Betty Brown – To start educating about diversity

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To start bringing diversity to another place or space that doesn't embrace it in the same way, you have to start very slow. You have to look at the philosophy of that other school or that other place, you'd have to look that their philosophy and see what their core values are, and then start working with those values and slowly but surely introducing the idea of bringing in the traditions that we have, the tradition that we value diversity, and we would like to embrace many people. It's difficult to force that on someone, so you have to do it very slowly. You have to look at the core values that they have, and start thinking as the community about those core values. You could perhaps stretch those values a little bit, but to go in and just say, "Ok, now we are going to do this." Is very difficult, because people resist that. They resist what they don't know or they're not familiar with. So you'd have to start it very slowly, and start introducing piece by piece. And a lot of that is through communication, talking and trying to figure out what's a way of doing something different? And what would the value be? And perhaps helping them see the value of something a little different. But it does take a long time. It definitely takes a long time. We've seen that with a lot of school systems around here, who a few years ago, if a child had a special need, for instance, they were, put in an isolated class. They weren't put in the general population. Which for a lot of children perhaps you might have needed a smaller classroom perhaps, perhaps a smaller number of children, but there are a lot of children who with a little extra help could be in a regular classroom, [01:44:00] and schools systems didn't think that way a few years ago, and now they've begun to embrace that. And we see more and more children that leave here are going into a traditional classroom as opposed to a smaller classroom, and for us that's huge. They have started to listen to the way we do it, and understand that there's a value for that. And also understand that they have to teach to that too. So id something comes up with a child, perhaps being teased about something, then a teacher reacts to that and doesn't allow that to continue, and that's important also, and that's what we do here. But it slowly starts and then it builds, but it is a long process. But it's an important process to go into and to try to share that with other people. We do that actually with other programs in Summerville. We belong to something called the Summerville community partnerships. Part of that is helping other centers embrace the philosophy that you want a wide population of children, a diverse population of children in your center. And we've done workshops; a lot of teachers at the center have actually done trainings and workshops to show how you can embrace the diversity. Ways you can manage your classroom so that having children with a wide range of needs can be addressed in the classroom, how you can make it work. So our teachers have been missionaries in a way, to go up and share that with other people. More and more as teachers see that it actually can be done, they are willing to try it. It doesn't mean it's always going to be smooth, but their much more willing when they've heard from teachers, particularly who have done it and managed it in their classrooms, they're much more willing to do it. So our teachers, as a program, have gone out and shared that with other people.

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