This past summer – almost two years after the viral video – the school board unveiled a plan that would require diversity and inclusion training for all students as part of the K-12 curriculum, while modifying the student’s code of conduct to address acts of discrimination specifically prohibit. , which is referred to in the document as “micro-aggressions”.
Angry parents – mostly whites – formed a political action committee within days and began attending school board meetings to express their strong opposition. Some have denounced the diversity plan as “Marxist” and “left-wing indoctrination” to solve a problem that does not exist. Opponents said they also wanted all students at Carroll to feel safe, but argued that the district’s plan would rather create ‘diversity police’ and amount to ‘reverse racism’ against white children.
The dispute became so heated that parents on both sides pulled children out of the school system, while others devised plans to move out of the city. One mother sued the district and successfully thwarted the diversity plan.
As the fight escalated, Cornish, whose youngest child graduated in 2018, began to think differently about Carroll’s official motto, affixed to T-shirts and signs across Southlake.
“Protect the tradition.”
She begins to wonder: What was the tradition that her neighbors fought to protect?
‘Everyone smiles in Southlake’
Robin and Frank Cornish moved to Southlake in 1993, shortly after Frank was signed by the Dallas Cowboys as an offensive linebacker. At the time, the city was more rural than suburban – little more ‘than a two-lane dirt road’, Robin joked.
There were not many other black people when the Cornishes arrived, but Frank fell in love with the open space. And with their first son on the way soon, Robin Cornish liked the prospect of sending their children to public schools.
Like many small towns in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area in the early 1990s, Southlake was at the forefront of explosive population growth. In the nearly three decades since the arrival of the Cornishs, Southlake’s population has tripled to more than 31,000 inhabitants, driven in part by a surge of immigrants from South Asia. Hundreds more black people have also moved in, although they still make up less than 2 percent of the population in a city where 74 percent of the residents are white.
With the proximity of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and the headquarters of several Fortune 500 companies, the city has become a magnet for wealthy professionals, with average household incomes now exceeding $ 230,000.
As it grew, Southlake gained a reputation in the Dallas area as a kind of suburban utopia, with master-planned neighborhoods and dominant high school sports programs. A 2007 D Magazine article on the Carroll soccer team’s championship describes the city’s ‘otherworldly’ charm.
“They’re good at everything in Southlake,” the magazine said. “If you’ve never been, there’s a little Pleasantville to it. The streets are cleaner than your streets, the city center livelier, the students more courteous, their parents more prosperous. Everyone is beautiful in Southlake. Everyone smiles in Southlake. ”
After Frank Cornish retired from the NFL, he immersed himself in the place. He started volunteering as a coach for youth football teams and later served as chairman of the city’s parks and recreation council. He even persuaded some former Cowboys teammates to move to the city to raise their children.
“Everyone has always thought of him as the unofficial mayor of Southlake,” Robin Cornish said. “He knew everyone, and everyone loved him. Eventually, he wanted to elect him mayor. ”
But when Frank died of a heart attack in 2008 at the age of 40, Robin Cornish faced a difficult decision. She is seriously considering moving her five children to Chicago, where she grew up. Despite Southlake’s many praises, she has become concerned about the steady stream of racially insensitive remarks – some subtle, others overt – that black people often endure in affluent communities where the vast majority of residents do not look like them.
One example: Every year when Cornish’s children were young, Carroll had to attend fifth-grade students at Colonial Day, an educational celebration in which students dressed as characters from the 1600s. But little thought seems to be given to what it means for black children, Cornish said, a supervision that became all too clear when a classmate told one of her daughters that she could not dress like a nurse. ; she would have been a slave.
But after her husband’s funeral, Cornish decided to stick it out. Although it would be a struggle to cover the high cost of living of a nurse’s salary, she had a support system in Southlake, and Cornish did not want to increase the trauma of her children by taking it from their friends.
“At the time, I knew it was not the best environment for the kids,” she said. “But they just lost their father.”
She also knew it would be difficult to find a school district that matched Carroll’s academic excellence.
And her children’s education was the most important.
A plan to confront racism
Following the 2018 viral video, the Carroll School Board convened a special meeting and invited members of the community to share their thoughts on how to proceed.
Cornish was the first to walk to the microphone. Reading prepared remarks, she rattled off some of the racist comments she said her children endured.
