My name is Jennifer Enoch, and I’m running for the Champaign Unit 4 School Board. I hope to earn your vote for the election on April 2!
I work as a certified nurse-midwife, and I’m the parent of a 3rd grader at Stratton. For a few years I volunteered several hours a week at Booker T. Washington STEM Academy, and I served as the co-chair of that school’s Parent Equity Committee. Currently I serve on unit 4’s Gifted Education Task Force and the EEE Committee.
There are a lot of things about our school system that I love. In my volunteer time, I have been awed to see master teachers at work. We have wonderful kids and parents, lots of amazing and deeply dedicated school employees, and some great programs. We have problems, too, and I would like to help solve them.
During the Schools of Choice process the year before my child started kindergarten, I spent a lot of time touring schools, talking to other parents and the people at the Family Information Center, and reviewing data. We chose the STEM magnet school because my daughter loved science and also because she is black, and we thought she would benefit from being at a majority black school. It wasn’t until she started kindergarten and I started volunteering that I realized that her school experienced intense within-school segregation, with grade levels starting in 2nd grade having some classes that are almost all black and some classes that are almost all white.
In kindergarten I volunteered in her class. I started out working one on one with children who had started school not yet knowing the alphabet, to help them recognize letters and remember the sounds each letter makes. Sometimes I sat with the whole class while they worked on other activities together. I noticed that their teacher often asked hard questions. At first, I cringed when she would ask one of the kids I volunteered with, who didn’t know their ABCs yet, to answer very difficult questions involving math, science, and literary analysis. I felt that it might stress out these precious children to get asked hard questions and I wished she would ask them easy questions so that they could experience success. But then I realized that they knew the answer more often than I would have expected, and that even when they didn’t know the answer, they seemed to sit up straighter and feel good that she had thought they might know it. I got to know all the kids in the class pretty well and a lot of kids told me things about their personal lives. It opened my eyes to the fact that many children in our community cope with severe stressors, some with strong family support, and some without it. I learned that many kids who live in poverty do get lots of support and enrichment at home. And then I realized that in actual reality, the children who had started school already understanding the alphabet and the children who were still struggling with sounds and letters, and the children of affluent families and the children living in poverty, were equally likely to offer amazing insights and analysis and describe how the book they had just heard related to things they had learned in the past. They were equally likely to have intense intellectual passions, about things like rockets and space travel, animals, and volcanoes. They could equally intelligently discuss concepts like gravity and friction after a unit on ramps and balls. They moved with stunning rapidity from learning sounds and letters in the fall, to learning sight words in the winter, to writing stories in the spring. The kids who started out not knowing the ABCs showed just as much creativity and an impressive command of language—their stories were every bit as complex as those of children who had started the year already knowing the sounds and letters and those who had already been reading. These were intelligent, capable children who were learning a lot, and learning it quickly. There is nothing wrong with our kids! Our kids are brilliant. There is no limit to what they could accomplish with an excellent education.
I observed some fantastically good teaching the year my child was in kindergarten, but I also noticed worrisome things that happened outside of that classroom. Adults often spoke to children very harshly. Sometimes the same adult would gently redirect a white child who was misbehaving, but speak to a black child engaging in the same misbehavior very harshly. I felt that some very little kids were getting persistent messages that they were unacceptable and unwelcome. Other parents in our Parent Equity Group told me they observed the same things; we met with the principal to try to solve these problems.
In my child’s kindergarten and first grade, the 3 classes in each grade were reasonably well-integrated. But in 2nd grade at her STEM magnet school, two classes remained general education classes while the third class was the gifted class. Each regular class was almost all black, and the gifted class had very few black children. It distresses me to see the message this sends to all students about what their school thinks about the intellectual capacity of black children. I thought I had prepared my child for what she was going to see, but it had more effect on her than I expected. She kept coming home and recounting conversations she was having with her friend Brooklynn about the fact that segregation was coming back to the United States. I kept explaining that segregation is not coming back all over and that it was just inside her school, and she sometimes got exasperated with me for not seeing the evidence she believed she was seeing with her own eyes. She and her friend wondered if the drinking fountains were going to be separate and how that would work. She asked me, “Will Sholem be the black pool and Crystal Lake the white pool, or will it be the other way around?” They were worried about what would happen. This is an unacceptable state of affairs.
What does our community stand for? I believe that we care about all of our community’s children, that we don’t want segregation within our schools, and that we do want fairness. We want families from all walks of life and every family configuration to be respected and welcome in our community schools. We want every child to feel that they belong and to have equal access to a great education. We want every child to be challenged in school and to learn what they need in order to be able to reach their potential and make their dreams come true. As adults, it is our responsibility to work toward making these things happen for the well-being of our children and our community. A strong community needs strong schools.
