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T H E CO R O N AV I R US VACC I N E S
B U T S I G N I F I C A N T N U M B E RS
REPRESENT AN EXIT
O F KA N S A N S R E M A I N R E LU CTA N T
ST RAT E G Y FO R F R E E I N G
TO G E T T H E M . WHAT CAN ORDINARY
T H E N AT I O N F R O M T H E G R I PS
PEOPLE DO TO ENERGIZE OTHERS
O F A D E A D LY PA N D E M I C .
AT THIS CRITICAL JUNCTURE?
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ELEVATE 2021 COMMENTATOR
Keith Tatum
Keith Tatum COMMENTATOR
Keith is a career public servant who is dedicated to empowering every voice within our community. He currently serves as the Director of Training and Staff Development for the Kansas Neurological Institute in Topeka and is an adjunct professor with the Family and Human Services Department at Washburn University. Keith, his wife Teresa, and family live in Topeka. He is one of five writers lending his voice to The Journal as part of the Elevate 2021 commentary project.
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Audrey Korte
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Audrey graduated from Wichita State University with a communication degree in 2019 and began a graduate teaching assistantship there. She has reported and directed podcasts for The Sunflower, WSU’s student newspaper, and been a news intern at KWCH-TV and Wichita public radio (KMUW). She researches Solutions Journalism, racial disparity and discrimination, and civic leadership. In January, she published an article in Hidden Voices Salone magazine in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Contents INSPIRATION FOR THE COMMON GOOD • VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 2 • SPRING 2021 PUBLISHED BY KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER
2.
Letter from the Managing Editor
41.
The Trust Turnabout BY: AUDREY KORTE
CHOOSING A MIRACLE BY: CHRIS GREEN
4.
A Shot in the Arm Toward Normal BY: BARBARA SHELLY
16.
‘Canceling’ Democracy BY: JOEL MATHIS
26.
Coming to Terms with ‘Tradition’ BY: MIKE SHERRY
70.
X, Y and Z Catching Up BY: CHRIS GREEN
50.
Balancing Act BY: MARK WIEBE
72.
‘We’re not the Virus’ BY: JERRY LAMARTINA
60.
Joining Hands for the Community BY: BECCY TANNER
74.
Mapping a Route to Resilience and Reconciliation BY: KEITH TATUM
80.
The Back Page GOOD GRIEF BY: MARK MCCORMICK
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LETTER FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR CHRIS GREEN
CHOOSING A MIRACLE DESPITE UNCERTAINTIES, VACCINES PROVIDE THE CHANCE TO LEAVE THE PANDEMIC BEHIND — IF WE CAN ENERGIZE ONE ANOTHER ENOUGH.
CHRIS GREEN MANAGING EDITOR
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The sense of relief I felt when both my parents received their first doses of the coronavirus vaccine in February is difficult to put into words. My parents are in their 70s, active and in good health. But there was always a voice in my head that feared for the worst. Could one ill-fated trip to church, the grocery store or the gym put them in danger? I couldn’t help but think of the half-million Americans, including about 5,000 Kansans, who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic – all of them members of somebody’s family. Nearly 90% of those who have died through early March were 60 or older. Now that my parents have received their second doses, my inner voice is starting to go quiet. (I received my own shots in March and April.) Although there are differences among them, all three of the approved coronavirus vaccines, including the Moderna vaccine my parents got, have proven extraordinarily effective in trials at preventing hospitalizations and death from COVID-19. With that comes newfound peace of mind. We’re starting to think about family events again after months of seeing each other in outdoor settings while wearing masks. The pessimist in me can’t help but worry about putting too much faith in vaccines bringing the pandemic to a close. News reports about the spread of variants that might be resistant to existing vaccines sound ominous, even if it’s too early to tell how concerned we should be. A significant number of Americans still remain cautious about getting the vaccine, even though the number of people eager to get vaccinated at first opportunity is rapidly increasing. There are perhaps some good reasons for people to be wary. The vaccines are new, and maybe it’s only human to want to take a wait-and-see
approach. Most notably with mask wearing, public health officials have at times changed their guidance during the pandemic, which may have undermined trust in some quarters. The virus became such a political football that it can be hard to keep track of where science ends and politics begins anymore. Despite such reservations, this moment still feels like a miracle after the life-altering disruptions of the past year. It offers the promise of a life that’s shifting back toward normal, if not yet normalcy. But anybody who watched receivers drop the prayers launched by Patrick Mahomes in the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl loss knows that miracles don’t catch themselves. Science has thrown us a Hail Mary and we need to haul it in and take it over the goal line. Public health experts say getting as many people vaccinated as possible is crucial to finally beating the pandemic. But there’s a collective adaptive challenge at play here too. After a divisive period in which so many of us have sacrificed, the rollout of the vaccines provides an opportunity to energize others. We should do everything we can to remind ourselves and one another that every jab is, ultimately, after any side effects ebb, a joy. It’s our ticket back to sporting events, concerts, crowded dine-in restaurants, parades, theaters and travel. Our pass to gathering with friends or attending family reunions without fear, shame or guilt. To the kind of human exchanges that buoy the spirit and can’t be lost to an unstable internet connection. The end appears in sight for this strange half-life that kept so many of us within our houses and households for far longer than imagined. But there’s a miracle to be had, if enough of us choose it. I’ll look forward to the celebrations that come next.
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B Y: B A R B A R A S H E L LY
Getting back to business after COVID-19 depends on whether enough people take one of the coronavirus vaccines. But the newness of the vaccines, the nation’s growing political fissures and past shameful treatment of people of color by the medical establishment complicate the push. What kind of leadership can everyday people exercise to help boost the chances that the pandemic will finally come to an end?
SHOT in the Arm TOWARD NORMAL
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K
ylee Shae hears just about every worry and rumor swirling around the COVID-19 vaccines. She’s the owner of Paradise Roots Pharmacy in Hill City, and vaccines have been on customers’ minds.
and to whom it will be distributed. Kansans have driven for miles, endured interminable “on hold” stretches and logged dozens of hours on their computers in pursuit of the coveted shot in the arm.
“There was a big scare when it first came out,” Shae says. “People were hearing there was a potential for paralysis and all these side effects.”
But supplies are catching up with demand and all Kansans ages 16 and older are eligible to receive it. And Kansans who are reluctant to receive a vaccine will have a decision on their hands.
Shae listens. She dispenses factual information along with prescriptions, skin creams and the miscellaneous items that an independent drug store in a western Kansas town of about 1,500 stocks for its customers.
“People are rightfully concerned about things they put in their bodies,” says Brett Bricker, a communication studies researcher at the University of Kansas who researches vaccine skepticism.
“It’s kind of like what goes on with the flu shot,” Shae says. “Every year I have people say, ‘I’ll never get the thing, it makes me sick, I don’t trust it.’ It’s going to be the same thing with this COVID vaccine.”
News reports highlighted that hesitancy as the first vials of vaccine began rolling into Kansas. A reporter visited the small city of Protection, which in 1957 became the nation’s first town to be fully inoculated against polio. No way would such a consensus occur with the COVID vaccine, residents said. The Coffey County Health Department created a stir when all four of its nurses said they had too many questions about the safety of the vaccine to administer it.
As one of a limited number of health care providers in Graham Country, where nearly one in 10 residents has tested positive for COVID-19, Shae is keenly interested in seeing her customers get vaccinated. She was thrilled when she learned in February that Paradise Roots Pharmacy would be receiving COVID-19 vaccine to dispense. “We’re going to help as many people get it as possible,” she says. And the doubters? Shae doesn’t see the point of arguing. “I’m not out here pushing people who don’t see the value in it,” she says. “That’s kind of a waste of both of our times. If they have questions and they’re open to discussing the potential benefit of it, I’m totally game to talk to them and help them out.” In the first months of 2021, most of the buzz around the COVID-19 vaccine has centered on where, when
But Bricker says he doesn’t think vaccine skepticism is more prevalent or intense in Kansas than in other states. And he thinks Kansas will achieve high numbers of vaccinations. “I do want to make clear that, at least from my perspective, we are not in dire straits,” he says. “For the most part, people are ready to put this chapter of their lives behind them and they see the vaccine as a way to do that.” Nationwide polls bear that out. Earlier this spring, polling from Gallup showed that more than three of four Americans were already vaccinated or willing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, up from just half in September.
It’s not yet clear how many Americans will need to be vaccinated for the U.S. to achieve “herd immunity.” But the number is expected to be high, with as many as 80% to 90% of the population needing to have immunity through infection or vaccination. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, has mentioned a vaccination threshold as high as 85% to get blanket protection for the entire country. Some scientists are skeptical that the U.S. will eradicate the pandemic through herd immunity, and that the best case is to render the virus as harmless as the common cold. Many people’s doubts are expected to ease as others receive the vaccine with no ill effects. “We have a lot of people saying, ‘I’m gonna wait and see what happens.’ That’s what they’re doing,” says Lavonta Williams, a former Wichita city councilwoman who is involved in vaccination efforts in her community. Because ultimate success against COVID-19 depends on lots of people getting the vaccine, leaders hope to enlist Kansans from all walks of life in the effort. Very few adverse reactions have been documented from the three FROM TOP: Paola native Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, prodded Moderna to develop its COVID vaccine; Dodge City Commissioner Blanco Soto willingly got COVID vaccinations – her second from nurse Aracely Del Real at the local Genesis Family Health. She says getting accurate information on immunizations to Hispanics has been a challenge because social media are awash with vaccine conspiracy theories, rumors and fringe news reports; Blanco Soto’s immunization card was more than just a reminder to get a second shot. The cards are an important medical record, reminiscent of the World Health Organization’s International Certificate of Vaccination, or yellow card, that many travelers and members of the U.S. armed forces have carried for years. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)
MORE THAN
1 million PEOPLE VACCINATED WITH ONE DOSE AS OF EARLY APRIL
1.6 million TOTAL DOSES
REPORTED AS ADMINISTERED
MORE THAN
35% of
KANSANS VACCINATED WITH ONE DOSE
SOURCE: KANSAS DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT ON APRIL 16, 2021
Pharmacist Kylee Shae dispenses full doses of neighborliness at her Paradise Roots Pharmacy in Hill City along with prescriptions and a varied inventory. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
approved vaccines. Side effects, when they occur, disappear after a few days. And while the shots won’t entirely protect against the virus, people who get them are highly unlikely to become seriously ill or die. And research increasingly is showing that vaccinated people are less likely to spread the virus. But the best advocates for vaccinations aren’t government officials, or even the scientists who created them. They are sons and daughters, neighbors, pastors and community pharmacists. “One thing that’s been consistent with my research is: The power of facts and science and information is actually less than the power of a story or a narrative or an anecdote,” Bricker says. So, one’s recitation on social media or in a front-lawn chat with a neighbor about those relatively painless 45 minutes in line at the vaccination site is a potent tool. Even more valuable are the stories about the relief and joy people are experiencing as they hug their elderly parents or grandchildren, and make plans to attend summer weddings. A couple of tactics are more likely to do harm than good. Heated arguments on social media or elsewhere, and attempts at “guilt-tripping” reluctant people, may only harden their reservations. “Arguing about vaccine beliefs can be counterproductive,” says Christina Long, a communications specialist in Wichita who is active in efforts to allay vaccine concerns.
