Federal

Wis. District Steps Up Response to Growing Minority Enrollment

By Lesli A. Maxwell — November 01, 2007 2 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Responding to concerns that minority students in Green Bay, Wis., lag academically behind their white peers and lack teachers they can identify with, school officials have pledged to focus on closing the achievement gap and recruiting and hiring nonwhite faculty members.

The school district’s pledge is part of a nonbinding agreement, announced late last month, between Green Bay civic leaders and representatives of the city’s growing minority communities that is meant to improve race relations in city government, the police department, and the public schools.

Prompted by complaints in 2005 from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that the city’s police and fire departments had no black employees, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a “conciliation specialist” to Green Bay to help broker the agreement.

See Also

See other stories on education issues in Wisconsin. See data on Wisconsin’s public school system.

For more stories on this topic read Diversity.

“Our concern was initially with the police department and fire department, but we also kept hearing from some of our students that they felt isolated at school and didn’t have teachers they felt they could turn to or would understand them,” said the Rev. L.C. Green, the pastor of the Divine Temple Church of God in Christ and the president of the Green Bay NAACP. “We needed black counselors and teachers.”

Mr. Green brought in local Hispanic, Hmong, and Native American leaders to work with black leaders to push for more minority representation in Green Bay’s public agencies.

Demographic Shift

Superintendent Daniel A. Nerad, said minority parents voiced “some very heartfelt concerns that their kids had not found their place with us, and that we weren’t making connections with them.”

“We’ve become a more diverse school district in a pretty short period of time,” he said. “It’s a real asset for the school district, but yet there are challenges associated with it as well, like recruiting, hiring, and retaining staff members of color.”

In the 20,000-student school district, 37 percent of students are from racial and ethnic minority groups, an increase of 3 percentage points from the 2006-07 school year, while the vast majority of the district’s teachers and other staff members are white, Mr. Nerad said.

Hispanic students now make up more than 17 percent of the district’s total enrollment. Asian-American students, many of them Hmong, make up roughly 8 percent, followed by African-Americans at roughly 7 percent, and Native Americans at 5 percent.

Mr. Nerad said the first and most important goal the district has agreed to target is closing the achievement gap between the district’s nonwhite and white students. Part of the strategy for doing so involves recruiting and hiring more minority teachers and drawing on the Minority Student Achievement Network, an association of 25 midsize suburban districts that serve large populations of minority students.

The district will also provide cultural-competency training for all staff members, and will devise new discipline and truancy strategies to help prevent a disproportionate number of minority students from being suspended or referred to special education programs.

“Even though it’s a voluntary agreement, the schools seem fully committed to this,” Mr. Green said.

A version of this article appeared in the November 07, 2007 edition of Education Week as Wis. District Steps Up Response to Growing Minority Enrollment

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Assessment Webinar
Reflections on Evidence-Based Grading Practices: What We Learned for Next Year
Get real insights on evidence-based grading from K-12 leaders.
Content provided by Otus
Artificial Intelligence K-12 Essentials Forum How AI Use Is Expanding in K-12 Schools
Join this free virtual event to explore how AI technology is—and is not—improving K-12 teaching and learning.
Student Achievement K-12 Essentials Forum How to Build and Scale Effective K-12 State & District Tutoring Programs
Join this free virtual summit to learn from education leaders, policymakers, and industry experts on the topic of high-impact tutoring.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Federal Inside Trump's Full-Force Approach to Ban Trans Athletes and DEI in Schools
Trump’s return to the White House has brought a new era of aggressive investigations of entities that flout the president's orders.
8 min read
Education Secretary Linda McMahon accompanied by Attorney General Pam Bondi, right, speaks during a news conference at the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, Wednesday, April 16, 2025.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, accompanied by Attorney General Pam Bondi, right, speaks during a news conference at the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. The pair were announcing a lawsuit against the state of Maine over state policies that allow transgender athletes to compete in girls' sports.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Federal Letter to the Editor Public Education Benefits the American Worker and the American Economy
Our nation’s schools are central to our nation’s health and future, says this letter to the editor.
1 min read
Education Week opinion letters submissions
Gwen Keraval for Education Week
Federal Opinion Federal Education Research Has Been 'Shredded.' What's Driving This?
How to understand why the Trump administration's axe fell so heavily on the Institute of Education Sciences.
8 min read
The United States Capitol building as a bookcase filled with red, white, and blue policy books in a Washington DC landscape.
Luca D'Urbino for Education Week
Federal Opinion Here’s What the K-12 Field Thinks of the Trump Ed. Department
Educators discuss what the current administration’s changes to the U.S. Department of Education will mean for schools.
9 min read
US flag. Vector illustration with glitch effect
iStock/Getty Images