Making everyone, regardless of their background, feel safe and seen at every building in the Francis Howell School District should be a top priority. Although, at times some members of the community feel as if it’s just a second thought. Over the summer, the school board passed a new policy that allows for resolutions to be automatically nulled after 75 days when the majority of the current board wasn’t part of their creation process.

The Board should be reviewing each of these resolutions and explaining in well thought-out reasoning to the Francis Howell community on why they’re removing or editing old resolutions. Lack of communication with the Francis Howell community leads to major outrage and negative media attention, like we’ve seen with the Anti-Racism Resolution. The Board needs to seriously reconsider how they address these resolution changes and removals, or our entire district will face backlash for the actions of few. It seems as if the board has the best of intentions but they need to remember that they will always be under a microscope from the community and even a little bit of miscommunication will end up in people being upset with them.

The lack of insight given to the community from the Board of Education about the removal of the anti-racism resolution has led to many members of the community feeling scared about their safety and how they will be protected against racism during school hours. To combat these feelings, there are a few things the board and the community need to help each other with to better understand one another so everyone can come together and improve the district as a whole. For starters, the Francis Howell community needs to better understand what the difference between a resolution and a policy is. A resolution is just a statement by the board that goes into greater detail about their stance on a policy. Even if this resolution were to get removed, it doesn’t mean that it automatically becomes okay to openly discriminate against other members of the community without punishment. The board however, needs to realize that silence in a situation like this and removing this resolution causes them to receive unnecessary backlash.