Hello my name is Angie Hinojos Yusuf. I am a mother of three NSD students. Two of them will be talking to you tonight.
As you know, representatives of Save Our Challenge
have been coming here to speak for many months, and we have greatly appreciated
your attentiveness.
The Board will soon vote on the options presented to
them by the District regarding maintaining the Challenge Program. For over ten months the District has assured
the Board and the community that they would seek public input specifically on
the question of the Challenge Program. They
didn’t follow through.
In October the Task Force noted that, “The
Board has asked that we …engage the community.”
In January the Task
Force was
asked, “ Is there anything specific task
force members would like to learn from parents through this survey to help
guide the work ahead?” they answered, “Address
the Challenge program.”
Save Our Challenge gladly accepted
an invitation to meet with the District and we gave them our full report (titled
Recommendations & Rationale Based on
Community Input, March 1, 2016). The District promptly engaged an analyst to
discredit a portion of that report. Our
research championed a different point of
view from what the District was pushing, so they focused on tearing it down
when their time and energy would have been better spent seeking the community input that they had promised
to obtain. Instead of offering the task force our document bursting with direct
quotes from parents and students, they dismissed it.
In late February the District
sent out the Grade Reconfiguration Survey.
But we (and many others) were
shocked when we saw that there were no Challenge-specific questions included.
When a subcommittee and Task Force member asked why, the District’s written
response was that
it was, “too difficult to do”.
Even so, many
parents told us that they had written-in support for Challenge on the survey. The voting task force members would
unfortunately never see those comments, because the subcommittee never received the full survey results, even though the
District had promised a subcommittee member that, “We won’t complete our
committee work without the parent survey results.” Both the subcommittee and Task Force voted on
the recommendations to the School Board without benefit of crucial pieces of
information, as the District consciously delayed discussion of the survey, “we
will push that to May.” (March 28, 2016 Task Force District Meeting Notes).
We come here over and over again, because we have no
other venue in which to express ourselves.
This is too important an issue to stand by and allow the District to
discredit us, sideline us, ridicule us, and silence us. This is an issue of fundamental equity for all students and access to a path that will lead
them, by their choice and hard work, to higher education. Many of them are here tonight, and many
others have come over the past several months to speak to you. We are one voice in unison, and that voice is
saying it strong and clear, “Save Our Challenge Program”.
I’d like to add, regarding underrepresented
populations accessing Challenge, please do not blame the victims here. To imply that “students never showed up” for
these opportunities is offensive to me as a Mexican American woman and mother
of three Mexican/Pakistani American boys, two are sitting right here. The District has all the power—go out and find
the kids and bring them in. That is your
responsibility!
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