FROM TOP: “Arguing about vaccine beliefs can be counterproductive,” Christina Long says. “Seeking and sharing fact-based and objective information to position yourself as a source for reliable information is a much more effective way to educate and inform.”; Lavonta Williams, a former Wichita councilwoman, has been using a soft-sell approach as she spreads the gospel of COVID vaccination; Monica Vargas Huertas, of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 2, is expecting more than 80% of its Dodge City members to get the vaccine. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)
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“Seeking and sharing fact-based and objective information to position yourself as a source for reliable information is a much more effective way to educate and inform.” And government vaccine mandates, including from schools, should be avoided, Bricker says. “People very much value that this is going to be their choice,” he says. “And the moment people feel that their choice is being taken away from them, there is a boomerang effect, and opinions become hardened against this.”
‘ A VERY POLITICAL VACCINE’
A
lthough some may find it confounding that people need to be persuaded to get a simple injection to protect themselves and those they care about against an illness far more lethal than the flu, there’s a relatively simple explanation. Kansas is home to broad groups of people that polling has shown are the least likely to trust a vaccine. According to a December poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, those include rural residents, Republicans and Black adults. A separate Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that Hispanic adults are somewhat less likely than white adults to say they will definitely or probably get the vaccine. Advocates are especially concerned about agricultural and meatpacking workers who may fear being questioned about their immigration status if they show up for a shot. Brock Slabach, senior vice president of the National Rural Health Association, grew up in rural Kansas and now lives in the Kansas City area. He isn’t surprised by the reluctance in rural America.
“I understand it,” Slabach says. “I’ve had relatives in central Kansas tell me, ‘I’m not going to get the vaccine.’” One of his family members, a younger woman, said she wouldn’t get the vaccine because she feared it would cause infertility. A false claim to that effect was circulating on social media around that time. Slabach sent his relative an article debunking the claim, and she thanked him. “Anecdotally, I think that social media has a lot to do with it,” Slabach says. “If you look at the political proclivities for people living in the rural states, they obviously trend very conservative. Their activity feeds on their social media accounts are going to reflect a certain bent, and this is where some of the anti-vaccine sentiments get filtered through.” Bricker says his research also tracks an overlap of vaccine skepticism and conservative Republican leanings. “We’re dealing with a very political vaccine,” he says. “Like a lot of issues in society right now, how one feels about the vaccine is almost expected to be representative of their political beliefs or their political prerogatives.” Even before the coronavirus pandemic, a group of Kansans had organized in opposition to mandatory immunizations. While leaders of Kansans for Health Freedom say the group is pro-liberty, not anti-vaccination, its website and Facebook page are filled with anti-vaccine testimonials and allegations that the COVID-19 vaccine and other immunizations are unsafe. The group is supporting bills in the Kansas Legislature this session that would prohibit employers from discriminating against employees because of their vaccination status, and declare that only elected officials, not the state’s health secretary, can add a new vaccine to childhood immunization schedules. Kansans for Health Freedom does not claim an affiliation with the state’s Republican Party, but some elected Republicans are allies.
LEFT TO RIGHT: It took about a year from the time COVID reached the United States before the state prioritized vaccinating workers at Kansas meatpacking plants. Last fall, COVID had spread at such a rapid rate in Ford County, site of National Beef, that 43 cases a day were being reported; Restricting people with COVID symptoms from work and other venues was a key response to slowing the virus’s spread; As a trusted community leader, the Rev. C. Richard Kirkendoll of Bethany Missionary Baptist Church in Wichita has lent his voice to the vaccination effort. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)
“I am so impressed with your group,” GOP state Rep. Tatum Lee-Hahn, who represents District 117 in western Kansas, told a couple of Kansans for Health Freedom leaders who visited her legislative office, in an encounter videotaped for the group’s Facebook page. Lee-Hahn said a friend’s daughter “almost died” from a vaccine. “I found out and started educating myself,” she said. Vaccine skepticism has been associated with the political left in recent years, but research suggests it’s not driven by political ideology but by inclination toward rumors and conspiracies. It doesn’t take much online searching to find sites that purport to give reliable information about the presumed harm caused by vaccines – but whose claims don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. “When we’re talking about vaccines years ago, people got most of their information from their family doctor,” Bricker says. “People now get their information and their news from self-selected sources that feed disinformation with basically no counter or no disagreement.
A SHAMEFUL HISTORY
W
hile vaccine resistance in rural areas and among Republicans has been building in recent years, Black Americans have distrusted vaccines and the government that authorizes them for decades – with good reason. The history of experimentation on Black Americans by the U.S. government and independent physicians is extensive and shameful. Black slaves were commonly tapped as subjects for medical experimentation in the antebellum period. In the infamous Tuskegee study from 1932 to 1972, Black men with syphilis in a government study were left to suffer and die of the disease even after a treatment became available. In 1951, physicians began years of research using the cells of a Black cancer victim named Henrietta Lacks, but never informed her family of the medical breakthroughs that resulted until decades after her death. “That has been passed down, that fear of not really believing what the government tells you regarding its intentions about health and wellness,” says Long, who is Black.
Communicating to Spanish speakers has an additional layer of importance because minorities typically face worse outcomes and greater health disparities when dealing with the virus. A casual attitude about COVID-19 is common in rural areas, where people think a vaccination is a personal choice and that news of the disease has been exaggerated. Nevertheless, people like pharmacist Kylee Shae of Hill City stand ready to vaccinate those who think being protected is a necessity. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)
And such concerns are hardly remnants of the past. Black people continue to experience disparities in health care, with one startling indicator being the mortality rate of Black mothers during pregnancy and childbirth. Kansas Sisters and Brothers for Healthy Infants reports that racial and ethnic minorities make up only 15% of Kansas’ population, but two-thirds of the pregnant women and new mothers who died from 2016 to 2018 were from those groups.
and more than 20% in Junction City and Kansas City, Kansas.
Research suggests the mortality rate for Black babies is cut dramatically when Black doctors care for them after birth – suggesting that racism can make even the most routine medical interactions different for Black people.
“I have preached on plagues and diseases that haunted our nation and how God came through,” says the Rev. C. Richard Kirkendoll, senior pastor of Bethany Missionary Baptist Church and president of the Greater Wichita Ministerial League. “You don’t know how God’s gonna work it out. This time he came through with a vaccine.”
Stack the newness of the vaccine atop cultural reluctance, and perhaps it’s not surprising that there are concerns. Long listed some of them: “It came to the market relatively quickly,” she says. “Has it been properly tested? Were people of all backgrounds able to participate in the trials? Will it do right by us like it does for other people?” Black residents make up just 6% of Kansas’ population. But they make up more than 10% of the population in Wichita and Leavenworth,
Just as leaders in rural areas are looking to trusted sources, such as pharmacists, to build confidence in vaccines, urban leaders are seeking people with credibility in Black communities. Possibilities include Black health professionals, some elected officials, some social service workers and, especially, clergy.
Bricker, the KU researcher, says his studies have shown that stories are important in overcoming vaccine hesitancy. “The power of facts and science and information is actually less than the power of a story or a narrative or an anecdote,” he says. Williams, the former Wichita councilwoman who is involved in multiple causes in her city, has heard the same thing. She has posted photos of herself getting the vaccine on her
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Facebook page, and she posted updates in the days afterward letting people know how she was feeling. “I’m not saying ‘go do it,’” she says in one post. “But let me tell you my experience and others will tell you theirs and you know what to expect.” Jarvis L. Collier, pastor of Pleasant Green Baptist Church in Kansas City, feels the weight of the Tuskegee experiments and other medical abuses of Black Americans. But he is also tired of hearing that Black people are “fearful.” “I personally think African Americans are treated as children,” he says. “The whole narrative becomes, ‘They are afraid.’” Collier pointed out that a 34-year-old Black woman, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, played a lead role in developing the vaccine. Instead of repeating the narrative about fear, Collier wants leaders of his city to swiftly get the vaccine to as many Black residents as possible. Wyandotte County has logged about 19,000 COVID cases and nearly 300 deaths. “I would suggest every church serving in the African American community in Wyandotte County, or the Hispanic community, have a site,” Collier says. “I would suggest they err on the side of too many, rather than too few.” Indeed, reporting last month by Alex Samuels of FiveThirtyEight points out that lower vaccination rates among African Americans early in the vaccine rollout appear to be more about inequities built into the health system than they are about reluctance. Long says she agrees that Black Kansans should not “be painted with a broad brush.” But she added, “If we’re going to look at the challenges, then you cannot deny vaccine hesitancy. You have to ask: What are the barriers to getting information to people? Those barriers exist.”
