Equity Audit Highlights Disparities, and Solutions

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A report examining equity in Winooski found that a number of issues including neighborhood segregation, city workforce demographics, and civic participation were present in the city. The report also found equity issues relating to student performance and discipline within the school district.

On April 18, the Winooski City Council discussed the findings of the city’s equity audit. The audit had a budget of $25,000, and was conducted by Opportunity Consulting, a group that specializes in promoting and advancing equity, based in Washington DC.

The findings of the audit were presented by Opportunity Consulting’s CEO Iris Bond-Gill, and Managing Partner Etai Mizrav, who led a presentation with the equity data that they had found in Winooski, both in the city and the school district.

Check out more coverage of Winooski’s equity audit at VTDigger and WCAX. 

“We've done this in partnership with the City of Winooski, and we've also worked in parallel with the school district,” said Bond-Gill, “both of these together really give us a rare opportunity to look at some of the most important government investments that impact the public across the city.”

The city portion of the audit focused on three main areas: city workforce, housing, and voting. The school district audit focused mainly on student outcomes and the inequities in student performance.

Data collected from the city portion of the audit included information on police traffic stops and demographics and pay of city employees and elected officials. 

“African Americans are in this data, the only group that has more traffic stops,” said Mizrav, “the disparity here is quite significant.”

“The city workforce is not as diverse as the city does not represent the demographics of the city,” said Mizrav. “Lack of diversity that results from the recruitment practices, plus low pay, it results in high turnover for both BIPOC and female city employees.”

Data was also collected on neighborhood demographics, and the diversity of living spaces within Winooski. These results, shown in a graph, highlighted neighborhood segregation in Winooski.

“We're looking at the Winooski percent of BIPOC individuals, 25%, and what it looks like in each neighborhood,” said Mizrav. “What are the differences? If the neighborhoods were diverse, then we would see most of the dots close to the line of the diversity in Winooski, but we're seeing most of them are actually far from the line.”

As for the data on the school district audit, key issues seemed to be student performance, and disparities in disciplinary treatment based on race.

“In Winooski, we see that BIPOC students are significantly more likely to get disciplined than any other students significantly across grade levels,” said Mizrav. “We had data on all of the disciplinary incidents in the school district, and we find systemic assignment of BIPOC students to these disciplinary treatments.”

Numbers showing occurrences of disciplinary action on students based on race are shown on this graph:

JFK Elementary School Principal Sara Raabe shared the number of students that were sent to the school’s Student Support Room for disciplinary issues, along with the corresponding racial data.

“This school year, there have been 32 white students sent to the Student Support Room (SSR) for a major behavior referral 3 times or more,” said Raabe. “During the same time period, 42 BIPOC students were sent to the SSR for a major behavior referral 3 times or more.”

Raabe offered some clarification on what the school means when it refers to a “behavior referral.”

“A major behavior referral means the student was sent to the SSR to process with a trained adult,” said Raabe. “For out of school suspensions, there have been 6 incidents of a white student being suspended, and 3 incidents of a BIPOC student being suspended.”

WMHS Co-Principal Kate Grodin provided some additional data about students' race and disciplinary action in the middle school and high school.

“The percentage of BIPOC students changes as grade cohorts move through the district. By 12th grade, there are fewer white students and a higher percentage of BIPOC students,” said Grodin. “Our suspensions have significantly decreased over the years too, which really is something to celebrate.”

The chart below shows the amount of students with disciplinary referrals, and the racial backgrounds of the students who receive them. 

WMHS School Year 2021-2022 (as of 4/28/22)

BIPOC students make up around 70% of the student population, and white students make up roughly 30% in the middle school. The same goes for the high school, which also has a student population consisting of 70% BIPOC students and 30% white students.

“White students are 30% of the middle school population, but have 40% of the referrals,” said Grodin. “White students are 30% of the high school population but have 45% of the referrals.”

In addition to biased disciplinary action against students of color, data found by the audit also showed that BIPOC students were underperforming in school compared to their white counterparts. This finding focused on new Americans, who struggle in school at a higher rate according to the data.

“Why are we seeing different results for students from a different background?” said Mizrav, “similar to the city we see a lack of teacher diversity in the school district.”

