Is leadership the key to erasing the systemic inequities that have been tugging on the shirt tails of our now flourishing hybrid education models? According to Dr. Lakisha Brinson, Director of Instructional Technology and Library Services at Metro Nashville Public Schools, “One way that we help with identifying and eliminating inequities is by making sure our students are engaged in the work. In our vision, we talk about every student being known. In our district, we believe that we should have focus outcomes and our focus outcomes are surrounded in these areas - in every grade level, there's a focus on literacy, numeracy, attendance and social, emotional learning. So, this is the question that we're asking today, how do we, as instructional leaders eliminate systemic inequities? And in just a moment, you're going to hear from my colleagues, who will dive into the work that they and their teams do every day to eliminate these inequities.”
Lindsey Kimery, Coordinator of Library Services at Metro Nashville Public Schools. She serves the 130 librarians in the district. Kimery wants the students to have equitable library services throughout the district, and believes that librarians have a very unique role in her schools. “With literacy re-imagined being one of our focused outcomes, we have a group of librarians serving on our instructional leader, a PLC and their role is to create lessons and resources that go with each quarter's English Language Arts scope and sequence. These librarians are very talented librarians, but they're also very talented teachers and they just are amazing instructors. So, it's great to have them working together to create lessons for our other librarians to use and to get ideas from. Also, we have our equity, diversity and inclusion PLC, and they are working closely with our district office of diversity equity and inclusion to examine how our school libraries are addressing EDI through our collections practices and policy. We want to be sure that our collections serve our highly diverse student population. We want our students to see themselves in the books and learn about others through the books that we offer.”
According to Carrie Whittaker, Coordinator of Instructional Design at Metro Nashville Public Schools, “I am the coordinator that works with two fellow instructional designers to really provide ongoing support and resources for our high schools, but my team works to support any of the district initiatives and projects that are ongoing throughout. Overall, our goal is to make sure that we're having equitable access for all, and all meaning all stakeholders within our community, including our teachers and students and parents. We work very closely with the additional departments within technology services to ensure that our students have access to their one-to-one device at school and at home so that they can continue to have that learning experience in whatever environment that they might find themselves in.”
Eliminating systemic inequities is hard work, but it is very important work. You won’t want to miss a single minute of this highly informative discussion. The skills learned in Metro Nashville Public Schools are highly transferable to your own district – great skills for your future and the future of your own schools.