CAN’T AFFORD TO STAY HOME
O
ne of the most difficult groups to reach with accurate information and messaging is Kansas’ Hispanic residents. “A good target to me is talking to my mother,” says Blanca Soto, an organizer with Kansas Appleseed and a city commissioner in Dodge City. Her mother mostly speaks Spanish, and gets most of her information from Spanish-language social media networks, Soto says. “On Facebook, there is a lot of reposting that happens from very untrusted sources. There are a lot of people – I can’t say that they actually are doctors but they’re portraying themselves as doctors. I think their intention is to introduce fear rather than data-driven information.” The Kansas Department of Health and Environment and some other groups have posted information about the vaccine in Spanish, but not always “with words that are easy to understand and to make sense,” Soto says. “I think our job right now is to put out that same information in a way that is easy to make a connection with that community and to provide trusted voices in that community that can help with the messaging.” Church leaders, especially Catholic and evangelical, are trusted sources among many Hispanic Kansans, Soto says. “People really rely on their church leaders for information and guidance.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and some other groups have raised concerns because the three vaccines approved for distribution in the U.S., like other commonly used vaccines, were tested with cells that decades ago were obtained from aborted fetuses. “I’ve heard comments like, ‘They’ve used unborn babies to develop the vaccine,’ That is not
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helpful,” says Monica Vargas Huertas, political director of the Wichita-based United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 2. The bishops’ conference is still encouraging Catholics to take the vaccine “as an act of charity toward the other members or our community.” More recently, the conference urged Catholics to avoid one of the three approved vaccines, saying that, unlike the others, a “morally compromised” stem cell line was used in its actual production. At least one Catholic church in western Kansas, St. Anthony of Padua in Liberal, has posted statements from the conference prominently on its website. For Vargas Huertas, the biggest challenge by far has been getting shots to the thousands of workers in the meatpacking plants in Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal. Although those employees have been on the job in close quarters since the start of the pandemic, and logged hundreds of COVID cases, the state waited weeks before prioritizing them to receive the vaccine. Many of those workers lack papers showing U.S. citizenship, but Vargas Huertas says she thinks the ready access to free COVID-19 testing will make people more confident to take the vaccine. “It’s been an excellent initiative that serves everybody,” she says. “They don’t require immigration status. They don’t push to show documents. I am hopeful that it will be the same when it comes to vaccination.” Soto says a bigger fear seems to be the possibility of becoming ill from the vaccine and missing work. “They know they can’t afford to stay home for one or two days if that happens,” she says.
TIME ON OUR SIDE
A
t the Rush County Grocery Store in La Crosse, Laurie Zink says she and most of her co-workers were holding off on the vaccine. “We’re all just kind of waiting to see,” Zink says. “My sister got it and her reaction to it wasn’t really good. That’s why I’ve been putting it off.” But Zink says some of her customers have gotten vaccinated. And perhaps without knowing it, they are its greatest marketers. “One of the biggest sources of hesitancy was related to the quick vaccine approval,” says Bricker, the KU researcher. People worried that the trials weren’t thorough, and that unforeseen consequences might surface, he says. “I assume that time will make it more normalized, and the lack of high profile adverse reactions will mean that people’s trust in the vaccine will build instead of erode.” Kansas has endured an exhausting year of sickness, mask disputes and limitations on gathering and movement. If the vaccine comes to be seen as safe and relatively painless, chances are most people will accept a shot in the arm to boost the chances of getting their lives back. “I really think time is on our side,” Bricker says. “Vaccine views are not hardened. They’re constantly formulating. Only the most fervent conspiracy theorists have a hardened view of the vaccine.”
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‘Canceling’ DEMOCRACY
B Y: J O E L M AT H I S
The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol added urgency to a growing debate about the legal and cultural boundaries of free expression in America. In a country rife with concern about censorship, disinformation and hate speech, social media carry the power to both amplify and silence once-fringe ideas. The problems surrounding free speech cut multiple ways and what we decide to do about them could shape democracy for generations to come.
The other shoe dropped just days after Jan. 6, when rioters who falsely believed Donald Trump had won reelection as president violently broke into the U.S. Capitol, disrupting that day’s congressional certification of the Electoral College vote.
“No question about it. I think we silenced a president,” Steffen says.
Five people died and scores more were injured as a result of the violence that day. In the aftermath, social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook shut down Trump’s accounts – alleging he had incited the violence with stolen election claims. The ban extended to thousands of other accounts that promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, which among other things, posited that Trump was leading the fight against a “deep state” cabal of powerful pedophiles.
“The scary thing is how big and how large a footprint these companies have.”
The purge prompted Kansas Sen. Mark Steffen, a Hutchinson Republican, to introduce legislation in the Legislature that would ban social media companies from censoring political expression – authorizing penalties of up to $10,000 for each reported violation. The bill, Steffen says, was born out of a belief that social media companies are suppressing conservative voices.
The power that tech companies have over public discourse, he says, requires the government to provide some guardrails.
But he added: “I see this as a bipartisan bill. The gun may be pointed at conservatives now, but who’s to say it won’t be pointed at liberals? It behooves us to address the situation.” For others, the insurrection suggested the dangers of allowing the First Amendment to be a vehicle for perpetuating falsehoods, such as the notion that the election had been stolen in the first place. “What happened on January 6th didn’t just spring out of thin air,” says Helen Norton, a constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado. “In order to survive as democracy – and I want to make clear that our survival as a democracy is at stake
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here – at a minimum, we need to share a common reality based on objectively verifiable facts, even if we vigorously disagree about what to do with those facts in terms of policy choices.” The violent nature of Jan. 6 added urgency to a growing debate about the legal and cultural boundaries of free expression in America. In a country rife with concern about disinformation and hate speech, fueled by the power of social media both to amplify and silence once-fringe ideas, and battles over what some conservatives call “cancel culture,” what happens next could shape U.S. democracy for generations. The fight is playing out at the national level, but also on college campuses and state legislatures: The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, said in February that bills like Steffen’s had been introduced in more than 20 states. The rising heat around the issue of free speech also has people rethinking long established positions. “I’ve always considered myself an absolutist when it comes to free speech issues,” says Leroy Towns, a former Kansas journalist, journalism professor and onetime chief of staff to recently retired U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts. “I have to say events recently kind of give a person pause whether that’s the best course of action or not.”
WHERE DOES FREE SPEECH BEGIN AND END?
In Kansas, the debate over free speech often has been centered not on Big Tech, but on allegations of hate speech, often involving social media use and tied to the state’s public universities. Back in 2013, University of Kansas professor David Guth was suspended after tweeting criticism of the National Rifle Association following a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard. “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters,” Guth wrote. “Shame on you. May God damn you.’” “This is hate speech,” an NRA spokesman
responded. “It is disgusting and deplorable. It has no place in our society.” Following the incident, the Kansas Board of Regents adopted rules to permit faculty and other employees to be fired for the improper use of social media – a category that included incitement to violence and the improper disclosure of student records, but also any post that “impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers.” More recently, in the summer of 2020 as Black Lives Matter advocates conducted protests around the country, student athletes at Kansas State University said they would not play unless a student activist, Jaden McNeil, was expelled after his offensive tweet about George Floyd went viral. (McNeil, who was no longer enrolled at K-State as of the spring 2021 semester, later retweeted a video showing himself chanting “America First!” outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.) The university declined to expel McNeil, saying his tweet was protected under the First Amendment. “While these messages are disrespectful and abhorrent, we cannot violate the law,” K-State President Richard Myers told the campus community. K-State athletes returned to the playing field. But Black students expressed disappointment. “We don’t need to wait for a student of color to be either hurt or killed, or for a student to incite so much fear on campus that a race war happens, for them to do something,” Tori Swanson, a K-State student who had organized BLM protests, told The Kansas City Star. These incidents scramble easy left-right categorizations of hate speech allegations and action against them. “Censoriousness knows no ideological boundaries,” says Adam Steinbaugh, an official with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an advocacy group that argues for free expression on college campuses. The organization weighed in on the K-State controversy in McNeil’s defense. But in free speech battles across the country,
a dividing line has often emerged between conservatives, who say they’re being stifled from espousing their beliefs on predominantly liberal campuses, and racial and ethnic minorities and members of the LGBTQ community, who say they should be protected from harmful, intimidating or hurtful speech at colleges with a history of excluding them. The United States is unusual among advanced democracies when it comes to the concept of free speech. In Germany, Holocaust denial is outlawed, and many other countries – across Europe, in Canada and elsewhere – have restrictions on speech that denigrates ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. “‘Extreme’ is kind of an extreme word, but it is the American system that takes an extreme view on freedom of speech and draws the line much further down to one end of the spectrum than any other system when it comes to trying to find a balance between the rights of those who might be harmed by speech and the rights of those to express themselves,” says Craig Martin, a law professor at Washburn University who has written in favor of stronger protections against hate speech.
These discussions aren’t abstract. Real human beings are involved, not just culture war props. In 2017, Joseph Shepard, then the outgoing student body president at Wichita State University, drew public attention when he said a racial slur had been directed at him by the parents of his successor. The incident was investigated, and the Sedgwick County district attorney declined to bring charges. Shepard, now the director of multicultural engagement and campus life at Newman University in Wichita, speaks carefully these days about the matter. “As I look back on that particular situation, I really do believe that there was a level of miscommunication at all levels,” he says. But he says that as a Black, bisexual man, “I think I’ve experienced slurs my entire life.” He added: “It makes me feel ‘less than,’ right? I think it makes me feel not valued. But I also have to be honest with you and say that it ignites this passion in me that wants to fight to make a difference.” Balancing free speech and diversity can be difficult. In 2017, amid a campus outcry over racial issues, KU’s University Senate formed an ad hoc committee
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to propose a free speech policy – one that would preserve public debate while also promoting values of racial diversity and inclusion. The effort failed. That was partly due to logistics – it was difficult to get everybody together for meetings – but also because the task was so challenging. “The issues surrounding freedom of speech on campus are extraordinarily complex and highly contentious,” the committee noted in its final report. “From the outset, some committee members doubted the wisdom and utility of adopting a statement of principles at all. ... Ultimately, developing a policy statement that can address these complex issues in a manner on which all constituencies can agree may not be possible.” Shepard understands that complexity. “Do I believe hate speech is OK? Absolutely not. Do I believe it should be legal? Absolutely not. Do I know that it is legal, though, and that more often than not, people get away with it? Absolutely,” he says. But he suspects trying to outlaw hate speech might create a slippery slope – that some people, for example, might see advocacy for the Black Lives Matter movement as hate speech against police officers. “It’s one of those issues that, it’s very complex in nature and … the only right answer is that we all should know collectively in our hearts that hate speech is wrong,” Shepard says. “But I don’t know that the answer to addressing hate speech is to get rid of freedom of speech.”
IS FREE SPEECH UNDERMINING OR SUSTAINING DEMOCRACY?
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, among other things, that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” Seems straightforward. The reality has always been more complicated.
Very early in American history, President John Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, one of which criminalized making “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” critical of the federal government – a law that resulted in actual arrests of accused violators. Before the Civil War, states across the South adopted laws essentially gagging anti-slavery activists. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln briefly had two newspapers shut down after they published forged presidential proclamations announcing an expanded military draft. Later on, Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was imprisoned for speeches opposing World War I. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt created an Office of Censorship. Such examples are plentiful. Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, says that battles over free speech have been constant throughout the country’s history.
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“The gun may be pointed at conservatives now, but who’s to say it won’t be pointed at liberals?” STATE SEN. MARK STEFFEN Proponent of ban on censorship by social media companies
“It’s incessant, no matter what the latest crisis of the day is. Speech is always scapegoated as the alleged cause, and censoring speech is always cited as a purported panacea,” she says. If free speech battles have been an ongoing feature of American politics – particularly during wartime, when the country’s national security has been threatened – there has also been a broad sense that unfettered expression is an essential component of democracy, a belief that the “marketplace of ideas” would help Americans doing the messy business of self government arrive at necessary truths, that (as established in Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ 1927 counterspeech doctrine) the best remedy for bad speech is more speech. “In this country, every single movement for equality, for increasing equality, starting with the abolitionists, going through the suffragists, the civil rights movement, the LGBTQ rights movement, all of these movements have been subject to censorship under whatever laws existed at the time, whether they were as hate speech laws, whether they were a breach of the peace laws, whether they were defamation laws, you name it,” Strossen says. “Especially for groups that are minorities, whether political dissidents or racial or other demographic minorities, (they) absolutely depend on robust free speech and are smothered by censorship.” Yet some observers say it is no longer the case that more speech can defeat bad speech. The internet allows bad actors to circulate misinformation around the globe at the speed of light, augmented by “troll armies” and automated bots that amplify untruths and drown out truth. The web creates a tidal wave of lies in an era in which many Americans are already swamped with more information than they can possibly process.
“The most important change in the expressive environment can be boiled down to one idea: it is no longer speech itself that is scarce, but the attention of listeners,” Columbia University law professor Tim Wu wrote in an influential 2017 article, “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” The University of Colorado’s Norton echoes this perspective. “For most of the 20th century and before, speech was relatively scarce. In other words, you had to have a printing press or access to a radio or TV station if you wanted to reach a large audience,” Norton says. “And because large-scale speech then was relatively limited, listeners’ attention was relatively abundant. Now, in contrast, 21st century technologies mean that speech is cheaper and more abundant than ever before.” She added: “The bad news is that this cheap, abundant speech can be and is exploited by both government and by private, powerful private actors to silence and otherwise control other folks’ speech and to frustrate healthy democracy through things like the widespread and instantaneous distribution of falsehoods – through manipulative commercial interfaces, through trolling and more so. In other words, speech can obviously be used for terrific purposes, but speech can be and also is used to deceive, attack, silence and manipulate others.” The result, she argued in a University of California Davis Law Review article co-authored with Toni Massaro of the University of Arizona, is that “left unfettered, the twenty-first-century speech environment threatens to undermine critical pieces of the democratic project.” That danger manifested itself on Jan. 6.
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DOES BIG TECH HAVE TOO MUCH CONTROL?
Strossen, however, argues that such concerns arise just about anytime new technologies come along that make it easier for people to share ideas and information. “It would have been revolutionary if the internet and then social media were not greeted with calls for censorship,” she says. “It has certainly happened to the printing press. Scholars of ancient history say it happened with papyrus. Anything that makes it easier and faster and cheaper to reach a mass audience is seen as very liberating and empowering and inspiring by some, and very threatening and dangerous by others.” That makes sense to Towns, who remembers the early 1980s, when a western Kansas radio station, KTTL-FM, drew national attention at the dawn of modern talk radio for broadcasting racist, anti-Semitic and conspiracy-minded commentary. The Federal Communications Commission – with the support of Sen. Bob Dole – investigated the station’s license, but the controversy eventually faded when the station’s husband-and-wife owners divorced. “The FCC fight over KTTL’s license mimics debate over free speech versus Twitter and other social media that is occurring today,” Towns wrote for the Kansas Reflector in January. He concluded: “As recent events make clear, history is prelude.” If the internet can amplify and accelerate the spread of misinformation, tech companies proved in the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection that they have remarkable power to shut down discourse. A range of social media companies shut
down Trump’s accounts. When many of Trump’s supporters fled for Parler, a right-wing alternative to Twitter, Apple kicked Parler off its app store – and Amazon Web Services said it would no longer host the website, citing calls for violence on the platform by Parler’s users. It took a month for Parler to find a new host and come back online. One study showed that in the week after Trump was dumped from Twitter, the amount of disinformation online declined by 73%. But many observers – including, but not limited to, conservatives – were alarmed that tech companies have so much power over what and how Americans communicate their ideas to each other. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt mentioned the issue in a video announcing his candidacy for governor. “The intolerant left with its cancel culture and big tech censorship is trying to shame and silence conservative voices.” U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, a Republican who represents Kansas’ 4th District, has called on Congress to investigate the power of Big Tech. Those companies “have free rein to do whatever they want,” says Steffen, author of the social media bill in the Kansas Senate. While he generally opposes regulating private enterprise, “I’m going to take it down to the individual rights – and I’m going to put the greater good in the hands of the individual, rather than the big company.” Norton shares such concerns about the power of technology companies. “What Twitter does with respect to speech is a free speech issue – not a First Amendment issue,
“Anything that makes it easier and faster and cheaper to reach a mass audience is seen as very liberating and empowering and inspiring by some, and very threatening and dangerous by others.” NADINE STROSSEN Former president of the American Civil Liberties Union
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but a free speech issue – because as a functional matter, Twitter and certain other private entities have all sorts of power over speech,” Norton says. “And we should be concerned about and attentive to the ways that private entities like Twitter and Facebook and other platforms control speech.” But Norton also had little problem with Twitter’s decision to permanently silence Trump. Such actions should be rare, she says, but “I think it was an appropriate exercise of Twitter’s considerable power because Trump’s falsehoods and his normalization of hateful conspiracy theories without basis and facts threatened our democracy.” Others are less sanguine. “I think that (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg and the titans of Silicon Valley are a greater danger to free speech” than government censorship, Strossen says. The federal government at least has checks and balances and is accountable to voters, she says, but Zuckerberg is accountable only to himself.
SHOULD GOVERNMENT CHANGE THE RULES OF THE INTERNET?
America already limits free speech, observers say. Libel and defamation laws allow for lawsuits against speakers and publishers who stray too far from truth and fairness, and it is illegal for speakers to incite riots or utter “fighting words” that lead to violence. And many states have prohibitions on campaign activities, including passing out brochures near polling places. Those precedents could be at the heart of future battles over expression. “So my co-author and I feel that the primary purpose the Constitution protects speech when push comes to shove is to ensure a healthy democracy. This is why, for example, we protect political dissent while we protect criticism of government officials, because that speech is
necessary to a thriving, healthy democracy,” Norton says. “We think that in many of those cases, the tiebreaker should be the choice that protects democracy, that maximizes democracy.” Rather than completely overhaul America’s free speech traditions (an impossible task, given how entrenched those traditions are in the law and culture), Norton suggests that tweaks might be both possible and necessary – for example, permitting the government to make it illegal to lie about who is eligible to vote, where and when. Rather than restrict speech, Towns says, the right move might be to require more accountability. Right now, tech companies are immune from lawsuits for the content that appears on their platforms – they face no liabilities, for example, for the threats of violence that popped up online after the election. “I see no reason they shouldn’t be responsible for what they publish. I know that would put a big strain on social media, but social media is really becoming a publishing platform and they ought to be on equal footing with, say, The Kansas City Star or anybody else,” he says. “I think that would go an awfully long way to shut some of it down, because if Twitter knew that they could be held liable in a lawsuit for defamation, for whatever goes on their platform, I think they’re going to police it just like a newspaper does.” Section 230, part of a 1996 law that shaped the 21st century internet, is being scrutinized by both liberals and conservatives wanting to rein in the power of big tech, albeit for different reasons. Some, like Trump, saw the regulation as a shield for tech companies to side with Democrats. Other critics see it as a free pass for companies to be a conduit for hate speech and disinformation. Still others think repealing Section 230 would have sweeping ramifications for not just Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but could also diminish the viability of start-ups attempting to compete with them.
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“For most of the 20th century and before, speech was relatively scarce ... Now, in contrast, 21st century technologies mean that speech is cheaper and more abundant than ever before.” HELEN NORTON Constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado
Strossen thinks governments should focus instead on reining in the power tech companies have over discourse. “I think they are analogous to public utilities and common carriers, such as the landline telephone companies a century ago that have been subject to regulation, going back to an old common law theory that if you are providing an essential function, then you may not deny it to any user,” she says. “You have to treat all users equally, fairly and reasonably. And I think that’s something that should definitely be seriously examined. It may be complicated. The devil’s in the details, but I think that basic concept is very sound.”
WHAT IS FREE SPEECH REALLY GOOD FOR?
Niam Yaraghi, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, is skeptical of any talk of regulation – either of free expression or involving tech companies’ power. When Parler shut down for a month, he noted, many of its users went to another platform oriented to conservatives, Gab. Ideas and technology will both race ahead of attempts to shut them down, he says. “It has become more and more difficult to restrict freedom of expression because communication tools have become more democratized,” he says. “So my argument here is: It really doesn’t matter what is right or what is wrong or what we want or what we do not want.”
