CHCCS Leadership Expects Asian Community to Act as “Model Minority”

[Audrey Niblock]

Dear CHCCS Board and District Leadership, I’m adding the public comment I provide at the June 4th Board meeting to the written public comment section for anyone who would like to review it. 

 

If district leadership believes Glenwood can be closed and its programs separated, that reflects a profound blind spot. Those closest to and a part of Glenwood have been clear: separation would dismantle the culture, safety, and identity‑affirming environment that make Glenwood successful. It would also weaken one of the district’s strongest enrollment drivers and accelerate already declining enrollment. Yet those insights have been discounted in favor of theoretical models that do not reflect lived reality.

With Glenwood’s closing what will happen if you move 200 Asian and mostly minority students into another school—displacing current students and staff to make room for Glenwood. Those existing students will lose their friends and teachers will lose colleagues to create room for Glenwood. They don’t want this. And our children will enter as outsiders and as a racial minority. How do you expect this will go?

Here is a painful truth about how it will go:

If you split Glenwood and we keep our six‑year‑old in DL, before she even walks into her new school, we will have to prepare her for how to respond when another child says, to her, “Go back to where you came from.”

That is the cost of this decision for Glenwood. 

We don’t have our neighborhoods. We don’t have our baseball teams. We don’t have our neighborhood school. We had Glenwood. Now that is gone. 

This is the cost for Glenwood and it is a cost our children should not have to bear.

So when I hear the claim that closing Glenwood is the “least disruptive,” I can’t help but wonder, is it perceived as the least disruptive because this “progressive” community is expecting the Asian community to be the model minority— and absorb the disruption, and stay quiet, and carry the burden of balancing schools and the decision made by the Board. I truly wonder? 

Thank you,

Audrey Shen

Parent of two Glenwood students 

Audrey....@gmail.com