I work as a certified nurse-midwife, and I’m the parent of a 3rd grader at Stratton. For a few years I volunteered several hours a week at Booker T. Washington STEM Academy, and I served as the co-chair of that school’s Parent Equity Committee. Currently I serve on unit 4’s Gifted Education Task Force and the EEE Committee.
There are a lot of things about our school system that I love. In my volunteer time, I have been awed to see master teachers at work. We have wonderful kids and parents, lots of amazing and deeply dedicated school employees, and some great programs. We have problems, too, and I would like to help solve them.
During the Schools of Choice process the year before my child started kindergarten, I spent a lot of time touring schools, talking to other parents and the people at the Family Information Center, and reviewing data. We chose the STEM magnet school because my daughter loved science and also because she is black, and we thought she would benefit from being at a majority black school. It wasn’t until she started kindergarten and I started volunteering that I realized that her school experienced intense within-school segregation, with grade levels starting in 2nd grade having some classes that are almost all black and some classes that are almost all white.
In kindergarten I volunteered in her class. I started out working one on one with children who had started school not yet knowing the alphabet, to help them recognize letters and remember the sounds each letter makes. Sometimes I sat with the whole class while they worked on other activities together. I noticed that their teacher often asked hard questions. At first, I cringed when she would ask one of the kids I volunteered with, who didn’t know their ABCs yet, to answer very difficult questions involving math, science, and literary analysis. I felt that it might stress out these precious children to get asked hard questions and I wished she would ask them easy questions so that they could experience success. But then I realized that they knew the answer more often than I would have expected, and that even when they didn’t know the answer, they seemed to sit up straighter and feel good that she had thought they might know it. I got to know all the kids in the class pretty well and a lot of kids told me things about their personal lives. It opened my eyes to the fact that many children in our community cope with severe stressors, some with strong family support, and some without it. I learned that many kids who live in poverty do get lots of support and enrichment at home. And then I realized that in actual reality, the children who had started school already understanding the alphabet and the children who were still struggling with sounds and letters, and the children of affluent families and the children living in poverty, were equally likely to offer amazing insights and analysis and describe how the book they had just heard related to things they had learned in the past. They were equally likely to have intense intellectual passions, about things like rockets and space travel, animals, and volcanoes. They could equally intelligently discuss concepts like gravity and friction after a unit on ramps and balls. They moved with stunning rapidity from learning sounds and letters in the fall, to learning sight words in the winter, to writing stories in the spring. The kids who started out not knowing the ABCs showed just as much creativity and an impressive command of language—their stories were every bit as complex as those of children who had started the year already knowing the sounds and letters and those who had already been reading. These were intelligent, capable children who were learning a lot, and learning it quickly. There is nothing wrong with our kids! Our kids are brilliant. There is no limit to what they could accomplish with an excellent education.
I observed some fantastically good teaching the year my child was in kindergarten, but I also noticed worrisome things that happened outside of that classroom. Adults often spoke to children very harshly. Sometimes the same adult would gently redirect a white child who was misbehaving, but speak to a black child engaging in the same misbehavior very harshly. I felt that some very little kids were getting persistent messages that they were unacceptable and unwelcome. Other parents in our Parent Equity Group told me they observed the same things; we met with the principal to try to solve these problems.
In my child’s kindergarten and first grade, the 3 classes in each grade were reasonably well-integrated. But in 2nd grade at her STEM magnet school, two classes remained general education classes while the third class was the gifted class. Each regular class was almost all black, and the gifted class had very few black children. It distresses me to see the message this sends to all students about what their school thinks about the intellectual capacity of black children. I thought I had prepared my child for what she was going to see, but it had more effect on her than I expected. She kept coming home and recounting conversations she was having with her friend Brooklynn about the fact that segregation was coming back to the United States. I kept explaining that segregation is not coming back all over and that it was just inside her school, and she sometimes got exasperated with me for not seeing the evidence she believed she was seeing with her own eyes. She and her friend wondered if the drinking fountains were going to be separate and how that would work. She asked me, “Will Sholem be the black pool and Crystal Lake the white pool, or will it be the other way around?” They were worried about what would happen. This is an unacceptable state of affairs.
What does our community stand for? I believe that we care about all of our community’s children, that we don’t want segregation within our schools, and that we do want fairness. We want families from all walks of life and every family configuration to be respected and welcome in our community schools. We want every child to feel that they belong and to have equal access to a great education. We want every child to be challenged in school and to learn what they need in order to be able to reach their potential and make their dreams come true. As adults, it is our responsibility to work toward making these things happen for the well-being of our children and our community. A strong community needs strong schools.
