Last summer – almost two years after the viral video – the school board unveiled a plan that would require diversity and inclusion training for all students as part of the K-12 curriculum, while changing the student’s code of conduct to specifically prohibit acts of discrimination, referred to in the document as “micro-aggressions”.
Within days, outraged parents – most of them white – formed a political action committee and began organizing school board meetings to express their strong opposition. Some denounced the diversity plan as “Marxist” and “leftist indoctrination”, designed to “solve a problem that does not exist”. Opponents said they also wanted all students to feel safe in Carroll, but argued that the district plan would create a “diversity police” and result in “reverse racism” against white children.
The dispute was so fierce that parents on both sides took the children out of the school system, while others made plans to move out of the city. A mother sued the district, successfully putting the diversity plan on hold.
As the fight intensified, Cornish, whose youngest son graduated in 2018, began to think differently about Carroll’s official motto, printed on T-shirts and backyard signs in Southlake.
“Protect tradition.”
She began to wonder: what was the tradition that her neighbors struggled to protect?
‘Everyone smiles at Southlake’
Robin and Frank Cornish moved to Southlake in 1993, shortly after Frank was hired as a Dallas Cowboys striker. At that time, the city was more rural than suburban – little more “than a two-lane dirt road,” Robin liked to joke.
There weren’t many other blacks when the Cornish arrived, but Frank fell in love with the wide open space. And with his first child on the way, Robin Cornish liked the prospect of sending his children to state-of-the-art public schools.
Like many small towns in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area in the early 1990s, Southlake was on the verge of explosive population growth. In the nearly three decades since the arrival of the Cornish, Southlake’s population has tripled to more than 31,000 residents, driven in part by a wave of immigrants from South Asia. Hundreds of other blacks have also moved, although they still make up less than 2% of the population in a city where 74% of residents are white.
With its proximity to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and the headquarters of several Fortune 500 companies, the city has become a magnet for wealthy professionals, with the average family income now reaching $ 230,000.
As Southlake grew, it gained a reputation in the Dallas area as a kind of suburban utopia, with planned neighborhoods and dominant high school sports programs. A 2007 article by D Magazine on the race for the Carroll football team’s state championships described the city’s “supernatural” charm.
“They are good at everything in Southlake,” said the magazine. “If you’ve never been, there’s something a little Pleasantville about that. The streets are cleaner than yours, the city center more vibrant, the students more educated, their parents more prosperous. Everyone is beautiful in Southlake. Everyone smiles at Southlake. “
After retiring from the NFL, Frank Cornish dived there. He started volunteering as a coach for youth soccer teams and later served as chairman of the city’s parks and recreation council. He even convinced some ex-Cowboys companions to move to the city to raise their children.
“Everyone used to think of him as the unofficial mayor of Southlake,” said Robin Cornish. “He knew everyone and everyone loved him. He ended up wanting to run for mayor. “
But when Frank died of a heart attack in 2008, at age 40, Robin Cornish faced a difficult decision. She seriously considered moving her five children to Chicago, where she grew up. Despite Southlake’s many accolades, she was concerned by the constant beating of racially insensitive comments – some subtle, some open – that blacks tend to live in wealthy communities where the vast majority of residents are not like them.
An example: every year, when Cornish’s children were small, Carroll’s fifth graders were required to participate in Colonial Day, an educational celebration in which students dressed up as 17th century characters. But it seemed like there wasn’t much idea of what that meant for black children, said Cornish, an oversight that was very clear when a classmate told one of her daughters that she couldn’t dress like a nurse; she would have been a slave.
But after her husband’s funeral, Cornish decided to resist. Although it was difficult to cover the high cost of living with a nurse’s salary, she had a support system in Southlake, and Cornish did not want to add to the trauma of his children by taking them away from his friends.
“At the time, I knew it was not the best environment for children,” she said. “But they had just lost their father.”
She also knew that it would be difficult to find a school district that matched Carroll’s academic excellence.
And the education of the children was what mattered most.
A plan to tackle racism
Following the 2018 viral video, Carroll’s school board convened a special meeting and invited community members to share their ideas on how to move forward.
Cornish was the first to reach the microphone. Reading the prepared comments, she recited some of the racist comments she said her children had endured.
