|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… |
When Trina Lutes-Johnson became the principal of Lakeland Hills Elementary School in Auburn last year, she noticed a trend that concerned her.
“When I looked at the [data on] discipline, there was a huge disproportion in the amount of Black boys that were being referred for discipline,” Lutes-Johnson told the Reporter in an interview.
Lutes-Johnson said she saw this trend both in statewide data from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) report card, as well as internal data from the school’s internal tracking system Skyward.
According to OSPI data for academic year 2024-2025, the year that Lutes-Johnson was looking at, about 6.4% of Black students and 6.2% of students of two or more races were disciplined.
Asian and Hispanic students were disciplined at a higher rate than white students but a lower rate than Black students: 2.9% and 2.1%, respectively.
Only 1.8% of white students were disciplined.
Lutes-Johnson wanted to understand the reason for the difference.
White students make up the largest proportion at Lakeland Hills, 1020 Evergreen Way SE. In 2024-2025, 31.1% of students were white, 27.3% Hispanic, 18.9% Asian, 12.1% of two or more races and 9.2% Black.
Lutes-Johnson tapped into Auburn School District’s equity resources to identify how the disparity was happening and how to fix it.
This started with what the district calls “equity walks,” where Superintendent Alan Spicciati, Assistant Superintendent of Student & Family Services Isaiah Johnson, members of the school’s cabinet and students walk around the building and observe how students are being treated, looking for certain indicators of culturally responsive teaching practices formulated by educational equity consultant Gary Howard.
Lutes-Johnson said there are the “front porch practices,” which involve making sure kids see themselves represented in the school and in the classrooms, and that staff are personally welcoming to all students. “That’s kind of like your front porch, what you visually see right away,” Lutes-Johnson said.
Then there are the practices that go deeper into the curriculum and classroom management. Lutes-Johnson said the latter is what they decided to focus on in their equity walks through the school last year.
“That restorative discipline is really what we’re looking for,” Lutes-Johnson said.
For example, when a student is off-task, restorative discipline means not calling students out by name – which can lead to shame and embarrassment – but instead using their physical presence as a reminder, or privately speaking with students to figure out what they may need to get back on task.
“Behavior is just a message to us,” Lutes-Johnson said. “It’s communication that something is going on. And when you stop and take the time to understand what is happening, the majority of the time, that can talk the kid down. It can get them back to baseline. And they feel seen and they feel heard. And that helps them be able to learn the lessons that they need to learn.”
Lutes-Johnson said they did not observe any disciplinary action during their equity walks last year. This was cause for celebration, she said, that students were being engaged in their classroom settings.
“That led our team to realize we needed to dig into the data more and see what was happening,” Lutes-Johnson said, leading them to take a closer look at the details of incident reports from the school’s internal referral tracking system.
“As we started digging through that data, we saw that the majority of the office referrals were coming from unstructured times such as recess and gym,” Lutes-Johnson said.
Lutes-Johnson guessed that these times were hotspots for discipline in part because they were hotspots for conflicts arising as kids played sports and other playground games.
With a clearer understanding of where the disparity was happening, Lutes-Johnson and the equity team started trying out solutions.
One change was hiring Isaiah Robinson, a parent of a second-grader at Lakeland Hills. Lutes-Johnson met Robinson when she was opening the doors for the school day, something she does every morning and relishes as the “best time of the day.”
After learning about Robinson’s experience working with children as a youth pastor, Lutes-Johnson recruited Robinson as a long-term substitute and special education paraeducator. This school year, Robinson started working as a recess supervisor as well, bringing him to full-time employment at the school.
“It’s been cool to be out there and wearing those two hats,” Robinson said in an interview with the Reporter. “You get to build a relationship with the kids in the classroom and then also be out there supporting them.”
Luteson-Johnson said she hired Johnson in part because “the more voices that we get from the community, it just makes us stronger in our practices.”
