9 December 2020 — 0853 mst
Washington state NAACP accuses Denise Juneau of racism,
runs her out of Seattle schools superintendency
Edited 10 Nov. During her eight years (2009–2017) as head of Montanan’s Office of Public Instruction, Denise Juneau never was credibly accused of being a racist or of committing racist acts. That’s because she’s not a racist and the people of Montana know it.
The people of Washington state do not. They only know her as the seventh superintendent of Seattle’s public schools since 2000. After losing the 2018 election for Montana’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Juneau was hired as an outsider to try to straighten out an ethnically and racially complex district with a dysfunctional school board and factional hatreds and ambitions that eat superintendents alive.
But instead of straightening out the district, it tied her in knots and dumped her in boiling oil. Last night, after months of being accused of racism, incompetence, and opacity, by the local NAACP, Juneau resigned effective at the end of the school year next June.
The Seattle Times ran a story on reactions to her resignation. At riseupforstudents.org, Matt Halvorson posted an essay, Seattle Public Schools are a mess, to be sure, but do we really think Superintendent Denise Juneau is to blame? KUOW has produced many stories on the school system, including Locked in the Cage, a story about an eight-year-old black boy who was locked in a cage on the school grounds.
Here’s the racial and ethnic breakdown of the school district’s student population. More data are in the Quick Facts PDF (link below), including a godawful donut chart of demographics that provoked me to display the same data in a proper pie chart.
Hispanic, incidentally, is an ethnic category, not a racial category. Hispanics can be of any race and in the 2010 Census approximately 50 percent self-identified as white.
The NAACP accuses Juneau of racism
The NAACP’s attack on Juneau intensified this fall. National Public Radio station KNKX reported on 20 October that:
The Seattle-King County and Washington state NAACP say the Seattle school board should terminate Superintendent Denise Juneau’s contract, maintaining that she has not done enough to address systemic racism in the school district.
Juneau, who is a member of the Mandan Hidatsa Tribes, has led the state’s largest school district for a little more than two years. When she came here from Montana, she pledged to center the needs of students of color, especially African-American boys. Her five-year strategic plan focuses on boosting academic results for Black boys. A group of local community and education leaders have written a letter in support of Juneau, saying she’s been proactive in addressing inequities.
But regional NAACP President Gerald Hankerson said she hasn’t delivered and hasn’t listened to concerns and input from the Black community.
“She made a tremendous amount of promises that she was going to deal with the racist nature of the school district. In fact, she got the job and forgot all about that conversation. She made it worse,” Hankerson said at a press conference, flanked by other NAACP leaders. “And then when the community that got her there reached out to try to assist in this, she disappears.”
Some of the issues Hankerson and others raised are the departure of some Black men from leadership positions since Juneau took over, including Brent Jones, who took a management job with King County Metro after serving as the Seattle district’s chief equity, partnerships and engagement officer, and Lester “Flip” Herndon, who became superintendent of the Tukwila district after serving as Seattle’s associate superintendent of capital, facilities and enrollment planning.
During a press conference Oct. 29, Juneau responded to the NAACP leaders’ criticism and said she takes their views to heart and considers them an important partner of the district. But she defended herself and said she’s made progress on issues of racial equity within the school system, including hiring a more diverse workforce this year.
“Fifty-four percent of our school leaders hired self-identify as people of color,” she said. “For example, in comparison, in 2018-19, that number was 36 percent.”
In early December, the NAACP intensified its crusade to get Juneau fired. The organization’s education chair for Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, Rita Green, published, on the Washington State Ethnic Studies Now’s website, an open letter laying out Juneau’s alleged deficiencies. This odious paragraph alleged Juneau is racist:
She claims to be a person of color, yet she has done more harm to students, staff, and families of color than previous SPS Superintendents. She does not even have strong ties to the Native community. Juneau displays a pattern of discriminatory behaviors towards people she deems to be powerless.
The NAACP’s concern that black students are not performing well is valid, but not unique. To varying extents, the performance of black students is a profound concern throughout the United States. Intensive classroom education helps close the gap, but it’s not the only factor affecting black students. Juneau may have promised too much to get the job, perhaps expecting she would be held to a due diligence, good faith, standard. And unrealistic promises may have been demanded by the school district’s board, setting her up for failure.
I suspect, however, that a good deal of the NAACP’s wrath derives from the departure of black men in the school district’s administrative ranks. The NAACP and its allies may believe that black men are entitled to a certain number of jobs in the district’s administrative ranks — an informal but ironclad affirmative action quota — and that Juneau wasn’t honoring that entitlement.
Beyond that, the local NAACP may simply want a black superintendent and has decided to raise hell and assassinate character until it gets one.
Her departure is Seattle’s loss. There’s no guarantee that her successor will fare any better, or be cut more slack by the NAACP. The school board wants its superintendent to be Mr. Perfect, who doesn’t exist and never will. Until that board accepts reality, every superintendent it hires will be found wanting and shoved out the door every two or three years.
Juneau, of course, will land on her feet. She has a solid record in Montana. Her not being rehired by a dysfunctional, feuding, school board will not not make her résumé reek of rotten salmon. I predict she’ll end up in Joe Biden’s Department of Education, the NAACP’s loathsome accusation that she’s a racist notwithstanding.