Meet the Women Starting a ‘Promise Zone’ at Booker T. Washington STEM Academy

All children will get an equitable education, where schools provide the education they need to achieve their dreams as intellectual and emotional beings.

This is what a group of Black women in Champaign believe public schools promised African American children and have not yet delivered.

“The significant gaps in reading and math scores at the district level is concerning and sobering. These have persisted for decades,” said University of Illinois Educational Psychology Department Chair Helen Neville.

Neville is part of a group with a solution: create a Promise Zone focused on Black children and historically Black neighborhoods, where each child gets a plan that spells out their needs and how the schools and community will fulfill those needs.

The idea is based on the Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that every student with disabilities receiving Special Education services must receive. Teachers must meet regularly with parents as part of the plan and are required to listen to parent input on the student’s needs.

The group would like to start with Booker T. Washington STEM Academy, an elementary school in the historically Black and now lower-income side of town. The school has a new principal, who the group says is excited to get community support. 

Longtime Champaign educational activist Imani Bazzell started the group and came up with the Promise Zone idea. 

“What is different about these Promise Plans is that they are parent-led,” she explained. “The parent might invite their pastor, their neighbor, their aunt, or the child’s teacher. It could be any array of people who would meet on a regular basis to review the child’s progress and to adjust any goals as needed.”

Bazzell worked with a superintendent on the idea about a decade ago. Then Bazzell got sick for a long time. She said she handed over the reins for the project to the Unit 4 administration at the time.

Another superintendent took over and retired before Bazzell recovered. When she was healthy again, the latest superintendent, Shelia Boozer, knew nothing about the idea. (Boozer has now been ousted, and the school board is in the final steps of hiring a new superintendent.)

Neville has worked with Bazzell on the idea before, but they have some new partners. 

Aixa Marchand is a University of Illinois educational psychology professor. Her research focuses on how Black parents engage with their kids’ education — and that will be key to the Promise Zone idea. 

“The ways in which [schools] do parent engagement often times is really traditional in the sense that like we want parents to come to the school. We want them to show up at parent-teacher conferences,” Marchand said. “That’s not the way some Black parents show that they are interested in their children’s schools.”

Bazzell is hoping to develop leaders among Promise Zone parents, who will be able to advocate for their dreams for their children and their children’s dreams.

Marchand and Neville are working on getting support from the University of Illinois College of Education, which is looking to partner more with local schools. A group of professors interested in the project are planning to meet in February. 

Bazzell has been talking with parents, pastors, and school staff about participating. She said the idea is culturally specific to Black families, but parents from any background can take the template and form their own teams.

“The vision of the Promise Zone is to develop a college-going culture on the north side of town. And that’s going to take a lot of adults to make a commitment, and that’s going to mean a different approach to teaching and learning for our kids,” Bazzell said.

This article was originally published by Illinois Public Media.