“The scars are there, the wounds are permanent,” she told the council, while some in the audience wiped away tears, according to people who attended. “You all have to take a stand. You have to change this curriculum. You have to change the tone of this city. “
The audience of mostly white parents applauded when Cornish stepped away from the pulpit. More parents followed, each sharing stories of racist bullying that traumatized their children, with little or no consequence for the offending students.
Michelle Moore, a school board curator, remembers feeling a mixture of anger and shame when she heard it. She had no idea that so many children felt as if they had been bullied in Carroll based on their race. How could she have been so alien?
“I left that meeting saying, ‘This is unacceptable, and it will not be under my supervision,'” said Moore, the Hispanic daughter of Cuban immigrants, who has since been appointed by the school council to serve as its president. “We had a responsibility to do something like advice.”
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It was the start of an almost two-year effort to change the way the 8,500-student school district deals with diversity and inclusion. The initiative gained momentum in February 2019, when a second video appeared of Carroll students shouting the word with N, and again a year later, when three teenagers painted racist slanders at Carroll High School. The school system called for volunteers and appointed 63 community members to a diversity council that would study possible solutions.
The school board recruited Russell Maryland, a friend of Frank Cornish and a former Cowboy teammate, to lend his celebrity as former NFL No. 1 for the committee’s work.
The result of the effort – a 34-page document known as the Cultural Skills Action Plan – was released in July. It required mandatory cultural sensitivity training for all Carroll students and teachers, a formal process for reporting and tracking incidents of racist bullying and changes in the code of conduct to hold students accountable for acts of discrimination. The plan also proposed the creation of a new position in Carroll, director of equity and inclusion, to oversee the district’s efforts.
“As we saw, that was a pretty basic plan,” said Maryland, who is black, noting that many large school districts already have similar policies. “Just a basic plan for human decency, empathy, kindness, inclusion and understanding about other cultures. It’s as simple as that – or so we think. “
Moore, the school council president, said what followed was “a perfect storm”.
The diversity plan was released while the country was in the midst of an emotionally charged reckoning on racial injustice after George Floyd’s assassination by police in Minneapolis. At the same time, dozens of parents who never paid much attention to school board meetings were now coming to comment on the district’s plans to resume face-to-face classes during the coronavirus pandemic.
“How many more things can you stack up on that people are anxious, upset and afraid of, all at the same time?” Moore said.
Southlake’s ‘true colors’
Opposition to the diversity plan was fierce, immediate and well-organized.
Moore and other board members were inundated with angry emails from parents. Some formed a political action committee, Southlake Families PAC, and started a website demanding that the council “focus on fall classes, not on creating a district diversity police!” The group quickly raised more than $ 100,000 from dozens of residents, including some of the powerful and conservative executives who settled in Southlake. (Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association and right-wing media star who lives in Southlake, gave the group $ 2,000, the campaign’s financial records show.)
For months, last summer and fall, the public comment section of Carroll’s school board meetings became a sight, with dozens of parents showing up every week to speak out against the plan.
A white father said he supported introducing children to different cultures, but argued that the district plan would teach students “how to be a victim” and compel them to adopt “a liberal ideology” in a city where more than two-thirds of voters voted votes for President Donald Trump in 2020.
Several parents said the plan would violate their Christian values by teaching children about issues that affect gay and transgender peers. Others warned that the council had aroused Southlake’s “silent majority”.
Opposition to the diversity plan came together around two central points: that the district’s student code of conduct already prohibited bullying in all forms and the belief among some conservatives that any instruction that emphasizes racial differences can only perpetuate, in instead of healing divisions. Some opponents categorically denied the existence of systemic racism and argued that children should be taught not to see race.
Even Southlake Mayor Laura Hill, who organized meetings on combating intolerance after the 2018 viral video, spoke out against the plan, writing in a letter to the school board in September that the process lacked transparency, creating a “crisis of trust “among Southlake residents. Hill, who is white, urged the council to invite more stakeholders from the community to the process of “regaining the trust of our citizens”.
At a school board meeting, some in attendance booed Nikki Olaleye, a 12th-year black student at Carroll Senior High School, after she turned to the public and declared, “The life of black people is important. My life is important. “
“People in Southlake have shown their true colors,” said Olaleye in an interview.