(Illustration by Jennifer Heuer)
Weaving through the barren roads of North Memphis, Tennessee, I drive past rows of blighted homes, a tattered gas station with the sole grocery store, and a few bus stops hidden in the grass. I pull up to Northaven Elementary, sign in, and wait for Principal Louis Padgett, who is busy facilitating weekend housing arrangements for two homeless students. Padgett greets me, takes me on a tour, and bends my ear as the district’s chief financial officer about his school’s needs.
Every three steps, students, parents, and teachers stop us to share personal news or explain a student’s situation. We hear about an 8-year-old Latino boy who sleeps in a car because his family was evicted and about a 9-year-old Black girl who picks up lunch leftovers reserved for her and her siblings. Padgett smiles as he responds to each student’s challenges. I leave the school wondering what more the district can do to help.
Similar school tours can be taken in many districts across the country. A huge burden is too often placed on principals and teachers to educate students and mitigate societal ills. They need greater support from school systems.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the gross inequalities that plague our society and how important school districts are in addressing them. As districts return from COVID-19, social responsibility must be integrated into their restoration. They have a moral imperative not only to educate their students but also to help liberate them and their families from social injustice and to support the revitalization and sustainability of their communities and environment.
Defining the Mission
School districts are more than centers of learning. They supply jobs, transportation, meals, wireless internet, health care, and housing. The sheer scope of their activities dwarfs that of the largest corporations.
There were nearly 13,700 districts with approximately 100,550 public schools serving 50.3 million K-12 students in the 2015-16 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. We spent roughly $678 billion on public K-12 schools employing 4.25 million instructional staff and 2 million support staff. We also spent $13.6 billion on lunches for 30 million kids, totaling 5 billion lunches for students annually—150 meals each second of every day in a year, or twice the number of McDonald’s hamburgers served. About 100,000 school buildings existed, taking up 7.5 billion gross square feet—roughly half of the space taken up by commercial office buildings. Districts collectively possessed 2 million acres of land—double the state of Rhode Island. Districts also own the largest mass transit program, transporting nearly 26 million students on 480,000 school buses over 16 billion miles annually.
We have come to demand social responsibility from corporations, insisting that they balance their business purpose with social and environmental concerns. We have all the more reason to demand social responsibility from our school districts, which educate millions of children, support their families, and promote civic responsibility as a social good.
Yet, most districts find it hard to be socially responsible for three reasons. First, social responsibility is not well defined for districts and integrated into their missions and strategies. Second, districts operate as systems of schools rather than as institutions, which thereby hides the institutional powers at their disposal to promote societal changes. Third, districts tend to be overwhelmed with demands and unable to acknowledge the depth of their societal entrenchment.
Social responsibility is the ethos that informs how districts achieve their mission while improving the community, society, and environment they touch. Unlike corporations, districts pursue social responsibility through their students and educational mission, liberating children to learn and make positive environmental and social changes. In the midst of recent inequities and uncertainties, socially responsible districts are societal linchpins that will cultivate future generations of children who will protect our planet’s viability, solve social ills, and fight for justice. Education can help free our children, communities, and society from an oppressive, decaying world and restore humanity, dignity, and life back into it.
Unlocking the Districts’ Superpowers
To educate children while being socially responsible and promoting their liberation, school districts have superpowers associated with their basic institutional roles that they can harness: their economies of scale, their physical assets, their local autonomy, their network of schools as community hubs, their power to convene people (one of six Americans visits a school daily), and their ability to tap into student data. Here are some examples of districts doing this:
Wireless and digital divide | In the United States, millions of kids do not have access to the internet, which limits learning opportunities at home. Buffalo Public Schools is bringing Wi-Fi connectivity to students’ homes in most poorly connected neighborhoods by installing wireless antennas on eight schools and other nearby buildings. California’s Coachella Valley Unified School District, the second-poorest district in the United States, is bringing wireless connectivity to disadvantaged communities by putting network devices on 100 school buses. Both examples demonstrate how districts can harness their networks of community hubs and physical assets to close the digital divide.
Unaffordable housing options | With the rising cost of housing in major cities, teachers struggle to live near their schools, and students are relegated to poor or unstable living conditions. The Dallas Independent School District addressed this problem by donating a shuttered elementary campus to be converted into a 35-bed shelter for high school students. California’s Monterey Peninsula Unified School District is building subsidized teacher residences to reduce commuting time, recruit talent, and relieve financial burdens on teachers.
Economic inequality | Districts supply a number of jobs that typically pay less than the living wage, including teacher assistants, cafeteria workers, and school secretaries. Several districts have fought back against economic inequality by ensuring that all employees make a living wage. Shelby County Schools, in Memphis, Tennessee, for example, has raised the wages for 1,200 full-time employees to $15 per hour, which resulted in other governmental agencies, corporations, and health-care institutions following suit. Districts have economies of scale that can ignite catalytic change in communities.
Food insecurity | Before COVID-19, food insecurity affected 13 million US children annually. Seventy-five percent of teachers indicated that their kids went to class hungry regularly. As an innovation to tackle food insecurity, Elkhart Community Schools in Indiana partnered with a nonprofit, Cultivate, to collect unused food from their own schools, make packaged frozen meals, and send the meals home for students and their families. Other districts have created community gardens on vacant lands and used mobile pantries to distribute food and provide low-cost food options through mobile applications.
Segregated attendance zones | Most districts have the authority to adjust their school attendance boundaries designating where students will attend school. Often, school attendance boundary decisions are influenced by special interests. Also, these decisions spur racial and socioeconomic segregation within a city through a deceptive form of gerrymandering. But the same gerrymandering tactics to drive greater segregation in communities can be used to foster greater integration, according to Vox reporter Alvin Chang. For example, Minneapolis Public Schools approved a comprehensive district design in May that redrew attendance boundaries and improved racial integration in schools and communities. Districts have the authority to reduce neighborhood and school segregation but too often fail to use it.
The Benefits of Social Responsibility
US students today lag behind those of many other countries in mathematics and science. In the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018, the United States ranked 13th of 99 countries in reading, 38th of 91 countries in mathematics, and 18th of 94 countries in science. Given the country’s lackluster academic position, why would social responsibility be added to districts’ plates?
The answer is that social responsibility boosts rather than distracts educational opportunities by deepening learning for all students. For instance, school energy efficiency is not simply a matter of environmental stewardship. Energy is the second-largest annual school cost, at $8 billion, and $2 billion can be saved and reallocated to the classroom annually if every K-12 school improves its energy efficiency. By enhancing indoor air quality, schools can also reduce the incidence of student illness in school buildings—and by extension chronic absenteeism—by 40 percent. In addition, academic performance improves with greater daylight exposure and environmental education programs.
As I think back to my time at Northaven Elementary, I can imagine how liberation for its children in the age of COVID-19 might look. With students learning virtually, the district takes the opportunity to convert its diesel bus fleet to green buses and deploys its green fleet to North Memphis to provide students and families with internet. The buses are also outfitted as mobile grocery stores or mobile health-and-wellness centers to address food vulnerability and limited medical access.
The school uses its land to grow organic vegetables with the use of food compost from daily breakfasts and lunches. The vegetables are used as part of a virtual culinary program where students learn how to create nutritious meals with local chefs, and they tackle math, science, and reading over the summer. Students sell the vegetables to families where food deserts exist as an exercise of entrepreneurship.
These are just my passing daydreams. At a school where students are truly liberated, there is no predicting how far they will go.
Read more stories by Lin Johnson, III.