When Xavier Botana took over as superintendent of Maine’s Portland Public Schools, it was clearly a great match. Portland is a diverse and progressive district of about 6,500 students, a little more than half of them white, nearly 30% Black, 5% Asian, and 9% Latinx. Over the years, the immigrant and multilingual population had grown, and the community created programs and services for the newcomers. The school board spoke openly about needing an equity-minded leader, and Xavier had experience as an educator and system leader in large and diverse communities. Yet, once he started the actual process of creating a transformational equity agenda, Xavier found that talking about it wasn’t the same as doing the actual work.

Coming out of his first budget meeting, which can always be a challenge when a superintendent is new to a community, Xavier realized that equity was touted as a value, but it was “a thing inside of a thing within a thing.” In other words, it was embedded in a lot of system goals, but it wasn’t a central goal in and of itself. He knew he needed a different approach, and he needed to mobilize and engage all parts of the community to get behind his vision and give it the resources to make it a reality.

Setting a course

Every superintendent has community engagement as a goal. They’re expected to be visible at student events, public forums, and awards ceremonies. When I was in the seat, I used to say I had two jobs. My day job was working with my team and visiting schools. My night (and weekend) job was being out and about at community events or meetings with elected officials. Superintendents are expected to build relationships with key community leaders, too. Elected officials, leaders of community agencies, faith-based leaders, parent advocates, and members of special interest groups all want a seat at the table. Community engagement is part of the job, but they don’t really teach you how to handle its nuances and difficulties in superintendent school.

A comprehensive community engagement strategy is an essential part of an equity-based transformation agenda. It’s simply not possible to break down barriers, open doors, and reallocate resources without involving the people who are directly affected or who have deep roots in the community. These people have relationships and knowledge that can be leveraged to improve services and supports for young people. Moreover, engagement works. There’s evidence showing that working with families and communities can lead to better outcomes for students (Epstein et al., 2018).

Skirting the potholes

Community engagement is not always a straightforward element of a system leader’s job. When driving an equity agenda, superintendents will find lots of potholes on the road to transformation. In the current climate, some of the typical potholes have become sinkholes, and good leaders are finding new ways to fill or avoid them.

It’s simply not possible to break down barriers, open doors, and reallocate resources without involving the people who are directly affected or who have deep roots in the community.

It’s no secret that different people and groups within a community will have various levels of support for an equity agenda. Tax hawks won’t support increased funds. Real estate agents don’t like the threat of housing values decreasing if schools are seen as less exclusive when advanced classes or gifted and talented programs are open to more students. Activists who have been clamoring for change for years want immediate solutions to long-standing issues. Elected officials who run on single issues are beholden to the supporters who put them in office. Advocates forcefully represent the needs and interests of distinct groups of students and families, sometimes with seemingly contradictory priorities. And these are just the external stakeholders. Within the system, there are teachers, families, school administrators, district administrators, and students, all of whom have their own opinions and needs. Good leaders, when the conditions are right, find ways to corral all this energy and use it as a powerful and positive source for transformation.

To accomplish this, a superintendent needs to be a visible face in the community, someone people feel they know and can trust. Yet, leaders can’t be everywhere all at once, so they need trusted proxies who can represent them in different venues. Community engagement should not be solely in the hands of the district’s equity leader, if there is one, as that can further isolate the position and the work. Plus, some cabinet-level or system leaders might have deeper ties to certain parts of the community than the superintendent or the equity leader. The trust they’ve built over time can make it easier for them to form the connections needed, although it can backfire if the leaders only advocate for those parts of the communities with which they feel connected. Competing demands from different groups with different levels of informal and formal power increases the complexity of engagement efforts. When it comes down to it, superintendents must know they can’t please all of the people all of the time, they can’t trust everyone but must be trustworthy, and realpolitik is the reality of the job.

Setting off — together

In Portland, Xavier was fortunate to have a school board and community that were aligned with his values. Even so, they weren’t willing to just jump into the deep end when it came to aligning the system with equity. He had to help them find entry points.

Xavier’s approach was pretty straightforward. Part of it was relentlessly staying on message about the issues facing the system. Xavier also built a trusted team with deep ties to the community to guide him, tell him the truth, and speak on his behalf, leveraging their relationships to support his agenda. He’s found philanthropic funding for important aspects of the Portland Promise, a statement of districtwide priorities and values. These funds were used to build on other citywide community engagement work in support of equity and to show the value of investing local dollars in diversity, equity, and mental health initiatives. Xavier also has found it necessary to go beyond the many well-meaning white people in Portland to activate less-involved parts of the community. For example, he and his team held what I call “where they are” meetings in places where traditionally disenfranchised families tend to gather, rather than asking them to come to a central location. His partnership with Portland Empowered, especially its leader Pious Ali, has been instrumental to the success of this work and has shown that the school district doesn’t have to do it all.

When it came time for Xavier to propose his second budget, after just over a year in the district, he was ready to help the district put words into action. He deemed this his “crossroads” budget, the idea being that it was time for the whole community to understand that they were standing at an intersection and had to choose whether to make progress or to stay put. Given his work to engage with all parts of the community, people knew Xavier’s story and his values and felt that they were part of a collective effort to improve. He was firm in his stance that equity must be central to the district’s work and had engaged the board deeply so that they would stand by his proposal to put money behind these efforts. This included funding items clearly related to both equity and community engagement, such as increased pay for parent/community specialists, who had been the district’s lowest-paid staff members despite the great need for deeper engagement of families and the district’s expressed support for their work.

Toward the future

After seven years leading Portland Public Schools, Xavier has decided to turn the reins over to someone who can take the district’s equity work to the next level. His humble, consistent approach to the work has laid the foundation for the next leader. Seven years may seem like a long time, but when transforming a school system through an equity lens, it’s about long enough to just reach the end of the beginning.

Xavier and his team have worked with the community to show them what’s possible. They’ve broken down some barriers by increasing access to advanced courses and gifted and talented programs. Disproportionality of student discipline by race has been improving (until this past year), students’ voices have been activated, the district has more teachers of color than ever before, and educators of color have been given opportunities to share their stories (Santoro, Hazel, & Morales, 2022). By some measures achievement is on the rise, but not fast enough for Xavier’s tastes, or that of some others who want to see faster movement. Xavier wishes he had moved more quickly to push people out who weren’t supportive of his equity agenda, and he sometimes feels that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed some of the weaker elements in the foundation that he’s built. But by staying the course, engaging the community, and relentlessly centering equity, Xavier has set Portland Public Schools on a course toward continued transformation.

References

Epstein, J., Sanders, M.G., Sheldon, S.B., Simon, Beth S., Salinas, K.C., . . . & Williams, K.J. (2019). School, family, and community partnerships: Your handbook for action (4th ed.). Corwin.

Santoro, D.A., Hazel, J., & Morales, A. (2022). Cultivating anti-racist professional cultures that support teachers of color. Phi Delta Kappan, 104 (1), 22-27.


This article appears in the October 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 2, pp. 58-59.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Joshua P. Starr

JOSHUA P. STARR is the managing partner at the International Center for Leadership in Education , a division of HMH, based in Boston, MA. He is the author of Equity-based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems .