Acting on Implicit Bias to Benefit All

PROFILE

Before Matthew Hillmann was named one of the finalists for 2023 AASA Superintendent of the Year, the most meaningful award he says he received was the Human Rights Award in 2022 from the city of Northfield, Minn., where he has been superintendent for seven years.

When Northfield Public Schools, which is 40 miles due south of the Twin Cities and serves about 3,900 students, was moving to a 1:1 personal technology program 12 years ago, Hillmann met with Spanish-speaking parents in the community about what he perceived as a widespread lack of internet access at home. After the meeting, he was told that many of the families already had internet and he quickly recognized his own implicit bias had come into play.

“I don’t speak Spanish so I’m interacting through an interpreter and, if you don’t do that regularly, I encourage people to do that,” Hillmann says. “It’s very humbling, and you have such empathy for people who took this incredible risk to leave a place where they knew the language and the culture to come to another place where they don’t know the predominant language or the culture.”

Since 2016, Hillmann has convened a Hispanic parental advisory committee that he joins three times a year to ensure he’s well-informed. It was that group that nominated him for the human rights recognition.

“… [T]his is a group that has been marginalized and they felt that I was a champion for them,” Hillmann says. “When you are doing things because you want to make things better for people and they say this made a difference for us — so much so that we want you to be recognized for it — it’s pretty special.”

Mar Valdecantos, a school district translator and local human rights advocate, has been drawn to Hillmann’s humility. When discussing a dearth of faculty of color in the district, Valdecantos says the superintendent was very open about the limitations of bringing teacher candidates of color into a majority white community and promised to try different approaches until he found one that worked.

“I don’t think he’s the typical administrator in that way, very vulnerable and humble, because sometimes, especially with this Hispanic family group, the conversations are hard,” Valdecantos says. “People bring real concerns, real stories of things that have happened to their children in the district and Matt is there, answering all the questions, promising to research whatever, contacting families afterward, if needed.”

The growing diversity in the district’s population — 37 percent of the students at one of Northfield’s most diverse preschools qualify for tuition scholarships, 31 percent are children of color and 37 percent receive special education services — is partly what drives Hillmann to focus on early childhood learning, beginning at birth. He mails a card with a handwritten note addressed to every baby born in the district that invites the families to attend an early childhood family education class.

The district also sends birthday cards to every 3-year-old in the community with an invitation to preschool screening, which has resulted in a 31 percent increase over the past five years of Northfield students entering early childhood special-education programs and receiving wraparound child care from the district’s early childhood center.

“Minnesota has some of the most embarrassing racial achievement gaps in the country, and there is some really good opportunity to intervene and divert those gaps,” Hillmann says. “Anytime we can provide [families] support and places where their kids can have high-quality fun experiences, it also helps us build those relationships before they enter the K-12 system.”

Juli Valentine is digital content editor at AASA.