What Luther Burbank Elementary third grader Harper Jones loves the most about Sankofa Saturdays—an enrichment program for Black kindergarten through fifth-grade students—is that no one said anything mean about her hair.
“They didn’t pull on it or ask me questions either; some of my new friends said, ‘Your hair is cute,’” Harper said.
Harper is one of the over 75 students who enrolled in the seven-week session of Sankofa Saturdays, a program that focuses on social-emotional learning skills and academic achievement for Black students.
Sankofa is a term deriving from the Akan people of Ghana that loosely translates to “go back and get it.”
Advisory Committee Lead Elyssa Taylor-Stewart said that over the past year, the Black Student Achievement Initiative (BSAI) adopted the principles of Sankofa, emphasizing that in order to move forward it is important to go back to one’s roots.
The BSAI is funded through the 2021-22 Learning Acceleration and Support Plan which allocated $750,000 to develop an initiative advisory committee to recommend additional support for Black students. One of the main goals of the initiative is to create programs that enrich Black students’ experiences as well as look into and analyze data to identify specific areas of need.
“BSAI looks forward to a future where our Black students are not just surviving but thriving,” Taylor-Stewart said.
Taylor-Stewart said that “in the spirit of Sankofa” the BSAI will reflect on the past two years to establish how they address educational inequities and outcomes for Black students moving forward.
“We look forward to building out a more intentional pathway to academic success and social-emotional well-being for our students,” Taylor-Stewart said.
The BSAI hopes this pathway will lead to improved test scores and A-G completion rates as well as create a greater sense of belonging and college and career readiness.
Some of the strategies to achieve this include strengthening existing projects as well as expanding and creating others like the high school mentoring program that will be offered at Lakewood and Woodrow Wilson High School starting in the fall.
The BSAI Advisory committee also recommended the district create a Black Parent Resource Center, a Black Student Achievement Initiative Webpage and eventually a Black Student Initiative Department.
During the initiative’s first year, Taylor-Stewart led the Coalition of Involved African American Parents which held parent engagement and informational sessions.
Other events held during the first year include a discussion panel on historically black colleges and universities, a virtual black history celebration and the first annual Black Student Achievement Initiative Symposium.
In year two, the BSAI launched Sankofa Parent Village to offer care and support to parents and caregivers of Black children. Taylor-Stewart said around 60 people would show up each month to learn and uplift each other.
Eugene Nah, a Stanford middle school teacher and adoptive father of a Black son, has been attending Sankofa Parent Village to learn more about raising a child in a transracial family.
“I am grateful that the district has provided this avenue to hear feedback and respond to needs as well as for the Black community to share knowledge and to uplift each other,” Nah said.
A Father’s Voice is the latest program under the Sankofa Parent Village and is meant to provide resources and community to fathers and male guardians of Black children to learn together and socialize.
At the school site level, $1,500 was allocated to LBUSD Black student organizations across middle and high schools like the Black Student Unions and the Young Black Scholars program.
The advisory committee also recommended the district hire additional staff under the BSAI umbrella as well as designated staff per school site to serve as communication support for BSAI.
“You cannot imagine how many times I hear, ‘I didn’t know about that.’ ‘When did that start?’” Taylor-Stewart said. “No principal, no teacher [and] no parent in this district should be unaware.”
Board member Erik Miller emphasized the importance of contextualizing BSAI achievements with data.
“As we continue to work on this space and improving the quality of education for our Black students in particular, I think that it is important for us to capsulize the impact of our efforts as we continue the quality work,” Miller said.
Related Posts:
