Reply to What do UMC Black Families Want (and sometimes not get?) vs What White Families Want and Get?

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Reply to "What do UMC Black Families Want (and sometimes not get?) vs What White Families Want and Get?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]respect
benefit of the doubt
credence
attention

white lives - even to many black people - have greater value/importance than black lives.

school leadership sometimes responds accordingly[/quote]

I’m an UMC AA woman, and my children attend their IB WotP school.  We receive all of those things from teachers and administrators at my children’s school.  At my request, my oldest child (who is very academically advanced) has received differentiation EVERY YEAR both inside and outside the classroom.  Any concerns that we have voiced have been respectfully addressed.

I don’t think that our experience is isolated, but it probably depends on the school (and the parent).[/quote]

It probably helps that you are WOTP at a school that is largely filled with White UMC students. [/quote]

It probably also helps that:
We live IB
My husband and I are both lawyers
We are active in the school community
We contribute to the annual fund and auction 
Our children are at the top of their classes, bright and (generally) well behaved

[b]Ultimately, who knows the exact combination of things that has caused this school/DCPS to work very well for us.[/b]  I’m just telling you that it works and we’re happy with the results.
[/quote]

I have doubts about this entire list and whether it indicates anything more than some wild inferences:

[i]We live IB[/i] How in the world do you know this helps or matters?   At this point almost everyone at a WOTP ES (except for Eaton) is IB or at least using an IB address.

[i]My husband and I are both lawyers[/i] This is hardly unusual in a WOTP ES and I'm not sure why it helps to be a lawyer - are people suing to make sure their kids have the right teachers or coming into parent teacher meetings and mentioning where they went to law school and magically getting better service?

[i]We are active in the school community[/i] Also not unusual WOTP

This [i]We contribute to the annual fund and auction [/i] had better not matter - I'm curious if you think it does and if so which WOTP elementary school is catering to folks who are donating money and how that connection is even being made?
 
[i]Our children are at the top of their classes[/i] which DCPS ES is measuring this?  I'd love to know where my child ranks in his class.  You can sort of infer their relative standing from the PARCC scores but standardized tests are an imperfect measure and almost all of the WOTP elementary schools score very high on national PARCC measurements with a large number of high performing students.

I'm hoping some folks will post some more substantive examples of things that they aren't able to get - there is this big misconception in DC that people living WOTP are getting some magical level of services that no one EOTP can get.  The reality from my perspective is there are a lot of frustrated residents WOTP, often about the same issues.
[/quote]

I'm the poster that you're responding to here.  Reading is indeed fundamental (read bolded text again).  As I have ALREADY said, I don't know why we haven't encountered the problems that some/many/most AA families on this thread have listed...we just haven't.  For the most part, our children's academic and social needs are being met at our IB school.  In some instances, I would even say that their school has gone above and beyond expectations.  The combination of factors I listed above may be the reason, or they may not.

You sound as if you're disappointed that, as an AA UMC family, I don't have a "woe is me" story to tell about our DCPS experience.  That's your problem, not mine. [/quote]

But you were making the point that there was some combination of things that may have been causing you to get treated better than you otherwise expected to get treated and then offered up a list of characteristics that make you pretty average as far as WOTP parents go.

Maybe the WOTP schools just treat their parents well and while some people are struggling to find grievances that don't exist and are even doing what you did which was to go a step further and explain away why you weren't aggrieved but maybe there was nothing to explain away.

The OP asked a somewhat provocative question that I don't really think has been answered much in this thread - a few folks assume they are being dis-respected and there was a story about an overheard conversation in a coffee shop (that didn't actually prove someone wasn't getting services they deserved) but there aren't many concrete examples listed here which makes me wonder if maybe there isn't an actual problem?[/quote]

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