LYNN — The city’s school district has officially welcomed Robert Bishop as its first-ever executive director of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
For the past year, Bishop has served as the interim executive director of DEI, with him, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Evonne Alvarez, and others starting to implement changes to improve the district’s DEI.
Dr. Alvarez said that in the majority of the state’s school districts that have a DEI director, the director is a person of color and the superintendent is white. In the city’s district, these roles are reversed.
“We really want to start a conversation about that balance, and that structure helps us to communicate with 100% of our constituents. And, that is really the true meaning of inclusion,” Dr. Alvarez said.
“Dr. Alvarez’s attitude with this really is that the responsibility of equity work shouldn’t fall squarely on the shoulders of people of color to speak for marginalized or underrepresented groups,” Bishop said.
Bishop has lived in the city for nearly 30 years. During that time, he ran a youth program at Washington Street Baptist Church and worked as a social worker for the Department of Children and Families. In 2016, he began to work full-time as a social worker for the district, spending most of his time at Lynn Classical.
Bishop also delved into creating music.
“In the midst of all these things, I also signed a recording contract with a subsidiary of Sony,” Bishop said.
He added that he was able to combine touring for his musical career with his work with the city’s youth.
“Anytime I was traveling, as much as I could… Lynn had to be involved,” Bishop said. “So, if that meant I got the church van and I brought 25 kids to the Bronx with me on any given weekend, that’s what we were doing.”
A former student of Bishop’s influenced him to take the step into DEI, as she told him that his work has always been centered around exercising equitable practice and ensuring a sense of belonging, which is what the position needed.
“One of my previous students, who at the time was actually my MSW (master of social work) intern, challenged me. She said, ‘Hey listen, you’ve been doing this work all along… belongingness is what you do. And, if there’s an opportunity for you to take this feeling that students have had all along the way regarding a safe space, a space of belongingness… if you can take that and you can implement that throughout this district… I would be disappointed if you didn’t try to go do that,’” Bishop said.
She told him not to box himself into one role and expand his services.
“I had to take that person seriously, because this is coming from the mouth of a former student,” Bishop said.
Dr. Alvarez provided some statistics regarding diversity, saying that around 50% of residents of the city are white and 50% are people of color.
In the school district, Dr. Alvarez said that 95% of the teachers are white, while 90% of the students are people of color.
“If you look at our educator and staff demographics, very, very high white, female, and monolingual,” Dr. Alvarez said. “When we’re talking about cultural competency, connections with students, environment of belonging, there’s an experience there in terms of what the students experience… We want to make certain that it is connected to what teachers understanding is in order to create relevant delivery of instruction.”
Dr. Alvarez also said that 77% of students are English language learners (ELL). She said that number goes down to 40% in grades three through eight and to around 30% in high school.
“Our significant challenge is ensuring that our students have access to language acquisition in order to be able to learn and master content in classes,” Dr. Alvarez said. “That was one of the reasons that we moved to working with Rosetta Stone as a strategic partner, because students need to learn language in order to learn content.”
Along with working with Rosetta Stone, Dr. Alvarez said hiring Bishop as the DEI director will help those students who struggle with belonging.
“DEI is social emotional work. It’s not really an educator expertise necessarily, it really does live in the SEL (social emotional learning) world,” Dr. Alvarez said.
In January, Bishop established a student cabinet, student DEI consultants, teacher cabinets, and ensured there is support regarding relevant preexisting extracurricular clubs.
Bishop said working with ELL and minority students one-on-one in previous positions has informed him on policy and the next steps to take as the DEI director to enhance learning.
“If we’re going to ensure there’s opportunity for these students to feel like they belong just as much as every other student who walks through that door, then the pathways to get there are going to look different,” Bishop said.
