Beth Fairfield, Superintendent of Education for the Rainy River District School Board, plans to increase the capacity of equity among RRDSB employees across the district. For Fairfield, equity goes above and beyond in addressing disproportionality across the systems the board has in place. Thus, the Rainy River District School Board’s Equity Action Plan was born as a reference point to curtail the biases and worldviews that inform the decision-making of teachers, administrators, and other staff of the board. Moreover, Fairfield acknowledges this might be an uncomfortable and iterative process full of learning, but also unlearning and relearning of topics or concepts.
For Fairfield, this begins with understanding what equity is.
“We’ve had sessions over the last few years, from a variety of different speakers who talk about power and privilege and how those play into our decision-making and our lived experiences,” said Fairfield, “that’s the equity framework that we’re working on building right now.”
To help facilitate a greater understanding of equity among the employees of the Rainy River District School Board, a “variety of different speakers” have spoken to the board about how one’s identity and lived experiences shape their perspective or worldview.
“We’ve had a variety of different speakers,” said Fairfield. “Their messages are very similar. It’s always from that stance of understanding who you are, your identities and lived experiences, and how those influence how you see the world.”
This helps to form a frame of reference and gives prompts to dive deeper into the necessary reflection preceding a decision.
“The purpose of the framework is to ask deep-diving questions to help people reflect on their decision-making when they make decisions in different areas,” said Fairfield. “We’re focusing on the key areas of ensuring that we’re affirming and representing the identities of all our students and staff in our buildings.
“So, we’re ensuring that the resources that we’re providing to students reflect the diversity of the identities of the students in our building. We want to ensure that our instruction is culturally responsive to the students in our buildings. So again, that’s looking at finding different ways and acknowledging that there are different ways of knowing and doing that doesn’t always come just from a European, white-centric background. So it’s helping staff understand that and providing them with resources.”
That being said, Fairfield emphasized this will be a process that might be uncomfortable for some and could require further iterations in the future.
“It’s a journey, and it’s sometimes it’s going to be uncomfortable,” said Fairfield.
“But that’s part of the learning or unlearning or relearning. Because, [people] grew up thinking a certain way about things, and it’s not until somebody sort of shines a light or shares their lived experience, which could be very different from mine or yours, and then reflecting on that new knowledge and maybe unlearning something or relearning something. That’s how we get change.
“As a school board, we are always trying to identify, by looking at the data, to try to identify where the disparities are and using that information to understand who is impacted, getting input from those impacted, for us to always be centring everything on students, then developing the appropriate actions to disrupt whatever that disparity is, and that’s really the core work.”
