Running Head: CHOICE BOARD #3

Choice Board #3

Halea Stairs and Rachel Satira

SED 305 01

Seton Hill University

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For the third choice board, we decided to work together. We grew up in two different

areas. Our school districts have many differences and similarities. We wanted to see if social

justice was absent or present in our years of schooling. For this activity, we are taking ideas from

the article, personal experiences, pictures, and statistics from the Niche website and connecting it

back to the article.

I, Halea, grew up in a primarily white middle class community. I began elementary

school being homeschooled, and then started public education at 5th grade at Donegal

Elementary School in the Mount Pleasant Area School District. Throughout elementary, middle,

and high school, almost all of my classmates were of the white race. According to the Niche

website there is about 631 students in grades 9-12 in the Mount Pleasant Area School District. In

the district, over 96% of those students are white, less than 2% are African American, Hispanic,

Multicultural, or Asian, and 0% are Native Americans or Pacific Islanders. The Mount Pleasant

School District has been open since 1964, and has been added onto a few times since they first

built the school. This has helped accommodate room for students that have came into the town of

Mount Pleasant and the surrounding areas. Our student to teacher ratio averages 1:14, which is

nice because there is more one-on-one interactions between the students and teachers. I feel that

my school is not very diverse, and has never been diverse due to the rural community that lives

in this school district. I graduated in 2015, and among my class of 150 people there was two

African Americans. Overall, my school district and the surrounding neighborhoods are not very

diverse unlike Rachel’s school that she went to.

I, Rachel, grew up in a predominately middle-upper white class community, Plum

Borough. The school district neighbored Penn Hills and Gateway. From preschool to sixth grade,

I attended a private school in Monroeville. Greater Works Christian School is part of a Non-
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Denominational church, Greater Works Outreach. The school opened in 1982. Called Greater

Works Academy, it contained all grades from Preschool to twelfth grade. The high school closed

in 2006. My mother actually became the school secretary in 2006. As of now, the school runs

from a three-year-old program (Pre-School) to sixth grade. They have ninety students enrolled.

According to Niche, 50% of students are African American, 37.5% of students are White, and

12.5% of students are Multiracial. For seventh through twelfth grades, I attended Plum Borough.

According to Niche, The Plum Borough School District has a “B”, overall. Oblock Junior

High School has a “C” in diversity. 90% of students are white while only 9% are African

American, 1.5% Asian, 1.3% Multiracial, and 0.7% Hispanic. Plum Senior High School has a

“C-” grade in diversity. 92% of students are white, 4.6% of students are African American, 1.2%

Asian, 1% Multiracial, and 0.5% are Hispanic.

Rachel

According to the article, without clear definition of how schools are implementing social

justice education, there has been backlash towards its controversial nature. It was implemented in

GWCs but there wasn't any specific emphasis on educating student of social issues in Plum. The

idea of teachers creating an education based around democracy, essentially making it a more just

world was present at GWCS. Being in the Gateway school district, most of the children that

attend GWCS, are from Gateway, Pittsburgh, and Penn Hills. I had friends from a lot of diverse

backgrounds. I didn’t have any bias or prejudice to what I experienced. It didn’t even occur to

me that I was experiencing two completely different situations when I left private school.

Transitioning from a private school to a public school was a big change for me. Larger classes

with a completely different classroom environment. I experienced more people but of the same
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backgrounds. I was provided with a better understanding of others during the early years of

schooling which carried into higher level studies.

GWCS is privately funded through the Association of Christian Schools International

(ACSI) and the mothering church. During my time at the school, I did not feel like my education

was poor or lacking. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at GWCS. It was here that I knew I wanted to

be a teacher. Yes, going into a much larger school, there were more opportunities but this did not

sink in until high school. I just thought all schools provided the same things so all children

learned equally. Wrong. Plum provided many more opportunities but they did lack in diverse

instruction. The article mentioned curriculum being inappropriate if it was not tied to basic

literacy and numeracy skills with the commitment of justice. Plum provided a basic education

but didn’t dare begin to talk about social justice issues. The article reminded me that social

justice is a broad term for much more than what we normally think.

I am not entirely proud of my high school. Putting aside the scandals that have given the

district a bad reputation; most students were not accepting of others and racial slurs were

common to hear in the halls. I recall issues with the Confederate flag on school grounds.

Students began wearing shirts picturing the Confederate flag on them or putting flags on their

trucks. This triggered a fight for cultural awareness and social justice. Unfortunately, this lasted

two weeks. Being in a predominately middle-upper white class community, we were not

educated enough about the world around us. We were fine with our lives and did not exercise our

voices to demand change. We were not educated on social, political, and economic issues. I

believe my time at GWCS provided a foundation of social justice awareness that helped me see

things in a public school that many others did not see. Plum Borough did not have a social justice
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model to work off of. Teachers did not have a framework for addressing social justice which the

article suggests schools have.

As future educators, Halea and myself must master the content of our professions.

Hackman says that, “teachers must educate themselves first on information that we share and

how it will effect the present and future” (2011). We have to provide self-awareness, self-

expression, critical thinking for all children. We must be aware of multicultural dynamics by

taking what we learn from this course, our field work, and personal social justice education and

apply it to our classrooms. We must find ways to connect the outside world to school. Providing

discussion, accepting everyone, and allowing cultural freedom, we can not just create a

foundation but a lifelong education of social justice. We cannot avoid social justice in our

instruction. We must share our goal of the importance of social justice education with other

educators, families, students, and the communities we live in.