“The scars are there, the wounds are permanent,” she told the council as some people in the audience wiped away the tears. “You must all take a stand. You need to change this curriculum. You need to change the tone in this city. ‘
The audience of mostly white parents clapped as Cornish walked away from the lecture chair. More parents followed, and each told stories of racist bullying that traumatized their children, with little or no consequences for the offended students.
Michelle Moore, a school board curator, recalled feeling a mixture of anger and shame when she listened. She had no idea, so many kids felt bullied at Carroll based on their race. How could she have been so unconscious?
“I left the meeting and said, ‘This is unacceptable, and it’s not going as it’s under my supervision,'” said Moore, the Spanish daughter of Cuban immigrants who has since been appointed by the school board. as its president. “As a council, we had a responsibility to do something.”
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This was the beginning of a nearly two-year-long effort to change the way the school district of 8,500 students handles diversity and inclusion. The initiative gained momentum in February 2019 when a second video surfaced of Carroll students shouting the N-word, and again a year later when three teenagers spray-painted racist insults at Carroll High School. The school system called on volunteers and appointed 63 members of the community to a diversity council that would investigate possible solutions.
The school board recruited Russell Maryland, a friend of Frank Cornish and a former Cowboys teammate, to bestow his fame as a former NFL draft pick for the committee.
The result of the effort – a 34-page document known as the Cultural Competence Action Plan – was released in July. It calls for compulsory cultural sensitivity training for all Carroll students and teachers, a formal process to report and detect incidents of racist bullying, and changes to the code of conduct to hold students accountable for discrimination. The plan also proposed creating a new position with Carroll, director of equity and inclusion, to oversee the district’s efforts.
“As we saw it, it was a pretty basic plan,” Maryland, who is black, said, noting that many large school districts already have similar policies. ‘Just a basic plan of human decency, empathy, kindness, inclusion and understanding of other cultures. It’s as simple as that – or so we thought. ‘
Moore, the president of the school board, said “a perfect storm”.
The diversity plan was released because the country was in the middle of an emotionally charged settlement over racial injustice after the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. At the same time, dozens of parents who never paid much attention to school board meetings have now commented on the district’s plans to receive personal re-education during the coronavirus pandemic.
“How many things can you still accumulate that people are anxious, upset and scared about at the same time?” Moore said.
Southlake’s ‘true colors’
The opposition to the diversity plan was fierce, immediate and well organized.
Moore and other board members were inundated with angry emails from parents. Some have formed a political action committee, Southlake Families PAC, and started a website demanding that the council “should focus on fall classes, not set up a district diversity police force!” The group quickly raised more than $ 100,000 from dozens of residents, including some of the strong leaders and leading conservatives who settled in Southlake. (Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association and right-wing media star living in Southlake, gave the group $ 2,000, according to campaign funding records.)
Over the past few summers and in the fall, the public comment section of Carroll’s school board meetings has become a spectacle for months, as dozens of parents turn up every week to speak out against the plan.
A white father said he supports introducing children to different cultures, but argued that the district’s plan rather teaches how to be a victim and forces them to adopt a liberal ideology in a city where more than two-thirds of voters’ ballots for President Donald Trump in 2020.
Several parents said the plan would infringe on their Christian values by teaching children about issues regarding gay and transgender classmates. Others warned that the council had awakened Southlake’s ‘silent majority’.
The opposition to the diversity plan is compounded around two key points: that the student’s code of conduct has been banned in all forms, and the conviction among some conservatives that any command emphasizing racial differences can perpetuate division rather than cure it. Some opponents outright denied that there was systemic racism and argued that children should be taught not to see race.
Even Southlake Mayor Laura Hill, who hosted meetings on combating intolerance after the 2018 viral video, spoke out against the plan and wrote in a letter to the school board in September that the process was not transparent and ‘ created a “crisis of confidence”. among Southlake residents. Hill, who is white, called on the council to invite more stakeholders in the community to ‘earn back the trust of our citizens’.
During a school board meeting, some of the attendees yelled at Nikki Olaleye, a black 12th-grade student at Carroll Senior High School, after addressing the audience and declaring, ‘Black lives matter. My life matters. ”
“People in Southlake showed their true colors,” Olaleye said later in an interview.