Chairman Phil Mendelson Committee of the Whole

Agency Performance Oversight: All Education Agencies March 9, 2021

Good Afternoon, my name is Kristi Matthews and I am the Coordinator for DC Girls’ Coalition. The DC Girls’ Coalition works to elevate and amplify the voices of young women, girls, femmes, gender non-conforming and transgender girls/women of color in the District of Columbia. DCGC, comprised of youth-serving and advocacy organizations, that adopts and fights for the implementation of policy recommendations that centers youth leadership and addresses their needs. We are currently managed by our Youth Advisory Board made up of young girls of color and gender nonconforming people of color ages 11- 22 years old.

Today, my testimony will focus on the following issues: mandatory reporting, increasing consent at 16 within education, youth centered approaches to responding to the pandemic, and police free schools. The first issue I will testifying about is mandatory reporting. We know that there is an issue with under-reporting issues of neglect and abuse that are serious for youth and children of color. I personally have been told of many incidents in which youth have shared issues with abuse and neglect and were not taken seriously or believed. We also know they are over-reporting issues that are not at a level of abuse or neglect for youth of color. Within our coalition we have many stories of youth having CPS called to their homes because they came to school late or missed breakfast without anyone talking with them first and seeing if there were reasons for these incidents. We are requesting that DCPS first address the issue of reporting by first making it clear to youth what leads to a cps call and who mandated reporters within their schools using placards within schools. We are also asking that children and youth receive regular classes or training on issues that will lead to mandated reporting.

Another major issue we are working on is consent at 16. We know that there are many youth who are navigating government systems without adult or family support. This becomes a difficult task when you are trying to transfer to a different school, apply for college, or even simply confirm your graduation credits when you are under 18. We are asking that youth under 18 have access to the education records so they can navigate their own education success. We are also asking the DCPS ensure that individual schools enforce their current policies that have been created support Youth who are transgender or gender nonconforming. The policy we are advocating be enforced is the one that states that youth has the right to be called by the gender they have self-identified as. This includes keeping two records of students’ education records (one with the gender assigned at birth and one with the gender they self-identify as). We also support more training of staff to ensure youth who are transgender or gender nonconforming are able to have a safe and healthy school experience.

I will now talk about the pandemic and the need for youth center responses to issues. We co-hosted with several organizations two youth centered town halls about the impact of the pandemic on youth. One of the most common themes was the negative impact on youth and their education access. We are concerned about issues within distance learning, in-person learning, sanitation of schools, recreational/gathering activities, and social and emotional support. With distance learning one of our biggest concerns is connectivity issues in Ward 7 and 8. We have heard from many youth who have lost connection to their classrooms, dealt with frozen screens, or inability to connect at all. We have seen youth fall behind due these concerns. Our next biggest issue is around social and emotional support. We know we are all struggling with social distancing. Children and youth are trying to manage learning and loosing the socialization that occurs within schools. Many youth have talked about an increase in anxiety, depression, and fear with social learning. We are seeing youth being frustrated with the process of learning and being punished for that frustration. DCPS needs to increase social emotional support for youth. There needs to be more resources put into community based healers, counselors, and emotional support entities. I have included the full list of our demands at the end of testimony.

Lastly, we support Black Swan Academy’s Police Free School demands. We are asking that instead of funding for the policing of youth we could make investments in social and emotional support. MPD currently receives over $13 million to police and criminalize our youth in schools. Less than half of this budget could ensure 80 schools received additional clinicians. We support the funding or criminalizing youth to be invested in the mental health of young people instead. We believe we should be increasing community based mental health support, increasing counselors within schools, providing training to teachers to increase their skills at social and emotional learning, and providing more psychologists to support schools.

Thank you for allowing me to testify. I welcome any questions you may have.

Full list of COVID-19 demands:

Focus on online learning and access to technology, including:

• Improve internet services in Ward 7 and 8
• Increase online tutoring resources
• Improve communications with students and families during distance learning
• Provide distance-learning tutorials for students
• Ensure distance-learning includes activities and lessons off of technology that are interactive
• Increase online opportunities for co-studying
• Increase supports for youth with special learning needs or disabilities
• Incorporate distance learning adjustment times within the school year

• Ensure all youth have access to computers, printers, and scanners at home.
• Provide support for parents who must work and cannot stay home with children.

• Provide high-quality classroom instruction, including:
  • Incorporate hands on learning opportunities and ensure children can interact with one another safely,
  • Ensure students in learning cohorts are on the same learning level
  • Incorporate outside learning opportunities
  • Ensures students who need aides are able to get support and remain safe
  • Limit in-school time to two or three days
  • Create a code of conduct for following safety protocols that all staff must sign and be held accountable to.

