The Burnaby school district is working to make its pool of principals and vice-principals more diverse to better reflect the "hyperdiverse" makeup of the city, but it's keeping changes to its recruitment policies under wraps.
The district launched comprehensive anti-racism efforts in June 2020 amid worldwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020.
As part of that work, the district hired a consultant, Co-Lab Advantage Ltd., to consult with community members, students, staff and senior leadership to see where the district was at in terms of equity, diversity, inclusion and Reconciliation.
Co-Lab's final report in September 2022 didn't mince words.
"Survey-results are deeply disturbing speaking to not just racism at the interpersonal level – the microaggressions, student-to-student behaviours etc. – but very systemic issues: the role of leadership, power and representation, student life outside the classroom, and also the role of predominantly white, non-Indigenous teachers and staff, who lack understanding, or denial, or at other times recognizing they don't know how to identify the subtle, structural racism that exists," stated the report.
Among the consultant's findings was a "serious and compounding lack of diversity of teachers and principals" and one of the recommendations was for the district to introduce a deliberate strategy to increase the number BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) leaders, teachers and other staff in the district, especially those who are currently most excluded.
Even before Co-Lab's final report, however, the district also hired the firm to review its policies for recruiting principals and vice-principals.
In fact, the district hired two consulting firms to review how school leaders are recruited in Burnaby: Co-Lab and Len Pierre, a B.C. firm that advises and trains organizations on Indigenous Cultural Safety, Reconciliation, decolonization, and anti-racism.
The district got reports from both consultants by June last year.
The Co-Lab report stated that the diversity of the district's student body was "in stark contrast to the racial and cultural makeup of Burnaby school district's staff, educators and administrators, particularly among senior leaders, principals and vice-principals."
And leadership is important when it comes to equity, diversity, inclusion and Reconciliation, according to the report.
"Decolonial, anti-racist and equity-focused hiring of principals matter, especially in the context of a hyperdiverse student population," the report states.
Both reports, which cost the district a combined $76,500, included multiple pages of recommendations on how to improve the situation.
When the NOW requested access to the reports, however, all of that information was blacked out.
Secretary-treasurer Ishver Khunguray said the district was withholding the recommendations to gain a competitive advantage in the sector.
"Just given how difficult recruitment and retention is, generally speaking, this provides us an advantage in that world," Khunguray told the NOW. "It's something that we really want to maintain and try and build because it's very tight to hire folks across, not just education positions; you see it across all sectors. It's definitely something we're looking to gain some advantages on."
Whatever the insights gleaned from the heavily redacted reports, the district began implementing its new recruitment policies last month.
But just changing its hiring practices isn't all the district is doing on the equity, diversity, inclusion and Reconciliation front when it comes to school leaders.
New hires are now required to take two related courses within their first two years, and those already in leadership in the district are required to include an equity, diversity, inclusion and Reconciliation objective in their individual performance plans, according human resources executive director Harpinder Hothi.
"The folks that we do have here are still responsible for cultural leadership, so we want to further them," Hothi said. "This is about bringing people in, but it's also about creating the knowledge and skill set and awareness for our existing principals and vice-principals too ... It works hand in hand. We're better off with both."
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