Details of the Kingston City School District’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) survey were revealed during a meeting of the board of education last week, with students at the elementary level reporting much more favorable ratings than their secondary counterparts.
The survey results were revealed by the district’s Director of DEI Kathy Sellitti during a meeting held on Wednesday, November 29, with a majority of secondary students reporting unfavorable ratings in all but one category. The survey was conducted in Spring 2023, with 1,290 students in grades 3-6 and 1,433 students in grades 7-12 participating.
The survey covered five different categories:
Climate — Perceptions of overall social and learning climate of the school.
Cultural diversity and awareness — How often students learn about and discuss issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in school.
Engagement — How attentive and invested students are in the classroom.
Sense of belonging — How much students feel they are valued by members of the school community.
Teacher/student relationships — How strong the social connection is between teachers and students within and beyond the classroom.
In each category, elementary students in grade 3-6 reported favorable ratings for climate (60 percent), cultural diversity and awareness (70 percent), engagement (60 percent), sense of belonging (63 percent) and teacher/student relationships (74 percent).
Meanwhile, secondary students rated all categories lower, including climate (32 percent), cultural diversity and awareness (40 percent), engagement (33 percent), sense of belonging (35 percent), and teacher/student relationships (51 percent).
“You’re going to notice that the elementary favorability ratings are higher than the secondary favorability ratings,” Sellitti said. “That’s not uncommon. That is in large part due to developmental differences in the kids and the different ways that school works there.”
Sellitti said that the results, even those that weren’t robustly favorable, showed there were signs the district is beginning to head in the right direction.
“I wanted to point out for all of our students the teacher-student relationships are the highest,” she said.“And I think that that is something important for us to notice and to point out. It says a lot…about the support from the community and the school district and the professionals that work there, that this is the highest category for all of our students…I think that speaks to the work that we have been doing is that superficial work that diversity does exist around here.”
But the other ratings show there is still a great distance to travel for the district, Sellitti added.
“We need to do more work in terms of getting more of our students to feel like they belong, to feel like they’re engaged in the work,” she said. “This is the work that we have to do, right? We’re working on culturally responsive and sustaining education. We have more and more teachers and learning and implementing culturally responsive and sustaining education practices.”
The district’s DEI path is being partly directed by the New York State Education Department’s Culturally Responsive and Sustaining (CRS) Education framework, which focuses on creating a welcoming and affirming environment, high expectations and rigorous instruction, inclusive curriculum and assessments, and ongoing professional learning and self-reflection.
Thirty-eight members of the Kingston Teachers Federation, including representatives from each school, are receiving training during the 2023-24 school year, working with the BOCES Regional Partnership Center and FACE (Family and Community Engagement) on the culturally responsive framework. That training will help shape goals and planning for next year.
“It speaks to the how that we teach rather than the specifics of what we teach,” Sellitti said. “But in order to fully implement CRS education, it requires deep paradigm changes. It is deeper than the organizational change that we usually talk about that takes that three to five years. We’re talking about changing complete ideologies. It’s a huge endeavor. We need to work at building the capacities as individuals and as the institution.”
To help ensure these changes, the district is forming an Equity in Action Committee, ideally comprised of 25 members, including three members of the community at large, two parents of elementary school students, one middle school parent, one high school parent, two middle school students, and two high school students, as well as school board trustees, administrators and teachers.
“We are actually low on applications there,” Sellitti said. “We have about ten in at this point in time.”
The Equity in Action Committee will be tasked with reviewing the district’s efforts to improve school climate and culture, curriculum and access and professional development.
While the full survey is unlikely to be given annually, school officials said that shorter versions might be in order to help gauge how students perceive the changes the district implements as it continues focusing on its diversity and inclusion efforts.
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