Even if those regulations are possible, Strossen believes the messiness of democracy, including free speech, is better than the alternatives. “A lot of people will just look at free speech in the abstract and say: Well, it’s not perfect and there’s a lot of dangerous speech and there’s a lot of harmful speech,” she says. “Who can disagree with that? But the alternative is censorship.” Norton says getting the answers right means grappling with hard questions. “Why does the Constitution protect speech?” she asks. “I’ve said I think the most important reason is that speech is necessary to a healthy democracy. But you can very quickly identify additional reasons as well, right? The marketplace of ideas – the more speech, the more opinion, the more ideas, maybe the more likely we will make the right decisions. Another reason we might protect speech is we might be thinking, regardless of whether it’s useful to anybody else, … it’s part of my humanity to express myself the way I want to express it. “I agree that those are also important values underlying the First Amendment, and hard First Amendment problems are those where we have to choose what’s more important – protecting the democracy or allowing every speaker to say exactly what they want to say, regardless of its possible harms? I think those are hard choices that make me pause. I’m interested in working through them, but I don’t think that they’re easy questions at all.”
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Coming to Terms with
‘TRADITION’ B Y: M I K E S H E R R Y
SCHOOL LEADERS FACING CONFLICTING PRESSURES IN PUSH TO RETIRE NATIVE AMERICAN MASCOTS
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s a football player and wrestler at Wichita North High School in the 1970s, Jeff Watkins embraced the Redskin mascot. One-quarter Cherokee himself, he didn’t mind when cheerleaders wore face paint and danced in a circle while patting their open mouths with their palms. It was not until years later – after a long run as a teacher and coach at Wichita West High School – that he saw racism embedded in the mascot. Fittingly enough, it was when he took over as head of the school district’s Native American program. Watkins’ experience highlights both sides of an issue seemingly guaranteed to stir the pot, whether in the fan base of a professional sports team or among patrons of a local school district. The question about whether Native American mascots honor a culture or demean its rituals has simmered for decades. But the debate has come to a boil during the past year, part of the broader racial reckoning spurred largely by high-profile cases of Black people dying at the hands of white police officers. Gone now from the national sports scene are the Washington Redskins of the National Football League, and the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball will be retired after the 2021 season. As activism refocused at the local level, school officials in Wichita and around the state faced calls to retire their Native American mascots. The Wichita school board did just that in February, voting to phase out North’s Redskin, which some regard as an epithet. And just two weeks before that, the Shawnee Mission school board in Johnson County effectively banned Native American mascots throughout the district. The actions in those two
Shawnee Mission North has had the Indian as its mascot since it opened in 1922, but its days are ending. (Photo by Matthew Cunningham)
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districts came more than three years after the Manhattan-Ogden school board reached a middle-ground decision on the Indian mascot at its high school. The experiences in those three districts could just be early skirmishes. “I do think this issue is not going away,” says Wichita school board President Stan Reeser. “Eventually every school district (with a Native American mascot) will have to deal with it at some point.” If there is one overarching lesson from the recent experiences, it is that there is more than one path to navigate this hot-button topic. One way districts walk that line is by taking a broad lens in hopes of creating a trustworthy process and inspiring collective purpose around a divisive topic. Examples include determining whether Native American mascots comply with antidiscrimination policies already on the books or highlighting broader equity and inclusion principles that deserve consideration. Questions about the costs of changing the mascot usually aren’t the key issue. Those expenses can be absorbed relatively easily through routine expenditures. The bigger issue is the hard feelings that can linger after a decision is made, and can reemerge in a flash as the national climate continues to shift.
DIFFERENT APPROACHES
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ative American mascots and imagery remain ubiquitous in Kansas, especially in high school sports. This past December, Jared Nally, the editor-in-chief of The Indian Leader, the student newspaper at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, documented how dozens of schools participating in Kansas High School Activities Association events appropriate Native American imagery or culture. His story included
a gallery of logos featuring Native Americans or cultural symbols such as thunderbirds. Nationwide, there were more than 1,200 high schools with Native American team names, according to an analysis published last fall at fivethirtyeight.com. In Kansas, at least three districts have tried to address concerns about Native American mascots in the past few years: •
In December 2017, the Manhattan school board voted 4-3 to adopt a proposal from the student council that a wolf serve as the “physical mascot” for the high school.
•
On Jan. 25, the Shawnee Mission school board unanimously adopted a new district mascot policy that applies to all schools. Among the requirements are that mascots must be “culturally and racially sensitive and appropriate,” that they “depict individuals with fairness, dignity, and respect,” and that they don’t “run counter to the district’s mission of creating a fully unified, equitable, and inclusive culture.”
•
On Feb. 8, the Wichita school board unanimously approved a task force’s recommendation to discontinue use of the Redskin mascot at North High School.
The back stories differ. In Manhattan, the school board said from the outset that it was not interested in changing the mascot for the high school. As part of the motion in December 2016 that created the task force to study the issue, the board agreed that the Indian name and image “shall remain the official name and image of Manhattan High School.” The task force presented a series of recommendations, which the board adopted in September 2017. Marvin Wade took over as Manhattan superintendent in July 2016, knowing full well that the mascot issue was at hand. Not long after he started, the district held a 5 ½-hour public forum on the matter.
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“ E Q U I T Y A N D I N C LU S I O N A R E N O T A N E N D I N A N D O F I TS E L F, I T I S P A R T O F T H E P R O C E SS O F M A K I N G S U R E T H AT W H E N O U R K I D S L E AV E S H A W N E E M I S S I O N , T H E Y A R E A B S O L U T E LY E Q U I P P E D T O B E L I F E R E A D Y.” M I K E F U LT O N Superintendent, Shawnee Mission District
Looking back, Wade thinks the mascot debate had a lasting impact far beyond determining a suitable symbol for the high school. “The whole mascot conversation,” he says, “has created more attention to what the district needs to do to really make the district a better, more welcoming, inviting place for everybody.” He noted that the district named its new elementary school for Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in a famous class action lawsuit against the Topeka school board that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court dismantling the legal basis for racial segregation in schools. In the Shawnee Mission district, Superintendent Mike Fulton said Native American mascots were evaluated in light of the spirit and language of a strategic plan adopted in June 2019. The plan, developed with a lot of public input, stresses a dedication to inclusiveness, dignity and respect. It was through that prism that the board and administration reviewed use of Native American mascots at all levels, not just at Shawnee Mission North, with its Indians mascot. “Braves” is also unacceptable, meaning mascot changes for a few elementary schools as well. The community, he says, should not lose sight of the larger purpose at play in the mascot debate. “Equity and inclusion are not an end in and of itself,” Fulton says. “It is part of the process of making sure that when our kids leave Shawnee Mission, they are absolutely equipped to be life ready.” Such considerations go beyond the district. For instance, Manhattan businesses and Kansas State University compete for talent nationally, and Wade says the mascot is a potential turnoff for candidates.
Their reaction goes something like this: “Other places dealt with that decades ago, and you still haven’t? What does that tell me about this community, and do I want to be a part of it?” In Wichita, an unexpected discovery helped smooth the way. As part of its research, the Wichita mascot committee found a policy, enacted in the 1970s, that directed principals to ensure no school spirit regalia was offensive to minority ethnic groups. Reeser says the policy most likely dates back to the integration of Wichita schools, and probably arose around the time Wichita South High School did away with a mascot and imagery based upon a Confederate soldier. Given the wording already on the books, Reeser said the board’s consideration came down to whether it wanted to follow existing policy, weaken it or get rid of it. In the end, he says, holding to purpose meant: “We felt like we had an opportunity to correct a wrong, and that was a very powerful motivation for the Wichita school board.”
CIVIL RIGHTS
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ut for some, the movement against Native American mascots has gone too far. One critic even suggests that prohibiting their use might actually be a form of reverse discrimination. Emmitt Monslow contends he’s willing to test the argument in court by alleging the Shawnee Mission district policy violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. An all-white school board eliminating the use of a minority mascot smacks of racism, he says. “It
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LEFT: Supporters of the Manhattan High School mascot like to remind opponents that it’s meant to honor a former teacher and coach, Frank “Chief” Prentup, a member of the Tuscarora Tribe. His descendants have urged the school to keep its mascot. Prentup, a graduate of Kansas State University, eventually was hired by the University of Colorado, where he coached baseball and football. (Photo by Luke Townsend) BELOW FROM LEFT: Reminders of Shawnee Mission North High School’s mascot are ubiquitous inside and out at the campus in Overland Park. The school, originally Shawnee Mission Rural, has traditionally had two Native American mascots, a princess and a warrior. (Photos by Matthew Cunningham)
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is just a continuation of eradication and putting Indians on reservations,” Monslow argues. The district’s name itself flies in the face of the new policy by incorporating the name of the Shawnee Tribe, as Monslow sees it.
Stigge is resigned to the inevitability of the Indian mascot being completely retired someday. He was a member of the community task force that studied the issue in 2017, and supported the hybrid approach that retained the Indian as the mascot.
A 2012 graduate of Shawnee Mission North, Monslow says his Native American lineage traces to the Choctaws and Indigenous Mexican peoples. Monslow testified against the name change before the school board, and started an online petition protesting the move, which garnered approximately 3,300 signatures. (An online petition supporting the name change has about 4,800 signatures.)
Ottawa University provided a good model. The school nickname remains the Braves, but it has Gibby the Otter as a mascot, a nod to the animal’s importance to the Ottawa Tribe. Ottawa University traces its roots to work between Baptist missionaries and the tribe.
Eliminating the Indian mascot at North will do more harm than good, Monslow says, because the symbol has caused classmates to treat Native Americans with respect. “What do we as Indians gain by losing this representation?” he asks. “We lose a lot. We lose a seat at the table. We lose relevance.” Monslow would prefer a more “regionally appropriate” logo that does not include a headdress, which he said Plains Indians did not wear. The North logo is not dissimilar to that of Haskell Indian Nations University, founded in 1884. The school’s nickname is the Fighting Indians. So then, asked Dr. Doug Stigge, a Manhattan optometrist, how can a Native American mascot be offensive if a school set up to serve the nation’s indigenous people uses such imagery? “That has been my point for 40 years,” says Stigge, a former student council president and 1973 graduate of Manhattan High School. In one oft-cited statement, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2001 made the distinction that Native American images and team names should be eliminated only at “non-Native schools.” Stigge remembered back to his junior year when Stanford University in California did away with its Indian mascot. We’ll be next, Manhattan students said.