“I’m a parent first and foremost,” Robinson said, explaining that his primary lens is always as a parent to his daughter, whom he and his wife have been sending to Lakeland Hills since kindergarten.
Robinson said they were apprehensive about Lakeland Hills at first, “under the assumption that it was just going to be a predominantly white school,” said Robinson. Robinson is Black, his wife is white and their daughter is both white and Black.
Robinson said that his daughter has struggled with feeling like “she’s too white for the Black community and too Black for the white community.” As a parent, he wants her to feel like she has support from her staff who just see her for who she is.
Robinson said he was surprised by the diversity they found at the school and in the neighborhood.
“There are parents that look like us,” Robinson said. “It makes you as a parent feel good to know that your kid is not the only interracial kid, but it also feels good to know that there is diversity in this neighborhood.”
Lutes-Johnson and Robinson said it’s important that the school community’s diversity is reflected in its staff.
“We want to see Black and brown kids feel seen,” Robinson said, and to know that at recess, “there is an African-American man that is here. But then on top of that, there’s a dad, there is a male presence.”
“In this day and age, we are living in such a time where kids need to know their identity,” Robinson said.
Robinson’s approach on the playground starts with building relationships with students.
“[Kids] just want to know if you’re going to be consistent and if you’re going to show up,” Robinson said. “The hardest thing for us to do as adults is just show up and be consistent.”
For kids who have had inconsistency in their personal lives, this is particularly important.
“We never want to assume that everybody’s home life is good,” Robinson said. “Some of [the kids] are going through it, whether it’s a double parent home, single parent home, maybe you’re living with grandma or grandpa. Maybe you had a meal, maybe you didn’t have a meal last night.”
“These kids are dealing with life,” Robinson said. “Even though they’re in elementary school, they’re dealing with it, and it’s heavy.
“We have to teach them that anger and frustration is a normal feeling, but what we do as a character when we are angry or frustrated is going to matter.
“I think it’s easy to look at a group of kids and automatically assume they are the problem. But some of them have have felt an injustice that says, ‘I’m being treated this way because of the color of my skin,” Robinson said.
Robinson talked about having difficult conversations with Black students about the different standards they are held in American society.
“We have to walk a different line,” Robinson said he has to tell kids. “The reality is, because you and I are African-American, there is a law that is set in place that is not built for people like you and me.”
Since Robinson has started the role of recess supervisor, he said that there have not been many large conflicts.
“My presence is known,” Robinson said. “I’m out there. I’m walking out there. I’m calling people by name. [I’m saying] ‘Hey, it’s good to see you.”
“Recess is becoming calmer,” Lutes-Johnson said. “We’ve having less incidents, less referrals that are coming into the office.”
Beyond hiring Robinson to help out at recess, the school has also focused on teaching kids healthy conflict resolution, with behavior intervention specialist Gina Greco and school counselor Wendy Medina leading sessions for classrooms at lunchtime.
“Our approach is to continually make sure that students know that they’re great human beings, but we make mistakes and that mistakes are how we learn,” Lutes-Johnson said.
Lutes-Johnson also implemented a whole-school morning meeting this school year, where everyone gathers in the gymnasium for a few minutes to touch base as a community before school starts.
“We talk about things that we’re seeing outside at recess and how we can improve and skills that we need to work on,” Lutes-Johnson said.
She said she got this idea after visiting a morning meeting at Terminal Park Elementary School, run by the current principal there Colleen Barlow, who used to be a principal at Lakeland Hills.
Lutes-Johnson said the morning meeting has been very popular among students, parents and teachers so far, and a way to “just have that common messaging and language and time together as a whole school community to start our day off in a positive way.”
Lutes-Johnson said families at Lakeland Hills are eager to have conversations about race and discrimination in the school community, citing data from the Council for Economic Education survey families take every two years.
To help facilitate these conversations, the school planned three open forums. The first one was on Oct. 14, with a turnout of about 40 people in-person and online, according to Lutes-Johnson. The next one will be in February 2027.
