Letter to the editor: Battling over race at Gateway

The Gateway School District’s racial achievement gap is in every school building and has been just about every year for at least 16 years. Bottom of the barrel in Allegheny County.

To change this, five of nine school board members voted this spring to hire an equity director. Another board member worked against the effort to reduce the racial achievement gap, saying it was an evil conspiracy to indoctrinate students with Marxism.

Monroeville Citizens for God and Country joined the effort. They gathered white families and told them an equity director would lead to their children being indoctrinated. Some of those parents believed that conspiracy notion and came to board meetings to testify that there is no racial divide and to yell at those who disagreed.

They went through the emails and paperwork of board members to discredit those who favored an equity director. They attempted to discredit a local church that had supported a volunteer tutoring program. A better use of their time would have been reading about the causes of the gap and how to reduce it, instead of reading board emails.

Gateway can become a great school district, but not if board members and local faith-based groups try to scare white parents by telling them that efforts to improve academic outcomes for Black children are evil, un-American and Marxist. Greatness can only come if all board members insist on ending the racial achievement gap and work with the administration to enhance the education of all children, irrespective of race.

Ray Firth

Monroeville