Stigge says he put a lot of thought into the matter as a member of the task force and continues to follow developments around the country. He doesn’t want to come across as a white male somehow laying claim or appropriating Native American customs. He’s aware that life will go on should the mascot someday be completely eliminated. Then again, Stigge would be disappointed at the loss of history if the mascot was dropped completely, remembering a redesign of the football helmets while he was in school that subtly paid homage to Native American heritage by placing a red bar below the white “M.” The designer of the logo was a Native American teacher. The same teacher redesigned the Indian in 2001. “To lose that story makes me feel bad,” he says. And while not disavowing the principle of white privilege, Stigge also says he was not entirely comfortable bowing to political correctness when even the Native American community remains split about the appropriateness of such imagery. It’s not just Haskell, he says. What about Red Mesa High School, located on the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona? Stigge asks. Their mascot is the Redskin. Manhattan school district officials try not to play up the Indian mascot too much nowadays, but that was not the case when Stigge was in school. He remembered the pep club doing war whoops to the fight song and cheerleaders performing stereotypical dances.
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He laughed at one classic memory, where a cheerleader was supposed to stab a spear into a chunk of Styrofoam. “The first time they tried it, she missed and put a big old gash in the center court of our new basketball floor.”
BALANCING ACT
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etiring Native American mascots often means balancing the school pride of alumni with the priorities of current students. In summing up his presentation to the Wichita school board the night of its vote, the chairman of the mascot committee, district administrator Terrell Davis, read a statement from the panel’s student representative. “It is hard to think this symbol we love so much is wrong and insensitive,” Davis read. “But that does not change the fact that the name Redskins goes against everything we stand for. As times change, we need to realize this and be ready to change with it. We are not trying to erase history, but instead grow from where we were to where we need to go.” It’s possible to balance both competing values to some degree and even speak to the sense of loss mascot supporters might feel. Wichita, for instance, will honor history by not changing North High’s trophy cases or statues. The district will also retain the logo that features a shield, drum and feather, with the mascot committee noting that the football team used those symbols as rewards for perseverance and selflessness. The board’s motion also called for the development of a ninth-grade curriculum, to be implemented in advocacy class, that highlights “the great history of North High School and its Native American influence.” The Manhattan school board issued a similar directive to its staff, telling them to include Native American history, religion, culture and contempo-
rary issues in curriculum and staff development. A high school teacher is also working on a certification to teach an American ethnic studies course, which the district hopes to add by the fall of 2022. Middle school teachers are also incorporating Native American elements into social studies and English language arts. Superintendent Wade and Paula Hough, executive director of teaching and learning, understand the frustrations of some people who would like the district to be further along. But doing it the right way takes time, they say. Moving more quickly, Wade says, “would mean dropping the ball on something else, so we are just juggling those things and trying to focus on continuous improvement.” He also noted that the district now has a very active diversity committee and has followed through on the board’s directive to recognize former Manhattan High teacher Frank Prentup, a member of the Tuscarora Tribe, who is honored in the school logo, which features a Native American in a headdress. As for implementing changes, the Wichita and Shawnee Mission districts set out transition timelines, distinguishing between changing the mascot and allowing more time to remove physical representations incorporated into buildings. Fulton says he’d like the new mascots to be chosen by the end of this school year. In general, the process calls for principals to work with students, parents and other interested parties to come up with an appropriate mascot to be approved by the superintendent. Then each principal will be expected to submit a timeline to Fulton, the Shawnee Mission superintendent, as to how long it will take to fully implement the change, including removing any imagery embedded in buildings. Wichita anticipates a two-year phase-in starting in the fall. Reeser says the timeline for selecting a new mascot was purposely left open-ended to let the principal facilitate a process, with feedback from the “North High community,” to decide if they want to merely stick with the current logo
Manhattan High School has held on to its American Indian mascot, but the issue has never quite been put to rest, a lingering point of contention in the community and among school board members, particularly over the past 20 years. At one point, a wolf was adopted as a secondary mascot – a change that has never taken hold. (Photos by Luke Townsend)
or come up with a new nickname and mascot. One potential example is Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which Reeser says dropped the name Redskins and now goes merely as Union High. The fiscal questions generally come from critics who wonder if it makes sense to spend the money needed to erase the vestiges of the mascot, embedded as they often are in parts of the building and emblazoned on gear. For the most part, though, school officials in the three districts say spending will be handled through the normal course of replacing such things as worn-out jerseys and refurbishing gym floors. Wichita expects the changeover to cost about $400,000. Shawnee Mission schools are still tallying up the costs, and Wade did not have figures from Manhattan. But it is here, Wade says, that the old wounds of the mascot debate can flare up. The district has to tread lightly in purchasing any new sports equipment that might be perceived as playing up the mascot too much. “We do take into consideration the fact that the Indians is not a resolved issue for us,” Wade says. “Yes, we are still the Manhattan High Indians, but the tension surrounding that fact is still there. All we have to do is bring up the issue, and tensions rise pretty quickly.” Proponents of the recent changes insist they are not part of the so-called cancel culture, the term mostly political conservatives have attached to communities rethinking homages to past leaders with histories of slave ownership or other wrongs.
“There are some Trump voters among us,” says Shawnee Mission parent Alisha Vincent, a graduate of Shawnee Mission North. “It is not a political thing. It has nothing to do with that.” Vincent’s 11-year-old daughter, Halley, also participated in the name-change initiative – orchestrating a letter-writing campaign that garnered more than 40 submissions from around the country, which Halley submitted to the school board. Vincent’s husband is a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. In Wichita, Reeser says the renaming of the Washington NFL team, which is still in progress, “really helped move this along.” He says the national discussion prompted an outpouring of communication with the board through emails, calls and casual conversations out in the community. Reeser estimated he had a couple of thousand interactions between July and early this year. Sentiments were evenly split between keeping the mascot and retiring it.
NATIVE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE
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avid Glass is the longtime president of the National Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media. Advocacy by his organization has helped eliminate more than 2,500 Native American mascots at all levels over the past 30 years, he says. But the coalition counts more than 3,000 teams still using names and imagery that are offensive to Native Americans.
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FROM LEFT: David Glass heads up the National Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media. The group claims it’s responsible for the retirement of more than 2,500 Native American mascots over the past 30 years. (Courtesy photo); Shawnee Mission North grad Emmitt Monslow has suggested that he may sue over the elimination of the school’s mascot. He contends that by banishing a mascot that’s a minority figure, the all-white school board engaged in a racist act. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
“ W E A R E N OT T RY I N G TO E RA S E H I S TO R Y, BUT INSTEAD GROW FROM WHERE WE WERE A N D W H E R E W E N E E D TO G O .” T E R R E L L D AV I S District Administrator, Wichita School District, reading a student’s statement
Among the teams in the coalition’s crosshairs are the NFL Kansas City Chiefs, and the Savages of Savannah, Missouri, a town about 50 miles southeast of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska’s reservation near White Cloud, Kansas.
But his views on the Redskin mascot changed because of the actions of a social worker he worked with as director of the Native American program. The social worker and her husband were both Native Americans.
Glass’ group is based at White Bear Lake, Minnesota, about a half-hour’s drive from Minneapolis, where the police killing of George Floyd in May helped ignite protests around the country against police brutality. Footage of Floyd’s arrest showed a white officer placing a knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes.
They lived in the Wichita North attendance area, making their kids eligible for district transportation. But out of respect for their parents, the son and daughter walked to another district high school farther away because they did not want to attend a school with a Redskin mascot. Watkins watched how it pained the mother to see her kids occasionally plodding through snow and ice on their way to school.
“It is sad you have to watch an officer put a knee on the neck of an African American man for as long as he did, and watch that man expire, to raise the consciousness of our nation,” Glass says. On the other hand, he said, he took calls for weeks after Floyd’s death from people who apologized for attacking him because of his activism regarding racist symbols. It’s just a football game, they would tell him, and Glass would say, no, it’s more than that. “If you understood what my community was all about,” he would say, “if you visited different homes and different communities, and talked with the young kids, and looked at the kids’ faces when the tomahawk chop starts in the stands by the drunken patrons of the teams, maybe you would understand.” Those conversions are reminiscent of the change of heart experienced by Watkins, the Wichita North alum. Growing up, he was not oblivious to his heritage. He listened to his grandmother speak her Cherokee language and tell stories.
Watkins recounted a text exchange with a former classmate who cursed him out for supporting the mascot change. The text lumped Watkins in with all sorts of beliefs ascribed to card-carrying members of the cancel culture. Watkins responded, “For your information, I do honor the flag, I don’t think that boys should play sports with girls or use the same bathroom, I do believe in free speech. In fact, I agree with free speech so much that I believe if you want to continue using a racist term like Redskin, you have the right to do that.” The friend didn’t reply. “I am as a conservative guy as there is,” Watkins says, “but I do believe in this very passionately.”
LEFT: Jeff Watkins is an alumnus of Wichita North High School, where he was on the football and wrestling teams. Even though he’s part Native American, he once found no fault with North’s mascot. The passage of time has provided the opportunity for reflection and the realization that the word “Redskin” is inherently racist. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle) ABOVE CLOCKWISE: North High School, the second high school built in Wichita, is an Art Deco structure incorporating a Native American and pioneer theme. The school’s tower is the point of focus, featuring an American Indian hunter and a plodding plowman. Numerous visages of American Indian scouts and chiefs were incorporated into the distinctive flourishes designed by Kansan Bruce Moore. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle); Native Americans have played roles in the evolution of the Indian mascot at Manhattan High. Brent Yancey, a longtime teacher who died in 2018, redesigned the chieftain emblem, drawing on his Native American heritage and own affiliation with the Potawatomi Citizen Band Tribe in hopes of emphasizing honor and respect.
DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. How would you compare and contrast the
approaches of the Manhattan, Shawnee Mission and Wichita school districts on this issue? What factors do you think influenced them to handle the issue the way they did?
2. In what ways do you see leadership on this
issue being risky?
3. How might the KLC leadership idea of
“speaking to loss” play into this situation?
T T
When early appeals to wear masks were met with resistance, Sedgwick County opted to spread the word regarding the basics of prevention: handwashing, social distancing and hygiene, says Akeam Ashford, the county’s director of strategic communications. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
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The Trust TURNABOUT When COVID-19 hit Sedgwick County’s Black community hard in the early days of the pandemic, African American leaders banded together to push county officials to communicate clearly about COVID-19. County officials responded to the sustained effort by putting members of the community in the driver’s seat for crafting and delivering messages people could trust and act on.
B Y: A U D R E Y KO R T E
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he news of her brother’s death wasn’t unexpected. But mid-March 2020 would prove to be an extremely unusual time for Margaret, an African American woman in her 70s living in Wichita, and for her family to bury a loved one. The novel coronavirus was beginning to reach Kansas. Just hours after Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly issued an emergency declaration in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kansas recorded its first death linked to the disease. In about a week, Margaret would learn just how close to home the pandemic would hit, when she became Sedgwick County’s first confirmed case of COVID-19. The Journal is withholding her real name at her request to protect her privacy but has verified details of her account through hospital discharge papers and interviews with friends and family members. As a veteran, she would eventually recover following a stay at the Robert J. Dole VA Medical Center. But her story corresponds with a now all-too-familiar narrative concerning the disproportionate impact that COVID-19 has had on people of color, especially early in the pandemic. Nationwide, people of color have been more likely than white Americans to contract COVID-19, and more than 73,000 have died from it, about 15% of all COVID-19 deaths where race is known. When we spoke last April, Margaret had no idea even then that testing was being offered by the county for free.
April, the infection rate for Black county residents was about 61 people per 100,000, compared with white residents who were being infected at a rate of roughly 30 per 100,000. The disproportionate impact spurred stakeholders in Wichita’s African American community to mobilize through Wichita’s Black Alliance. One of the first points of emphasis was pushing county leaders to use some of the $99.6 million that Sedgwick County had received for coronavirus relief to help its Black and low-income residents. To make their case, Black leaders gathered for a demonstration outside the courthouse in early May to demand better communication, testing, and support for black businesses. That week, a letter had been sent to all area elected officials co-signed by the Wichita Branch NAACP, Greater Ministerial League, Wichita African American Council of Elders, Wichita Urban Professionals and Wichita State University’s African American Faculty and Staff Association. Kansas state Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau; state Reps. Gail Finney and K.C. Ohaebosim, all Wichita Democrats; and City Council member Brandon Johnson also signed. They asked the county to ramp up COVID-19 testing, education and mask availability, while improving data and demographic metrics and providing support for parents and minorityowned businesses. Then on May 12, The Wichita Eagle published a letter by the Black Alliance.
“I wonder if that is true. If so it should be on the news every day. They put everything out on the news,” she told me. “That should be a public service announcement. They have to get that information out there.”
Johnson says the letter was written to make sure that the county Board of Health knew how Black residents were being impacted and what the Alliance wanted the county to address.
Last spring, as more and more Wichitans such as Margaret got sick from the virus, Sedgwick County’s trajectory looked similar to the nation’s. In
“We wanted to speak in one voice to make sure every governing body, including the one I’m a part of, understood that we were serious,
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COVID and RACE in KANSAS DATA AS OF MARCH 5, 2021 DATA LAST COLLECTED BY THE COVID TRACKING PROJECT MARCH 7, 2021
BY RACE
Cases
Deaths
PER 100K PEOPLE
ASIAN
BLACK OR AFRICAN AMERICAN
PER 100K PEOPLE
AMERICAN INDIAN OR ALASKA NATIVE
BY ETHNICITY
Cases
Deaths
PER 100K PEOPLE
PER 100K PEOPLE
NOT HISPANIC OR LATINO HISPANIC OR LATINO
WHITE
ABOVE: In the opening months of the pandemic, information about testing was so fragmented that great swaths of Wichita’s population did not know if it was available at all, much less some of the details, including who would stand the cost of the tests. BELOW: Wichita City Councilman Brandon Johnson and Ti’Juana Hardwell, owner and editor of Mamarazzi Entertainment, played key roles in the campaign #FACTSNOTFEAR, crafted specifically for Black residents and Black-owned businesses. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)
“We knew how important it was to make sure that people who looked like them are helping to get the pertinent information out to them.” TI’JUANA HARDWELL Mamarazzi Entertainment, Owner and Editor
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this is a need, and we are concerned about the potential threat that this virus poses to us,” he says. The effort prompted county officials to initiate one of its earliest relief expenditures: expanding communication outreach to the Black and Hispanic communities, eventually earmarking $150,000 for campaigns last year. With that money, the county hired professionals from minority-owned communication firms, including Claudio Amaro of AB&C Bilingual Resources and Christina Long of CML Collective, to help ensure that information would be geared toward Black and Latino residents and appear in places where they were readers and listeners. “It’s important here that the messaging goes out to the entire community,” says County Manager Tom Stolz, one of the key figures helping to oversee the disbursement of pandemic-relief aid. “And so we’re trying to hit those culturally sensitive areas, and we hired people within the culture to help us do that.” Then in November, the Black Alliance and the Wichita African American Council of Elders received a $532,500 CARES Act grant through Sedgwick County to provide information technology support, food assistance and mental health support to the Black community. The funding also provided the support necessary to launch an outreach education campaign called #FACTSNOTFEAR, designed specifically for Black residents. It had taken months of work, planning and collaboration by the Alliance and the Elders to get to that point. Multiple rounds of requests for COVID-19 CARES Act funding made their way through the advisory councils that allotted the money. Despite holding to purpose, Black leaders didn’t get everything they requested for Black and minority-owned businesses. The county put $5 million into a bucket for business grants of up to $5,000, and although none was earmarked for minority-owned firms, leaders encouraged them to apply.
Access to testing improved, in a large part because HealthCore Clinic took the lead through initiatives such as mobile testing. But fear, Johnson says, still proved to be a barrier for many. Combating that fear came down to communicating thoughtfully with Black residents. Doing that became one of the clearest outcomes of the push by Black leaders to raise the heat on the county and community to better battle COVID-19. FROM FLYERS TO GEO FENCING
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ecause of a history in this country of anti-Black violence and inequality, communicating effectively with African Americans about the pandemic posed special challenges. Local officials needed to craft messages specifically for Black residents about limiting exposure to and the spread of the virus, says Djuan Wash, communication director for the Alliance and a drafter of the letter headlined “Wichita’s Black Alliance: Coronavirus is no laughing matter” in The Eagle. “Historically black communities have a deep-seated mistrust of medicine and doctors, and that is obvious and for good reason,” Wash says. “You know when you have such things as the Tuskegee ... experiment, you know, experiments that they did in St. Louis with the military, you know all of these sorts of things Black people have in the back of our minds when we’re asked to go take this – this test that we don’t really know about.” And it was also important that those communications be inclusive. Sedgwick County is about 80% white (about 68% are white alone, not Hispanic or Latino), and crafting communications about the pandemic only for the majority population would be an easy shortcut to take. But if African Americans and other communities of color didn’t see themselves represented in the campaign, they wouldn’t respond well to it.
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“In a place like Sedgwick County and really all over, you see white faces in the marketing, you hear white voices in the marketing,” Wash says. The county’s communication team approached Long early on to help ensure that the messaging it put forward would be relevant, representative and distributed in the best ways possible. Even before her contract was finalized in May, the county was putting the pieces in place to help make people aware of COVID-19 and its impact in the area. “They had already identified and created an online report system and communication resources that anyone who had access to the Sedgwick County website and was visiting could download and use for their own, either professional or personal communication effort,” Long says. An initial $50,000 investment in communications was followed up with an additional $100,000 effort that emphasized the basics of staying safe during the pandemic -– handwashing, social distancing and hygiene, says Akeam Ashford, Sedgwick County’s director of strategic communications. The push came with an eye on meeting the audience where they were by encouraging them to find ways to keep themselves and those around them safe even if they couldn’t abide some of the recommendations.
The #FACTSNOTFEAR campaign and other efforts aimed at Black Wichitans were designed to meet the audience where they were. One innovation involved a text alert system to inform community. (Courtesy photos)
“We kind of saw that you had those who were staunchly against wearing a mask,” Ashford says. “From the direction of Dr. (Garold) Minns (Sedgwick County health officer) and other physicians, they started to see the numbers start to go up and so they really wanted to push the message of those three factors which, in the very beginning of this pandemic, were kind of the key points.” Traditional marketing strategies such as flyers and posters, along with social media messaging and engagements with television stations, newspapers and radio stations certainly played a role. But technology also provided opportunities to employ more sophisticated and better targeted approaches. One important addition proved to be geo fencing. This marketing strategy allows for segmentation of what types of ads appear on mobile devices, based on the geographic location. Long says geo fencing offered the ability “to use a combination of traditional methods, with digital and electronic communications and also newer trendier technologies, just to make sure, again, the county’s messages about healthy behaviors and what to do about testing and where to get tests were out there.” Long’s deep connections and understanding of the community also made her and her team tremendous resources in advancing the county’s efforts, Ashford says.
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“Her ideas and her insight really helped us to reach the folks that we are trying to reach,” Ashford says. “That kind of consultant to communications, I’ll be honest, it makes my job really easy.” Sedgwick County’s efforts to prioritize communication to minority communities were noteworthy. “Most places, most organizations don’t think about communicating to minority groups, and I think just pulling in Christina, pulling in Claudia for our (Spanish) speaking folks, and then translating into Spanish and in Vietnamese, that says volumes about Sedgwick County government,” he says. “I think the future is bright. I think this is a learning opportunity. It was a hard lesson to learn in a lot of ways, but I think it sets us up for the future to better communicate in the next event.”
