Pushback, Peril and Progress
BY DENA K. KEELING/School Administrator, November 2021

Dena Keeling (right), chief equity officer of Orange County Schools in Hillsborough, N.C., says it’s impossible to leave her professional work at the school door at the end of the workday. PHOTO BY AMANDA BUNCH

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.

The Pushback

I am a department of one so I knew I could not lead this work alone. Every district and school leader needed to be equipped with the skills and knowledge to identify and address inequities in their buildings and departments.

We began with monthly racial equity training for district leadership and the district’s 13 school principals. Every school identified “equity leads,” (a title I gave those staff members who lead equity efforts in their schools), who created ongoing opportunities for staff to examine their personal biases. I engaged high school student equity teams to identify inequities and develop solutions.

We were making progress when in March the school board voted to rename two schools because of associations with slavery and segregation. The pushback was immediate. Al-most daily, demands were made for my e-mails, department budget and salary. Some argued that all equity task force meetings be open to the public. The equity resources I provided to staff members were posted on social media sites, and a group called Parents Defending Education filed a complaint about the school district with the federal Office for Civil Rights because I held an affinity group meeting with African-American staff after the murder of George Floyd.

The Position’s Reality

While other education leaders can leave their work personas at the door, I cannot. Equity is part of my identity. I am always a Black woman and mother of a Black son. I once was that student for whom I seek to change the educational system. I know what it feels like to sit in educational disparities, experience microaggressions and think that slavery is my only history because that’s all that was discussed in the high school curriculum.

While some would view the pushback we received as par for the course, I felt personally attacked. There were times I hesitated to use terms such as “white supremacy culture” because I was told if I focused the equity work on race, the work would be brought to a screeching halt.

Worse yet, at times I have gone silent as a desperate act to preserve my mental health. I had to remind myself that I engage in this work not because it is a livelihood but because it is my life. I knew I needed to resist the forces that sought to distract me from continuing with our efforts.

A Call to Action

I have come to realize that pushback from families, community members and, unfortunately, even from some staff is a distraction tactic meant to consume our time crafting countermessages and carefully choosing our words.

The true counternarrative to pushback is action. The most challenging part of my job is getting the school district to do this work and not think that engaging in the distraction is the work. Equity is about improving student outcomes.

As a chief equity officer, my work is to develop plans explicitly for the success of students of color. It’s researching instructional models designed specifically for each of those student groups for whom the academic disparities and inequities in access exist. It’s constantly urging district leaders to unpack the ways privilege, including the privilege to distract, sustains inequities and disparities for our students and families.

I will never completely silence the pushback. My goal, rather, is to make progress in the face of it.

DENA KEELING is chief equity officer of Orange County Schools in Hillsborough, N.C. Twitter: @OcsncE