At a meeting of the Vashon Island School District board meeting on Jan. 28, three speakers representing Comunidad Latina de Vashon asked board members to commit themselves to engage in talks with Latino community members.

The 30-minute presentation, by Cynthia Ramos Orozco, Nicole Gehlbach-Wilson and Branden Guerrero-Rivas, re-introduced the group to VISD and reframed the way CLV would like to engage with the district to jointly create solutions for Latino students.

Leading the presentation, Ramos Orozco spoke of the group’s first foray into the broader community in 2009, when CLV first organized a large contingent of Latino families to march in that year’s Strawberry Festival.

Since then, she said, CLV has created vibrant programs that have not only benefited Latinos on Vashon but the broader community as well.

Outlining the accomplishments of CLV’s youth leadership program, Guerrero-Rivas, a student at Vashon High School, detailed two get-out-the-vote efforts, in 2018 and 2019, during which Latino youth on Vashon set records statewide in terms of voter registration.

In 2019, community leaders also organized a pop-up market attended by more than 400 people, and in early 2020, joined with 100 attendees at a Dia de los Reyes celebration to discuss economic opportunities, leadership development, and health and civic engagement.

At the start of the COVID pandemic — which brought immediate and deep economic impacts to the Latino community — the youth of CLV mobilized again, Guerrero-Rivas said, to assist younger students with online school.

“This was the time for leadership — our parents and youth both advocated and stood together to make this situation the best possible by helping each other out,” he said.

This kind of ability to create organic programs by and for the Latino community, promoting equitable systemic change, Ramos Orozco explained, is what CLV is all about.

“We decided that we are more than the sum of our needs and barriers but that we have talent and ideas to invest for the betterment of our community and for the entire island,” Ramos Orozco said.

Through the years, she said, CLV’s efforts have included organizing celebrations of Latino holidays in the schools and creating a fundraiser for the Vashon Schools Foundation when teacher cuts were threatened.

Another impactful contribution has been CLV’s advocacy for VISD’s all-day Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) bilingual preschool at Chautauqua Elementary, which opened in 2014 with students from all low-income communities on Vashon.

The group also led efforts to advocate for VISD to retain full funding for the preschool when it was targeted by administrators for cuts for 2019 and 2020.

In her presentation, Ramos Orozco encouraged a shift in VISD’s perception of the Latino community.

“Many times, institutions look at us as a problem to solve rather than a partner to solve problems with together,” she said. “Latinos do not just need services, they are not clients. They are community leaders who are responsible for their thriving and surviving amidst the chronic, subtle blows of systemic oppression and racism.”

She also said the CLV was concerned that many of VISD’s equity efforts were made in performative ways — including the formation of an equity committee that held two-hour meetings in the middle of the day, in English only.

“Our ultimate goal is to have not only equity for the Latino community, but the understanding and systems which better harness the ideas, talents, and power of all the island community, especially other ignored and undervalued groups like low income Vashon community members,” Ramos Orozco said.

Nicole Gehlbach-Wilson, who is the mental health director at Puentes, also called for VISD to recalibrate to form a true partnership with CLV.

Puentes is an organization engaged by CLV that provides mental health services for Latino children attending Vashon schools.

In speaking about the diversity and strength of the Latino community and its children, Gehlbach-Wilson said CLV would not allow a “single story of pity to circulate.”

“Many of the supports given to Latino kids, such as ELL groups, may be helpful for learning English, but they are done in a way that feeds the narrative that they are immigrants in need,” Gehlbach-Wilson said.

She also said that VISD needed to reconsider the way it worked with the Latino community.

“Often the parameters for meetings, programs and initiatives are set by those in positions of power and privilege,” she said. “When those parameters did not work for our community, they were blamed. This is a story from people in power, but not one with which we resonate. We see the problem as systemic. The efforts that have been made toward equity — part-time advocates, token representation and monthly equity meetings — are not enough. They were not co-created.”

True collaboration with CLV, she said, was possible and would benefit all students in the district.

“We have valuable information from our families that would be helpful for transforming the school system the way your resolutions and intentions proclaim you are dedicated to, but we need to be able to trust that you are following through when in-depth, trusted input is given to you for free,” she said. “You hired an external equity consultant when you have been getting one from your community for years. We need you to center impact, not intention.”

In closing, Ramos Orozco said that CLV seeks to partner with the district in a relationship that is “founded on, convinced of and promoting the power, talent and brilliance of Latinos.”

“As an organization that is powered by community and dependent on relationships, collaboration is in our veins,” she said. “Lack of ‘participation’ in partnerships has more to do with discernment about when a project or perspective does not hold our values and not wanting to subject our community to these environments.”

Her presentation ended by calling on each board member, by name, to meet with the leaders and organizers of CLV to build a relationship founded on co-created solutions.

Each board member of VISD agreed, with Bob Hennessey additionally asking CLV to provide input on VISD’s budgeting process.

“You fund what you prioritize,” he said.

Later in the meeting, Superintendent Slade McSheehy, speaking in the context of the school’s broad goals for racial equity, spoke about the district’s relationship with CLV, mentioning Gehlbach-Wilson’s call for the district to center “impacts, not intentions.”

“It’s messy work, and we don’t get there tomorrow,” McSheehy said. “I don’t believe this work is going to be finished when our kids are gone … We will struggle to make sure that race is not the determining factor for how kids are successful in our district, and how they feel like they belong. We heard that tonight. We haven’t figured it out yet. We haven’t figured out the relationship with Comunidad. We haven’t figured out a lot of things so it means there is a lot of work to do.”

CLV responded to McSheehy’s comment in a message to the Beachcomber, saying, “We can’t afford to wait a lifetime when it comes to racial equity, and will continue to advocate for a posture of humility and urgency when it comes to transforming the educational system.”

Timeline of appeals from CLV to VISD

Throughout the pandemic, Comunidad Latina de Vashon has repeatedly come before the school board in public meetings to raise issues about the impacts of online education on Latino students and other matters.

In April, CLV created a subtitled video, asking the school board not to cut funding for the bilingual, ECEAP preschool whose founding it had helped champion in 2014. Cuts had also been threatened the previous year.

In August, another video requested tutors, the translation of school materials into Spanish so that parents could better assist their children with online education, and the addition of a bilingual, bi-cultural teacher to the FamilyLink program.

But even as they asked for these accommodations, CLV expanded its partnerships with Puentes, a mental health organization CLV has engaged for the past two years to work with children at Chautauqua Elementary, and Geeking Out Kids of Color (GoKic), which provided technical support for families experiencing problems with virtual learning.

In October, CLV sent a lengthy public comment to the board, outlining its disappointment that CLV had not been consulted by VISD in the formation of a tutoring program and a job description for a Latino Community Liaison position at the schools. The group had specifically asked for such involvement in a detailed letter sent to McSheehy on Sept. 10.

Latino students currently comprise 13% of VISD’s student body, but graduation rates for Latinos lag. In 2019, local Latino students had a graduation rate of 70% — lower than the statewide average of 75.7% of Latino students and almost 24 percentage points lower than white students on Vashon. In 2019, 86.4% of Latino students in the Bainbridge School District graduated, outpacing the percentage of white students graduating statewide, which was 82.9%.