Minority community seeks more diversity in Warren teaching staff

By Ed Runyan

runyan@ vindy.com

WARREN

Leaders of several groups connected to the minority community spoke at Tuesday’s Warren Board of Education meeting, asking that they have “a presence in the schools” and that more be done to increase the “diversity” of the teaching staff.

“There are less than 5 percent minority educators in the district, which is 57 percent diverse, and less than 1 percent minority males,” a letter from the five black leaders said.

The group said it has a specific concern regarding the status of a black male principal at Jefferson K-8 with a master’s degree in science who was removed from his job last November. They want him to be reinstated.

Furthermore, there are other minority teachers who applied for jobs in the Warren schools who were not able to even get an interview, said Annette McCoy, president of the Trumbull County chapter of the NAACP.

McCoy said she would like Superintendent Steve Chiaro to meet with the leaders. In an interview, she said the group would like the superintendent to allow two of the leaders to participate in the committee that does the hiring.

“There is widespread agreement that our elementary and secondary teaching force should ‘look like America.’ But it is also widely lamented that as the nation’s population and students have grown more racially and ethnically diverse, the teaching force has done the opposite and grown less diverse,” the letter to the board says.

The other leaders speaking to the board Tuesday were Pastor Alton L. Merrell Sr., president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance; Tom Conley, president and CEO of the Greater Warren-Youngstown Urban League; Sonny Morgan of the A. Philip Randolph Institute; retired teacher L.K. Williams; and social worker Sierra Johnson.

The school board president, Bob Faulkner, and board member Andre Coleman both discussed the challenges in hiring minority educators, with Coleman saying: “We are trying.”

Faulker and Merrell said some of the most effective programs for recruiting minority teachers involve encouraging minority children to become teachers before they even reach high school.

But Faulkner noted that frequently minority teachers don’t stay in the profession a long time.

Board member Regina Patterson said she’d like Chiaro to meeting one-on-one with the leaders “to see if there’s something we’re missing.”