Hempfield Area School District to create educational equity committee

The Hempfield Area School District plans to establish an educational equity committee to address gaps in student achievement.

The committee will have two main goals: Identify and address barriers that impede student achievement or opportunity gaps and address explicit or implicit bias that impacts educational achievement, according to Superintendent Tammy Wolicki.

In order to accomplish those goals, the group will gather data based on student achievement, graduation rates, course failures and participation in advanced courses to determine which students or student groups are experiencing the least achievement.

That data will then be broken down to help identify how the district is performing in terms of supporting students who are considered economically disadvantaged, English language learners or students with disabilities. Other data will also be gathered to identify any needs for promoting inclusion and cultural responsiveness.

Along those same lines, the committee will also work to determine if there are professional development needs in terms of cultural competency, cultural proficiency, cultural responsiveness, implicit and explicit bias, diversity and inclusion. Once the assessments are complete, goals and action plans will be created.

The idea for the committee came from a Pennsylvania School Board Association policy regarding educational equity. In order to establish systems necessary to address the policy, Hempfield administrators decided to create the educational equity committee, Wolicki said, noting that creating the committee was in the works prior to the covid-19 pandemic.

The pandemic, which spread across the region in the spring, only highlighted inequities among students in several area districts due to unreliable internet and technology access, and was also a period of social movements like Black Lives Matter protests that occurred throughout the summer.

In Hempfield, while the average household income is around $65,000, about 8% of people live in poverty, according to estimates from the American Community Survey.

In 2017, when the latest small area income and poverty estimates were released by the U.S. Census, around 550 students in the district between the ages of 5 and 17 were living in poverty. That’s about 9% of students in that age group.

The township itself is also not very diverse, with 96% of residents identifying as white on the 2019 American Community Survey. That’s about 39,500 people. Almost 440 people identify as Black, about 430 identify as two or more races and about 350 identify as Asian.

The policy has not yet been presented to the board for approval.

If it is approved, the committee will be made up of students, parents, teachers, administrators, school board and community members, Wolicki said. Board President Tony Bompiani said during Monday’s board meeting, which fell on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, that board members would include Vince DeAugustine, Sonya Brajdic and Paul Ward.

Of the committee, Bompiani said the purpose is “to see how we can look at our district and make it a better district when it comes to diversity, when it comes to embracing all of our people with the love and kindness that Dr. King did, too.”