LA GRANGE, IL – Lyons Township High School is making progress with staff diversity, but it has a long way to go, an official says.
“We continue to recruit staff that’s reflective of the communities that we serve,” Ed Piotrowski, the school’s human resources director, said at Monday’s school board meeting.
In the last couple of years, he said, the school’s staff moved up to 14.6 percent of people of color, from 13.4 percent. In the 2017-18 school year, the rate was 10.3 percent.
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“That’s a 40.8 percent increase in that time,” Piotrowski said.
The student body is one-third people of color.
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Among teachers alone, the percentage of people of color is lower, at 6.3 percent last year, according to the Illinois Report Card. That’s up from 5 percent two years earlier.
Last year, 16 of the school’s 255 teachers were people of color. Eight were Hispanic, five Black and three Asian, the report card says.
Increasing diversity is a change that takes time, Piotrowski said.
“All of the people who have been involved in these processes are committed to making those changes,” he said.
He credited Jennifer Rowe, the school’s equity director, with arranging “hiring for equity” training. It’s where people can relate their experiences, he said.
“I shared an experience myself when I was in an airport in Florida, overhearing a conversation and the type of things that were going through my mind and how implicit bias and unconscious bias creeps in,” Piotrowski said.
He said he realized “how I was completely wrong about that situation and thinking this is exactly the things we talked about.”
“We can’t really combat implicit or unconscious bias if we’re not aware of it,” he said.
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