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The first time Kim Amburgey heard Glen Singleton speak, she became defensive.

"I could not understand how somebody could suggest that, not only do I have low expectations of my minority groups, but that part of that is due to the simple fact that I am a middle-class white teacher," said Amburgey. "How could anybody who does not know me or how I teach make that type of accusation?"

Three years later, Amburgey, a Central Academy teacher, has become a champion of Middletown's racial equity work through the Consortium on Racial Equity in K-12 Education.

In Fairfield, Tracy Ashford, one of a dozen black teachers in the district, said strides have been made with the consortium, but there are challenges. With the consortim, Ashford said she's finally able to verbalize what she went through as a black student in a white school. Also, she can speak up about things that happen to her as a teacher.

Once, she said a parent told her she must be special, because the district doesn't typically hire blacks. Another time, she said she encountered a teacher calling black students "thugs" and "ghetto."

"I said, 'what do you mean by that?' It was very tense between that teacher and me after that, because I called her on that," she said.

Ashford said the encounter confirmed her childhood fear.

"As a child I thought maybe the teachers felt that way, but I actually heard it from a teacher in my adult age. It was extremely troubling. I said there's something that needs to be done about this. Students are able to pick up on those non-verbal cues from teachers."

Like many teachers, Amburgey comes from the age of the "colorblind" theory of teaching — the notion that in education, skin color should be ignored because every child is the same inside.

The work of the consortium has taught Butler County educators like Amburgey and Ashford that it's okay to notice a student's skin color and even better to embrace race as an essential part of educating students.

"With the color of our skin often comes wonderful cultural beliefs, values, practices and history," said Amburgey. "To ignore the skin color and culture of a child is to ignore the many things that have developed him into who he is."

Three years ago, Amburgey would have let a student slide for not having homework finished after a rough night at home or given a student the option to "phone a friend" instead of more time to think through a question.

"I thought I was supporting the child and saving him from embarrassment," she said. "I really did have low expectations of many of my African-American and Appalachian students."

Amburgey calls those actions her "mistakes," but now that she has recognized them as low expectations for her students, it has made her a better educator for all her students, she said.

For Ashford, another issue has become clear. The teachers of area school districts do not mirror the student populations.

"It is a concern for me that the staff population and administrative population does not reflect the student population," she said. "I'm in a position now to help those that were like me."

Racism doesn't have to be intentional to be hurtful, said Middletown Superintendent Steve Price. The consortium, he said, will provide districts with training and job-embedded coaching to create anti-racist school systems.

In conversations about achievement disparities, people often stray from the topic of race, said Price.

"People will go to other topics, poverty, wealth or income because its' more comfortable," he said. "It's hard to talk about internalized racism."

The nation-wide achievement gap between white students and students of racial minorities exists in the classrooms of Butler County schools, in some cases as much as 30 percent, according to statistics from the Ohio Department of Education.

On the Ohio Graduation Test, 94.8 percent of Fairfield's white 10th graders were proficient in reading, compared with 90.5 percent of multi-racial students, 85.9 percent of black students and 81 percent of Hispanic students.

In mathematics, 92.6 percent of Fairfield's white 10th graders were proficient, compared with 81 percent of multi-racial students, 72.9 percent of black students and 85.7 percent of Hispanic students.

"White educators want to explain away the achievement gap," said Cathy Milligan, Fairfield City Schools superintendent. "The achievement gap is consistent no matter what the range of income the family has. We want to explain it away with everything else, because we don't want to talk about it. What a white educator believes about race is going to determine what the student believes. I recognize race is a difficult topic to talk about, and we've got to develop a comfort level so we can talk about it."

At Talawanda, the school district's enrollment includes 3,066 students that are 93 percent white, 2 percent black, and other subgroups including Hispanic, Asian or multi-race.

"Talawanda is focusing on raising the achievement gap of all students while narrowing the gaps between the highest and lowest performing students as we eliminate the racial predictability," said Kelly Spivey, assistant superintendent. "Talawanda's goal is for all students to be successful and reach their optimum level as the district strives to achieve excellence."

The Ohio Board of Education Executive Director of Urban Policy, Adrian Allison, said the most impressive thing about the consortium is that it all started at the district level.

"As a state, we know that we have an achievement gap issue," he said. "We know that our black students and our Hispanic students are not doing as well as some of their counterparts. Our plan right now is really to meet as a team and to just explore the conversations right now."

While the ODE does not at this point plan to scale this program state-wide, he said they are working on getting a firm understanding of how the program works.

"We are a long way away from creating general statewide policies based on this work," he said. "I think the effective piece is the fact that districts are willing to engage in the conversations about closing the achievement gap and they are taking it seriously and looking for ways to make a difference. If there's a con, it's that the achievement gap as a whole is just a daunting task. I think it's a piece of the puzzle and at least these districts are exploring."

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