Halea

In today's society we have a lot of controversy whenever it comes to social justice issues.

In some schools there are students taking advantage of the social justice concept. Like the article

says teachers need to fit the needs for all students, and with social justice the students are

supposed to take an active role in their own learning. Although in a lot of schools, they are either

not meeting the needs for all students or the students are taking control over the teachers instead

of actually learning. Yet, there are many schools that are trying to implement social justice

properly, but it is hard to implement for them.

One example of social justice being hard to implement in schools is in the article

whenever Jonathan Kozol talks about segregation is increasing instead of decreasing. Since
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schools are trying to bring in social justice, they need students there of diverse backgrounds to

help them implement it. Without them having this then they are going to have a harder time

trying to put into place social justice concepts. Being in a school with majority of the race being

white people, there were not very many other races around. So, I can see where the schools

would get segregated because sometimes parents and students want to be around more people of

their own race. Unfortunately, I do not see Mount Pleasant ever becoming a diverse school in the

near future unlike Gateway, Pittsburgh, or Penn Hills. This is also unfortunate because in the

article they said with segregation increasing the students are less likely to receive a quality

education.

Jonathan Kozol also was mentioned about visiting the richest and poorest places around

the United States. I feel that those ideas would be interesting to take a look at because of how

different our school districts are. Just like my school district and Rachel's school district are very

different, and they are not even that socioeconomically different from each other. So, to think

about having a very wealthy school district, compared to a moderate school district, compared to

a poor school district, I feel that is something that would be very interesting to experience and

learn about.

Throughout high school there was not much diversity. There was a lot of people who

were racist, and those who put the Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks “because

it was cool.” Obviously those are not things that I am proud of, but those are ideas that I can look

back on and think as a teacher on what I can do to make it better. I can help students understand

what all of this information means and how it can connect to their real life skills later on in life.

Like the article mentioned, we need to “promote the knowledge and skills needed for thoughtful

citizenship.” These are ideas that I am hoping to take into my own classroom one day.
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Neither Rachel or myself will ever know where we are going to end up as teachers, but at

the end of the day we will need to be prepared to help all of our students. So, weather we are

going into a school district that is primarily white or a school that is diverse we will always need

to educate our students the same and promote equality among all of them, as well as getting them

educated for their future.

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Pictures From Our Personal Experiences

We thought it would be a good idea to include pictures within our Choice Board to get a

visual representation on how our schools are similar and different. The first pictures are Rachel's

Elementary and High School, and the second set is Halea’s High School. You can see from the

pictures that some of the desks are similar, we talked about how the lockers, walls, chalkboards,

gymnasium seats, and other details were similar in both of our schools. Although we saw

differences because Rachel’s school did have a higher percentile of diversity, but not by much.

Also another difference was the location of our schools. Our schools are about 45 minutes - 1

hour apart from each other, so it was different to see that they can be so similar with being in

totally different neighborhoods.

Rachel: Greater Works Christian School (pictures taken in 2018):

Hallway 5th grade classroom Main Office

I attended GWCS from Preschool to 6th grade. Only one teacher of mine remains at the school. My nieces now
attend GWCS in 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades. I chose these three pictures to show the environment inside the school.
From the high school shutting down, they have a lot of unused resources stored away. There might not be a lot of
funding but their instruction is strong and social justice is implemented.
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Rachel: Plum Borough School District

Unfortunately, I do not have many pictures from my time at the high school nor middle school. From my graduation,
you can see a small sample of students that made up Plum Borough.

1. My friend and I on our last day of school in Statistics. We both are studying Early Education now in college.
2. My main group of friends outside of the volleyball team. The friendship is still going strong today.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Did-PA-School-Leaders-Look-the-Other-Way-as-Teachers-Preyed-on-Students-Plum-Sex-Pittsburgh-381552031.html
Plum Senior High School, 9-12th grades
http://www.wtae.com/article/oblock-junior-high-school-evacuated/7120378
Oblock Junior High School, 7-8th grades
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Halea: Mount Pleasant Area

All of these pictures are throughout my high school experience. As you can see, majority of these people are of a
white ethnicity. There is almost an equal amount of male and female amount of students in the Mount Pleasant Area,
but with my personal pictures they are mainly female.

https://www.mpasd.net/domain/18
Both of these pictures are of the two schools that I went to during my time at the Mount Pleasant Area School
District. The school on the left is the Junior and Senior High School, split up from grades 7-8 and 9-12. The school
on the right, Donegal Elementary, is where I spent my 2 years of elementary school at. It holds grades K-6.
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References
Hytten, K., & Bettez, S. C. (2011). Understanding Education for Social Justice. Educational

Foundations,7-24.
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Summary

We both decided to work together to compare our differences in our school districts on

their diversity. We discussed different ideas on how we could incorporate our own personal

thoughts into this Choice Board, and choosing the essay linking it to personal experiences fit

what we were trying to learn. By reading the article and relating it back to ourselves we were

able to realize both of our high schools were not very diverse, but they were very unique in their

own ways. In both of our schools social justice has came up, but at the time we did not realize it.

Until thinking back on it we have noticed some of the ideas were social justice has came up and

other times were it has not, but it should have. We also wanted to include some pictures of our

schools that we went to because we felt that it helped visualize our schools better to get an

overall understanding on how they can be similar and different. Overall, we feel this Choice

Board was both a learning experience due to the article we read and because we worked together

and sought out similarities and differences within our similar Niche diversity related percentiles.

We also learned how to implement strategies of social justice in our future classrooms. This

activity also confirmed that social justice education is needed in a changing society.