Pushback, Peril and Progress

One of the first steps the board of education in North Carolina’s Orange County Schools took toward making equity a districtwide priority was to ban the Confederate flag on school property. Then the board convened an equity task force, charged with opening community dialogue around race and identifying steps to address a climate of racial intolerance and pervasive academic disparities among the district’s students.

The task force developed an equity policy, Policy 1030: Equity in Education, which was adopted unanimously by the school board in February 2019. Five months later, I was hired as the first chief equity officer. I was grateful for the community and staff members who expressed enthusiasm for the district taking steps to eliminate racial disparities.

A system with 7,200 students, we are one of two school districts in Orange County, which is home to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s oldest state-supported university.