• Require sanitation protocols, including:
  • Ensure that students and staff are able to be tested for COVID-19 regularly and ensure strong contract tracing
  • Provide free masks, gloves and sanitizer to all students, staff, low-income residents and those at higher risk of contracting COVID-19
  • Ensure all schools have an assigned nurse and access to larger healthcare teams.
  • Develop youth-specific hotline to call if they have symptoms of COVID-19
  • Create cleaning stations outside of each room in schools including bathroom
  • Test every school for ventilation safety and take the necessary steps to ensure it works properly before opening schools
  • Ensure that anyone who enters the school building goes through a sanitation process
  • Increase the number of deep cleanings for each school

• Rethink, but prioritize gathering times, including
  • Develop spaces to create decorative face masks during school
  • Develop a protocol for walking hallways
  • Create virtual interactions between classes and during lunch,
  • Host activities outside
  • Complete virtual assemblies
  • Develop creative ways for students to practice after school activities.

• Prioritize social emotional support and mental health, including: ○ Incorporate games and virtual hangouts in lesson plans and school activities ○ Create spaces in school for youth to hangout in a safe way to ensure youth are still getting socialization and emotional support from peers
  • Develop a plan to address how to deal with trauma during the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Ensure every school has fully equipped mental health support staff in schools and virtually that meets national standards, including counselors, social workers, behavior techs, therperist and other clinicians
  • Increase mentors within the school
  • Reach out to community-based partners to help with emotional needs of students
  • Develop mental health check-ins and self-care check-ins that can be incorporated into the class daily
  • Develop creative ways to provide safe hugs during crises
  • Remove police presence in schools and do not rely on security personnel or punitive disciplinary measures to enforce safety protocols or
  • Develop student-based safety protocols that do not rely on police or security officers.

In 2016, Washington Area Women’s Foundation began what will be a forever journey. At the time, we were both clear and intentional in how our mission pursued gender justice, but we were not as clear, nor were we intentional, about how racial justice intersected with that mission. And so began our organizational journey with a fundamental question – how could we be better and do better?

We started with ourselves. We took steps to change policies, processes and workplace cultural norms that perpetuated white supremacist values. I will be the first to say that we don’t always get it right, and it will be a lifelong work in progress, but we are being intentional about our learning and acknowledging when and where we fall short and taking steps to do better moving forward.

We then began examining our work and our role as a grantmaker – who and what we support and why. As a women’s foundation, our entire body of work since our inception has been about improving the lives of women and girls, but who are the women and girls we are talking about?

After five years of reflection and internal reform, I am proud to announce, on behalf of the entire Washington Area Women’s Foundation team, an important update to our mission statement:

In many ways, our mission statement is catching up to the fundamental shifts we have been making over the last five years.

There is no debating that women and girls are bearing the brunt of the pandemic, and for cis and trans women and gender expansive individuals of color, this is exacerbated by the structural inequities that were in place long before this pandemic. We saw this play out in real time across our region, prompting us to launch the Stand Together Fund last spring, which prioritized the needs of women and girls of color. In launching the fund, we were clear from the outset that we needed to be focused on the immediate, short-term and long-terms needs of women and girls of color because the systemic barriers that prevented access to opportunity would not disappear overnight.

Additionally, research shows that philanthropy has historically underinvested in women and girls of color, undervaluing them as the powerful community and movement leaders they are. We knew that we could do better. We intentionally prioritized women and people of color led organizations. We shifted to general operating support and changed our application and review process to take the onus off our Grantee Partners. And we undertook our grantmaking outreach and due diligence at the direction of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color leaders in our community so that our investments focused on gaps identified by those who know best.

By investing in the power of women and girls of color, we are actively and intentionally working to shift the power dynamics that are inherent in philanthropy and our community. We are recognizing that our collective liberation from white supremacy is tied to the liberation of women and girls of color, and we are deepening our commitment to achieving gender, racial and economic justice.

While we are proud of the pivots we have made, we are clear that there is much work to do. We are stronger when we stand together, and I invite you to join us on this journey to invest in the power of women and girls of color in our region.

Growing up, I wanted to be president. It was more than a childhood dream. In elementary school, I wrote anti-war, environmentalist letters to then President Bill Clinton. In middle school, my best friend gifted me a “future president” t-shirt as a joke, but I wore it earnestly. I would practice speeches in the bathroom mirror, and in preparation for my life of public service, I ran for elected positions of my high school class, volunteered in my town, and while my friends were reading the Harry Potter books, I was studying the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

It wasn’t until the summer after my junior year of high school when I began to question if my dream would become reality. I was attending a summer program for high school students at Georgetown University, and the second I stepped on campus, I knew I was in over my head. It wasn’t that I couldn’t cut it academically. It was that I simply did not fit in. These kids were rich and well connected. Even my own roommate that summer was the daughter of a member of Congress. In contrast, I was just a girl from a small town in Connecticut, best known back home as the youngest kid of the Indian widower to the former town beauty queen.

