Boldly Digging into Diversity

Tamara Fyke wrote this column in 2019 about the experience of Fyke’s own children when they moved from a diverse city school to a mostly white suburban one. The section below, added in 2026, sets the three ideas in the column beside national data and research on a sense of belonging in school, and offers practical next steps for school leaders.

In a large urban district like Metro Nashville Public Schools, my biracial children felt rather comfortable. There were other brown faces in their classrooms. For the most part, they didn’t stand out as “different.”

Of course, they did encounter the occasional question about ethnicity from a peer. One of my sons even had a white teacher treat him unfairly because of the color of his skin. But, for the most part, my kids felt like they belonged in their diverse schools.

When my kids transferred to a suburban school filled with mostly white students, things changed, and they felt the sting of being different. Since my daughter is light-skinned, she could “pass” for white. Although she was hesitant to let go of her identity as a strong, young black woman, she did hide it. It was easier – less painful in some ways – to try to fit in. Watching her struggle, I questioned myself. “Haven’t I taught my children about equality? It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

“Yes, but not at the cost of denying who you really are,” I thought.

For my youngest son, there is no “passing.” His ethnicity isn’t obvious just by looking at his skin tone, but it’s clear enough for the white kids to tell he wasn’t like them. “Why don’t you go back to Mexico?” the boys taunted. “You’re a n*****!,” they’d torment. “That’s why you wear those shoes,” a girl snarled. Each and every time, he would go to the school counselor, a black educator in a predominantly affluent, white district, and tell her what was said. “We have to document this. Nobody will believe us unless we document it,” she explained, understanding how the system worked. When he would share with me, I would vacillate between tears and tirades. How could anyone treat another child that way? How could anyone say those things to my beautiful boy?!

In mid-2019, our United States of America is divided by race, class, and creed. All you have to do is go on Facebook to witness the latest war of words. Ironically, this division is occurring while we are experiencing the browning of America. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than half of all Americans are projected to belong to a minority group by 2044.

Lest we think this is just a black-white issue, consider what a friend of mine who works in Louisiana’s public schools recently shared with me: “Hispanic students are immigrating to these schools, and the black students who grew up in the area feel threatened.”

As educators and community leaders, our job is to make our schools safe places where everyone is seen, known, valued, and loved. We want our students and families to know they belong. How can we do that? Here are some ideas:

Diverse Representation

Be sure that the staff and materials mirror the student population. Hire minority educators. Curate a culturally diverse library. Place pictures and posters on the walls of students of every color.

Intentional Communication About Values

Provide explicit instruction about:

• Respect – valuing yourself and others

• Fairness – treating every person the same; playing by the rules

• Kindness – treating others the way you want to be treated

• Cooperation – working with others as a team.

Also offer opportunities where these values can be practiced, such as project-based learning, service learning, sports, and arts.

Meaningful Conversation

Give time and space for dialogue about race, culture, identity, difference, change, and community. In order for this to be fruitful, you must first establish a caring and nurturing environment in your classroom and your building. Assure students and families that this is a safe place for them to share their hearts.

Digging into diversity and acceptance can be challenging and uncomfortable. However, as leaders, it is our job to make sure that everyone feels safe and welcome in our classrooms, our schools, and our communities.

Sense of belonging in school: what the research says and what schools can do in 2026

A sense of belonging in school is the feeling that the adults and other students around a child accept that child, care about that child as a person and care about that child’s learning. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses the term school connectedness for the same idea and defines it as students feeling that adults and peers in school care about them as individuals and about their learning. As Tamara Fyke describes above, Fyke’s children felt this in a diverse district and lost it in a suburban school where they were suddenly different from most of the people around them. That is one family’s account, and the research below shows how widely belonging varies and why schools have reason to treat it as part of their core work.

What national data show about students who feel connected

The most detailed recent CDC analysis uses the 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a representative sample of 17,232 high school students. In that survey, 61.5 percent of students said they felt close to people at school, and the share was lowest, at 48.3 percent, among students who identified as questioning or described their sexual identity in another way. Students with high connectedness were less likely to report poor mental health in the past 30 days (22.0 percent compared with 40.1 percent) and less likely to have missed school because they felt unsafe (5.9 percent compared with 11.0 percent). An Education Week report from October 2024 gives the figure for the next survey, in 2023, as 55 percent, down from about 62 percent in 2021.

These results come from a survey taken at one point in time, so they show that connectedness and well-being go together and cannot show which one causes the other. The CDC authors say so themselves, and they add that connectedness was measured with a single question. The pattern still gives school leaders a reason to watch the measure. The CDC report on the 2021 survey has the full figures, and the CDC’s school connectedness page notes that connectedness does not benefit all students equally, which is why it recommends inclusive, equity-focused practices.

Representation: the first idea in the column, and what a study of teachers found

The first suggestion in the column is that staff and materials should mirror the student population. One widely cited study on staffing is by Seth Gershenson and colleagues, published in 2022 in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. The authors used the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment, in which students were assigned to classrooms at random, and found that Black students who had at least one Black teacher in kindergarten through third grade were 9 percentage points (13 percent) more likely to graduate from high school and 6 percentage points (19 percent) more likely to enroll in college than similar students in the same schools. The working paper reports no effect for white students, notes that the gains in college enrollment were concentrated in two-year programs, and says the long-run effects were concentrated among disadvantaged Black males. The study shows that who stands in front of the class can matter over many years. It does not say what any individual teacher can or cannot do, and it does not replace the other two ideas in the column.

Who the students are now

The column cites a Census Bureau projection that more than half of Americans would belong to a minority group by 2044. The Bureau has since issued new projections. In its 2023 series, non-Hispanic White people made up 58.9 percent of the population in 2022 and are projected to be 44.9 percent in 2060 under the middle scenario, while the Hispanic share rises from 19.1 to 26.9 percent and the non-Hispanic Black share stays near 13 percent. Projections change with each release, so a school board is better served by its own enrollment data than by a national date. The direction is consistent, though: more schools will serve students who are in the minority in some classrooms and the majority in others.

Practical steps for leaders, teachers and parents

The second and third ideas in the column, teaching values explicitly and making time for conversation about race, culture and identity, depend most on adults being prepared. Learning for Justice, the education program of the Southern Poverty Law Center, publishes Let’s Talk! Facilitating Critical Conversations With Students, a 2022 guide for educators with classroom-ready strategies for planning these discussions. A school leader can decide four things in advance:

• Who on staff receives a report when a student is taunted because of race, ethnicity or language, and what the family is told afterward. The counselor described in the column advised documenting every incident, and a written procedure means a family does not have to carry that burden alone.
• How staff are prepared to lead discussions on identity, so that no student is asked to speak for a whole group.
• How the school asks students about belonging, for example through a short, regular survey, and who reads the results.
• Which adult a student who is new to the school can go to by name during the first weeks.

Parents can ask the same questions of a school before a transfer. A school counselor or psychologist is the right person to involve if a child is withdrawing, avoiding school or showing signs of distress. These steps sit within the broader work described in edCircuit’s Social-Emotional Learning Guide.

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