teachers after seeing parallels in a video they watched about youth marches for civil rights in 1963. Case instructors said 150 or more students will line a sidewalk along a nearby road, carrying posters with the names of Parkland victims.
The walkouts have drawn support from companies including media conglomerate Viacom, which said it will pause programming on MTV, BET and all its other networks for 17 minutes during the walkouts, and students will temporarily take over MTV’s social media accounts.
The planned protests have drawn mixed reactions from school administrators. While some applaud students for taking a stand, others threatened discipline. Districts in Sayreville, New Jersey, and Maryland’s Harford County drew criticism this week when they said students could face punishment for leaving class.
In suburban Atlanta, one of Georgia’s largest school systems announced that students who participate might face unspecified consequences.
But some vowed to walk out anyway.
“Change never happens without backlash,” said Kara Litwin, a senior at Pope High School in the Cobb County School District.
The possibility of being suspended “is overwhelming, and I understand that it’s scary for a lot of students,” said Lian Kleinman, a junior at Pope High.
“For me personally this is something I believe in, this is something I will go to the ends of the Earth for,” Kleinman said.
Other schools sought a middle ground, offering “teach-ins” or group discussions on gun violence. Some worked with students to arrange protests in safe locations on campus. Officials at Boston Public Schools said they arranged a day of observance Wednesday with a variety of activities “to provide healthy and safe opportunities for students to express their views, feelings and concerns.” Students who don’t want to participate could bring a note from a parent to opt out.
Meanwhile, free speech advocates geared up for a battle. The American Civil Liberties Union issued advice for students who walk out, saying schools can’t legally punish them more harshly because of the political nature of their message. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas, some lawyers said they will provide free legal help to students who are punished.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., declared Tuesday that she is “extremely disappointed” with how U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is approaching her new gig as the head of a presidential commission on school safety.
Her statement came after Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee, and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the panel, met with DeVos to discuss school safety and the commission’s charge to make policy recommendations in the wake of the mass shooting last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 dead.
“I was extremely disappointed at how the meeting went,” Murray said in a statement. “I was hoping that Secretary DeVos would be able to talk to me about real and meaningful steps she could move quickly on as head of President Trump’s new gun commission, but everything I heard from her in our conversation suggested that this is just the latest effort to delay and shift the conversation away from the gun safety reforms that people across the country are demanding…”
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March 5, 2018 ― The San Antonio ISD Board of Trustees today passed a resolution related to school shootings in the United States.
As a member of the Council of Great City Schools, SAISD stands in solidarity with member districts across the country that are concerned with the safety and security of children and their families adversely affected by the continued incidences of gun violence on campuses and in communities;
“We continue to share in the nation’s collective grief following the Florida school shooting, said Board President Patti Radle. “Student safety is essential. We believe now is the time for action. Legislation is needed to protect our students.”
Trustees called for legislative action to prevent any more students and educators from being the victims of a school shooting. They also announced their opposition to arming teachers.
New Hampshire Public Radio interview with Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity, and an expert in contemporary forms of racial bias and discrimination, as well as the intersections of race and gender.
By Sarah Andes and Dana Harris
Building: