Even youngest Harley students meeting race issues head on

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As the country continues to face social and racial unrest, one local school is tackling the issue head on.

“We think it’s important to prepare kids to go out into the world as they are actually going to find it,” said Larry Frye, head of school at the Harley School, a private college preparatory school in southeast Rochester. “The story of race relations and racial difficulty, frankly, is a central part of the American story, and it’s both a central part of American history, a central part of American life today, and it’s foolish to think that is won’t be part of life going forward.”

Harley wants its students to have thought a good deal about and done a good amount of work around issues of race relations, inclusion and relating across difference of every sort, Frye said.

“It’s fundamental for us. You should be preparing kids for the world as they’re actually going to encounter it, what’s in that world,” he added. “This is in that world.”

From a practical perspective, Harley is a very diverse school, said Lars Kuelling, academic dean for the school.

“It’s a lived experience for many of our students and families that we have to address and wade into and acknowledge, and help support people as they form their own identities and as they come to understand others,” Kuelling explained.

Harley has adopted the Pollyanna Racial Literacy curriculum from Pollyanna Inc., a kindergarten through eighth-grade curriculum that is designed to help students gain knowledge about race as it has been constructed in the United States.

“It is a curriculum that is being implemented by independent schools across the nation that helps students at a very young age begin to understand race and ethnicity,” Kuelling said. “It does address other forms of identity, and there are opportunities to expand it beyond just race and ethnicity.”

Harley has adopted the curriculum from its nursery, which serves children as young as two, through its eighth grade.
“It’s a wonderful curriculum because of the way it meets each child developmentally,” Kuelling said. “By that I mean, for kids that are four years old, most of it is done through literature and we have made a vast investment in diversifying our literature for the earlier ages and even up through the middle and upper school, based on a lot of the recommendations that come out of that.”

Harley’s middle school has dedicated diversity, equity and inclusion classes, he added. Although the classes do not meet daily, they are mandatory. Kuelling teaches the classes in grade seven and eight, while Civic Engagement Educator Jocie Kopfman teaches the classes to the fifth and sixth-graders.

“It really is a great resource for us because it approaches so much through literature and art, meaningful video and allows students to understand the stories, if you will, of many Americans, always being respectful that any one individual’s story may differ from others within their group,” Kuelling said.

The school also has a Rights & Responsibilities class, also taught by Kopfman and Kuelling. The class is mandatory for all ninth graders, Kopfman said.

“I lean heavily on our civic engagement mission, and our civic engagement mission is about understanding the root causes of social issues in order to find out what are we excited about, what are we interested in personally in terms of those issues and how do we advocate for those things in responsible ways,” she explained.

As an educator, Kopfman’s background is in Africana studies, so ensuring that students understand how to look at racism systemically was a must.

“Even when we’re seeing all these current events come up, we have a way of talking about them that is rooted in understanding systemic oppression,” she said. “And that’s true of all oppression. So we don’t just talk about racism, we also talk about sexism and homophobia. But we use race and racism as a starting point.”

Kopfman also offers independent studies and currently has some ninth-grade students working with her now.

“In R&R we do this project, the advocacy project, because it’s really important that while they’re learning about these topics they have this opportunity to start dipping their toes into advocacy for themselves,” Kopfman said, noting that in some cases students have been involved in advocacy since middle and sometimes lower school.
Kopfman works out of Harley’s Commons Building, which is committed to community sustainability. All of the classes in that building touch on some aspect of society, diversity, equity, inclusion and more because, as Kopfman put it, those too are part of the sustainability of the community.

“There are several other things you can do in high school,” Frye added. “In fact, there are two required courses in the history sequence — world religions are required of every ninth grader and global human rights is required of every 10th grader. So that whole curriculum is meant to be a way of rooting kids in understanding of various global issues from global perspectives, but also offer on an alternating basis electives of women’s studies and gender studies.”
Kuelling teaches an anthropology course as an elective to upper class students that, while not solely dedicated to issues of race and ethnicity, has quite a bit that involves gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, sexual orientation and similar subjects.

“While it focuses on topics from across the world, we inevitably come back to the United States and look at multiple areas of diversity, equity and inclusion,” Kuelling noted. “That ends with students following up on a research proposal. The gender studies course that we offer clearly gets to a lot of items within DEI, and I think there are so many areas for us to focus on, but I think the Pollyanna Curriculum with its focus on race and ethnicity as a centering point really is something that will help us establish a nice long arc in approaches to many things.”

In February, Harley hosted a segregation and redlining talk for the community, led by Shane Wiegand and Simeon Banister. Wiegand is a fourth-grade teacher in the Rush-Henrietta school district, while Banister is vice president of community programs at the Rochester Area Community Foundation. Wiegand’s and Banister’s talk, “A Tale of Two Cities,” was part of Harley’s Commons Series, which are public talks on issues of public interest, Frye noted.

The school also has a student-led group called Students of Color plus Allies, or SOCA, that get together each week to talk about issues around race, gender and sexuality, Kopfman said. It was the school’s first student group that was back up and running when school resumed because the students understood the need for a space to be able to process the racial unrest locally and nationally last summer.

“Within education on the whole we have not always served all students well and have harmed many students,” Kuelling said of schools in general. “I think Rochester is uniquely positioned right now with a large group of committed educators who want to do right by their students. And the things that are occurring out in the community that we’re not necessarily leaders on, but are partnering with or even following, are hugely important. A lot of really good stuff is happening in the community.”

As head of school, Frye said he does not get much pushback on course offerings or students groups from parents of Harley students.

“I think the reason is that we try to be vividly clear about who we are and what we strive to do,” he said. “The first line of the school’s mission statement is we are a diverse, inclusive school. We don’t want anybody to be confused about who we are and what we try to do. I think most people who come to the school are saying yes to this kind of academic work.”

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