Communications and development director Emily Hecker spoke about section 4C of the audit’s findings, which related to a lack of racial diversity among the teachers in the Winooski School District.

“Increasing school staff diversity was a demand of the Winooski Students for Antiracism several years ago, so there's already a team devoted to that important work on our Antiracism Steering Committee,” Hecker said.

Similar to the issue of the teaching staff lacking diversity, many of the issues at the school were known, and steps toward a working solution are in place, Hecker said. One of these is the student transportation issue that was highlighted in the audit.

“That's actually happening right now,” said Hecker. “​​They've come up with a really unique program to help either teachers or community members, specifically community members in the new American community to get their CDL or commercial driver's driving licenses. And so there's money built in to provide bonuses, interpretation support, you know, and help with passing that test.”

The school district was working to solve some of these issues before the audit’s findings were released, Hecker said. 

“We weren't waiting on the equity audit to do a lot of the work,” said Hecker, “a lot of the work was kind of underway already.”

According to data presented, income was a big factor for performance among white students, but not among BIPOC students. The report said that disparities in BIPOC student performance only had to do with race, as shown on the graph below.

Representation was also an issue, in both school and city. In the city audit, this was found to be correlated with voting. 

“The electoral structure in the city one districts which makes them an insignificant electorate in terms of who can get elected without campaigning with that community,” said Mizrav. “Probably worse than not voting is not even trying to get elected. These are communities with community leaders. We've identified some of those leaders, and those leaders are not putting themselves out there.”

Representation in the city has been something that Winooski was hoping to find solutions to through the results of this audit.

“The City pursued this audit to help surface the experience of residents we don't always hear from, or do the best job engaging,” said Mayor Kristine Lott.

The team from Opportunity Consulting also offered some solutions to the problems regarding equity in the city.

CEO Iris Bond-Gill had shared some solutions that she thinks could benefit the school district, both in regards to providing resources to new American students and for disciplinary disparities. 

“Leverage students native language in both their teaching and in the materials,” said Bond-Gill. “Provide transportation by increasing drivers' pay, so this is really talking about the school bus again.”

“Implement strategies to reduce exclusionary discipline policies and experiences of exclusionary discipline that disproportionately impacting students of color,” said Bond-Gill.

Recommendations were also given for the city government to implement to solve some of the equity problems outside of the school district.

“Develop an affordable housing Research and Action Plan. I know that you all know that this is something that has to be done,” said Bond-Gill. “To address affordability and availability the city really does need to spend time identifying what the drivers of housing inequality are; looking at zoning laws, the interaction with income, how, you know, home ownership programs, just a number of laws that exacerbate, you know, residential segregation and prevent people from finding affordable housing.”

Along with initiatives for more affordable housing, it was also recommended that people be educated on renting, so as to level the playing field between tenants and landlords.

“Educate and train landlords and renters,” said Bond-Gill, “there were lots of conversations with people who didn't understand their rights as renters.”

City government also needed to change, in order to address some of the issues regarding the demographics of city employees and officials, Bond-Gill said.

“Changing the way that we advertise and recruit to diversify the workforce,” said Bond-Gill. “In particular, the areas where the workforce is diversifying in the city is around more service jobs or what people consider community outreach positions, and so how do you diversify across all areas? Develop a real plan for that.”

One of the biggest pieces of advice given to the city was to increase inclusion and representation in politics.

“Develop strategies to increase civic participation among BIPOC residents,” said Bond-Gill. “We believe there are some systemic barriers, education being one and then there are some other structural barriers as well to potentially how elected positions and commissions are set up.”

Language can be a barrier as well, and despite Winooski’s move to allow all residents, including non-citizens to vote, the audit shows that that alone may not be enough.

“We know that there are languages that the city has translated ballots into, and there are languages that haven't been translated,” said Bond-Gill, “but it's not sufficient, and so even if every language was translated, we don't believe that based on everything we heard and saw, it would increase, you know, exponentially increase voting participation and other participation.”

Winooski city council (top left) speaks with Iris Bond-Gill (top right), Etai Mizrav (bottom right), and Yasamin Gordon (bottom left).

Clarification 4/30/2022: A quote from WSD communications and development director Emily Hecker about efforts to increase staff diversity was updated for clarity. A link to the audit was added.