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Town Hall Meeting engages the purpose of education
by Arletha Jowers
Apr. 3, 2008
On Sunday, March 30th the Community Dialogue on Education, a project of the Beloved Community Center, hosted a Town Hall Meeting on education. This meeting was held in response to the transition that will occur following the exit of the current School Superintendent Terry Grier. The CDE saw this moment as an opportunity to engage the Guilford County community in a discussion of our goals for education in this county.
The CDE agreed together that any search for a new superintendent needs to be informed by the highest hopes, dreams and aspirations of our friends, relatives and neighbors from the community and the young people who will be responsible for moving us into the future. Much of the current discussion of education policy includes the dire warnings about American competitiveness, but we must also include a sense of purpose and direction that is linked to the full realization of the humanity of our youth. Many of the current policies and procedures, while having the expressed intention of improving education for all young people, have had very different results. We, as a community, need to develop bold, creative and effective ways to resist the damage to our young people by any policies that we see which do not meet our standards for the full development of our youth. Any such dialogue would be incomplete if it did not include the voices of young people themselves in expressing their needs and desires.
With these agreements in mind, the CDE called the Town Hall Meeting to reframe the conversation currently unfolding in the public square. On Sunday, there was a diverse panel of four people—Martin Green of the School Climate Task Force, Ian Plummer a senior at Smith High School and participant in New Voice, Steve Flynn of UNCG and a participant in the CDE, and Ed Whitfield a long time education activist, participant in the CDE, and member of the BCC board—that answered questions from the audience the first half of the meeting. During the second half of the meeting participants were divided into break out groups that discussed different topics: Education for Democracy, Education for Financial Security, Education for Community, Education for Meaning of Life. These groups discussed their respective topics and brought their thoughts back to other participants. In all the Town Hall meeting went very well, giving people the opportunity to think and analyze what is right and wrong with our education system. It opened dialogue, got the community talking and, hopefully readied participants to right some of the wrongs in our schools.