No one that summer had to tell me not to share my future career aspirations with my peers. I was very much the metaphoric fish that suddenly found herself in a much bigger pond, and just like that, I doubted my capabilities.

At one point, my roommate was in an amicable debate about political electability with another student, because that is the type of thing high schoolers at Georgetown do, and he said something about intelligence as a top criteria for candidates for elected office. My roommate countered that there were other factors that mattered more. “Take Martine for example,” she said. “She’s super smart, but I would never vote for her.” She didn’t mean it to hurt. We got along great, actually, and we remained friends long after that summer. What she meant was that it didn’t matter how smart I was. It didn’t matter how much I studied or prepared. The voters of this great nation were simply not going to vote for me for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I’m not a White man.

That was the summer of 2000. Two months later, I was studying in my high school’s library during a free period when the school principal came in frantically asking for the television to be turned on. The library had one of only two televisions connected with cable in our small school. It was unusual for it to be used, let alone for Principal Story to seek it out, but he was beside himself. The librarian found the remote, and he turned on the news. I stood there with Mr. Story watching the World Trade Center towers smoldering on live TV.

The TV stayed on over the course of the day. Within the hour, the library was standing-room-only with students and teachers watching the news, crying, holding one another, and taking turns using the phone in the office to call their families to make sure that their relatives in New York were ok; some learning they were not.

Like many brown people in this country, I was horrified by what transpired on 9/11. I was scared. I felt betrayed. But, I couldn’t dwell on it. Because the fear of the actual attack morphed shortly thereafter into fear of my fellow Americans.

In the weeks after 9/11, my father put three American flag bumper stickers on his car and started wearing an American flag pin on his clothes every day. He hoped it would be enough to convince our predominantly White community, where he had lived for decades at that point, where I was a second-generation townie on my mother’s side, that we weren’t suddenly a threat. Like I said, part of the reason we were well-known in our town is because my father is an Indian man who married a local White woman. Before 9/11 that was unusual. After 9/11, it was a liability.

And just like that, the weight of reality hit my teenage self, not like a ton of bricks, but more like a smothering blanket. Those few months made me realize what I had been too naive to recognize; I was not going to be spectacular. I was going to be average, at best, because the safest way to get through life was to keep my head down as much as possible.

Ultimately, I did decide to be a public servant, albeit not an elected one. I have dedicated my life to public and nonprofit work, and I’m proud of what I have accomplished as an adult. But, I have missed my childhood confidence.

I remember feeling a small level of validation when President Obama was first elected in 2008, because not only did he become the first Black president, but also the first president with a non-European name. If Americans can accept Barack Obama as President, surely the name Martine Sadarangani is truly American too.

And then came Kamala.

Watching Kamala Harris on the campaign trail in 2020 had a profound impact on me. Here is a woman who, like me, was raised by an immigrant parent; who, like me, is half Indian; but who, unlike me, is seemingly unapologetic for who she is.

We hear all the time that representation matters, notably for kids. We want kids to see themselves in their teachers, pastors, community leaders. But, I have not had one woman of color teacher or religious leader in my entire life. My role models, as it turns out, have been largely male and/or White.

Even twenty years after my childhood dream was stamped out, and after working to build a successful career for myself otherwise, the election of a woman of color as Vice President made me stand up a little taller and made my voice a little clearer.

I love this country. More often than not, I tear up with pride upon hearing the national anthem. But, in loving this country, I don’t ignore the injustices and the terrible acts of our past and present. My love is what put me on a path of public service, and my love is what allows me to have faith that we can and will do better in the future, even in moments when I don’t feel that my country loves me back.

Leading up to yesterday, friends asked me if I was nervous about the inauguration. There was an attack on the Capitol Building just two weeks ago. Areas of DC are on lockdown, with a stronger military presence than the US has deployed in areas of active armed conflict.  Shouldn’t we just have the inauguration indoors where our elected leaders can be kept safer and so that DC residents don’t need to be afraid?

Of course not. Demonstrations of love need to be stronger than demonstrations of hate.

And look at what this inauguration gave us. Just two weeks after white supremacists tried to cripple our democracy, and coming up on nearly a year into a pandemic that has claimed the lives of 400,000 Americans, a Black and south Asian woman stood before the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, raised her brown-skinned hand and swore the oath of office for the Vice Presidency.

Regardless of your political views, that moment was a demonstration of love. It is a moment that brown-skinned women and girls all across the US can hold in our memories.

And on a day in the future when, despite our devotion to this country, we don’t feel that love returned, we can think back on the image of Kamala Harris being sworn in to a nationally elected office; we can see ourselves in her; and we can stay hopeful for our own futures.

Congratulations, Madam Vice President. And thank you.

[Artist credit: Lex Marie]