‘PEOPLE THEY TRUST’
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i’Juana Hardwell, owner and editor of Mamarazzi Entertainment, also played a key role in the #FACTSNOTFEAR campaign. “I honestly feel Ti’Juana Hardwell is working herself in a tizzy to make sure that these niche messages are out, and she is doing a phenomenal job. That is also another indication and demonstration of how the county and the community are getting it right … in the face of a pandemic,” Long says.
Using grant money that the Alliance and the Elders had applied for, a communications plan was fashioned to fill information gaps. “We knew how important it was to make sure that people who looked like them are helping to get the pertinent information out to them,” Hardwell says. One of the campaign’s innovations was a community alert system that allowed organizers to communicate directly with residents via text message. The alert system was sponsored by the Elders and the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and supported by the Kansas Health Foundation, which also funds the Kansas Leadership Center, publisher of The Journal. “The community alert system allows anyone to be able to text the word ‘alerts’ to 484848,” Hardwell says. “And they will begin to receive information as we receive it.” The communications push didn’t just help empower residents to keep themselves safe. It also helped connect them to resources that would help them weather the pandemic’s economic impact. Hardwell says a lot of African American business owners, especially, were not aware that they they were qualified for CARES Act funding – one consideration that arose when the alert system went live.
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“This whole idea about having a community alert system, text messages that come right to their phone, (is) so that they are able to get that information and not just a timely manner, but from people who they trust,” Hardwell says. One point of pride for Hardwell and her team was the inclusion of Black business owners in their planning and distribution efforts. “With that money that we received, we actually did a lot of business with African American business owners. That was a way of us being able to make sure that that money went back” to people who could most benefit from it, she says. The lessons learned during the outbreak will likely be applicable to the next phase of battling the pandemic: encouraging vaccinations. The Alliance and the Elders hosted virtual town halls and vaccine health forums in November, December and January to discuss vaccine facts and fears. All of the communication tactics used to inform minority groups about how to reduce the COVID infection rate could also play a role in persuading skeptical individuals to get vaccinated and, in turn, increase the chances of herd immunity. “It’s really important to know that when it comes to … these vaccinations that are getting ready to happen, African Americans have a long history of not trusting medical professionals, and also not trusting news that is disseminated. It’s just a long history,” Hardwell says. THE CHALLENGE OF REINING IN A DISPARITY
got sick. More than 580 Sedgwick County residents and nearly 5,000 Kansans overall have died. What the numbers don’t show presently, though, is the stark racial disparity evident early in the pandemic. White residents of Sedgwick County now appear slightly more likely to test positive for COVID-19 than Black residents. But it’s tough to say for sure whether Sedgwick County has avoided the racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 deaths nationally because of the large number of deaths in which racial data is unclear or has not been provided. According to Sedgwick County Health Department records, African American individuals accounted for 33 of the county’s 584 deaths as of early April. However, 129 deaths have been catalogued as “other races,” and no racial demographic information was recorded for 31 deaths. In terms of ethnicity, Hispanics and Latinos accounted for 26 deaths, while 471 deaths involved people who were not Hispanic or Latino. No ethnicity was recorded for another 83 deaths. The county’s death rates rank well below the national average per 100,000 for every racial and ethnic demographic grouping, except “other,” which is three times the national average at 316 deaths per 100,000 Sedgwick County residents. Kaylee Hervey, epidemiology program manager at the Sedgwick County Health Department, says cases get categorized as “unknown” if the health department fails to reach an individual or a person refuses to answer questions. All coronavirus deaths recorded in Sedgwick County are tied to confirmed cases, in which a positive test for COVID-19 preceded the death.
G
Labs or the providers that order tests are asked to provide demographic information to the county, but in dozens of deaths, the health department has been able to obtain racial information no more specific than “other.”
Several thousand more African Americans in Wichita have contracted the virus since Margaret
In a perfect world, Hervey says, county officials would be able to know the demographic specifics of every case, but the scale and scope of the
auging the success of the communication’s campaign in helping to stem the pandemic can be difficult and complicated.
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COVID-19 pandemic has complicated data collection efforts. More details could emerge over time if the state decides to allocate the resources necessary for a deeper investigation of death certificates. But for now, the data only provide an outline of what’s occurred. “You just have to know there are some nuances to that data that could skew your assumptions,” Hervey says. The uncertainties surrounding the data frustrate analyses of whether Sedgwick County’s communications resulted in a reduced number of cases and fewer deaths. But cause and effect is often complicated in matters of public health, and advocates for the county’s efforts say they are better judged by the fact that officials made conscious interventions to address an emerging problem. Long says that the metrics generated by Sedgwick County’s campaign provide at least one barometer of success. “Reach numbers across digital platforms and across social media continue to show that more and more people are engaging, commenting and interacting with communications,” Long says. Being able to count on the county as collaborators has made a huge difference. Long complimented Ashford’s teamwork, saying that he not only aided in messaging through animated videos and graphics but helped to facilitate town hall meetings where health professionals could share information. One of the things to keep in mind, Long says, is that with something like COVID it is important to remain agile, because the goal is always changing and moving. Still, organizers wished they could have done more. Ashford says that if they’d had more money, he would have liked to see more direct engagement, in-person town halls in some of the
very large spaces in the county that could safely accommodate such a gathering and the use of national influencers. Long says she would have liked to increase the volume across platforms. “More budget means more frequency, more exposure,” Long says. “So I would have loved to have been able to have a budget that would allow even more.” Long says that she thinks blaming the county for racial disparity in early days of the pandemic would be misplaced. “In terms of the racial disparity factors, we have to understand that time frame and what was going on in the country when COVID just broke out.” She applauded the county for having the foresight and initiative to bring in outside assistance to be able to deepen their breadth of knowledge and to make sure that all types of residents were appropriately communicated with. “However, the county is just one entity in this whole situation with COVID,” Long says. “We had a federal level voice that was causing confusion when it comes to COVID. Then we have funding -- various pots of funding that the state was communicating about, the county was trying to figure out how to communicate about, the city was communicating about.” She says the county went above and beyond what they were required to do in allocating money for a campaign targeted at African Americans. “This was a great demonstration of what happens when you truly put resources and people to power in order to empower those who are typically left behind,” she says. Journal managing editor Chris Green contributed to this story.
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Balancing Act When the pandemic drove school online, it represented just the latest in a series of challenges and disruptions affecting the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools over the past two years. But the collaborative leadership style of figures in two key positions has helped make conflict easier to manage and fostered work toward a common purpose. Still, plenty of challenges and uncertainties remain.
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B Y: M A R K W I E B E
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acing trial after trial, the Kansas City, Kansas school district has been shaped by uncertainty and turbulence over the past two years. Just maybe not in the way one might expect.
The shift in the district toward a more collaborative leadership style by key authorities – open, engaging and focused on finding common purpose rather than lingering on divisions – appears have paid dividends.
First, the KCK school board weathered an uncommonly bruising election in 2019.
Spencer Martin, the district’s science instructional coach for secondary schools, says he can see the difference at the instructional level.
Community members were also divided over the 2018 hiring of Superintendent Charles Foust, who had come to Kansas City after brief stints at school districts in North Carolina and Texas. Some teachers and administrators, dissatisfied with Foust’s leadership style and his focus on state test scores to measure student performance, left the district. And some of those who stayed endured low morale and a micromanaging board. If that sounds like a crisis that would only continue to grow amid the Covid-19 pandemic, it was. Until it wasn’t. Foust is gone, having abruptly resigned his post last summer for a job in North Carolina. His replacement, interim superintendent Alicia Miguel, is earning praise for managing the district’s pandemic response, as well as a host of challenges that include staff shortages and the deaths of almost two dozen students in the past year. So is the board’s president, Randy Lopez, one of two new members elected in November 2019, along with Yolanda Clark. At 39, Lopez is the youngest board member, but he brings experience from a number of non-elected boards and has earned a reputation as a skilled facilitator and listener. “He’s working very diligently to have the board work as a team,” says fellow board member Janey Humphries, an incumbent who won reelection. “And I feel that the board has been growing in the past few months in their ability to work together for the good of the district.”
“Instead of micromanaging and trying to control everything, we’re actually trying to develop capacity,” says Martin. “People are no longer afraid to try something because they’re afraid they’ll get blowback. We now have a supportive leadership structure that’s willing to let people try things.” STEADY AMID UNCERTAINTY
O
f course, few educators in Kansas or across the country would report a surge in morale these days, and those in Kansas City are no exception. The pandemic has spawned burnout and frustration among many, according to a study from the Rand Corp. And fears that remote learning will give rise to a “lost generation” of underperforming students are especially acute in Kansas City, the state’s poorest school district. But the district has thus far avoided the reversals the pandemic has created in other communities. It has not, for example, repeatedly transitioned between remote and in-person learning, as some districts have. For most of the school year, the KCK board has adopted a stay-the-course approach by providing online instruction to all but its most vulnerable students – those in special education classrooms and students who speak English as a second language. Yet this approach has received increasing scrutiny across the country, including in the Kansas Legislature.
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At a legislative committee hearing in February, one lawmaker questioned whether the KCK and Wichita districts could be stripped of about $300 million in relief funding because they hadn’t returned to in-person learning. “The intent was to get the kids back in school as quickly as possible,” state Rep. Sean Tarwater, a Stilwell Republican, was quoted as saying by the Kansas National Education Association, the teachers union. “I mean that’s 300 of 500 million (dollars) and they’re not teaching anyone.” By mid-March, the district was the last one in the state remaining in total remote learning and lawmakers were passing a law to require all schools to offer an in-person option before the end of the month. In testimony to lawmakers, Miguel said the district had remained in remote learning because of Wyandotte County’s extraordinarily high COVID-19 infection spread, which reached a 43% positivity rate among those tested in early January, according to a report from the Kansas Association of School Boards. Tarwater questioned Miguel about why Catholic schools in Wyandotte County were in person but not KCK. Miguel responded by explaining the district’s students live in multigenerational households, which can create health risks that facilitate the spread of the disease. But Tarwater said such reasonings sounded like excuses, according to a tweet by Scott Rothschild, communications specialist with the school board association. Dominick DeRosa, NEA-KCK president, believes the district did everything it could to balance the need to educate its students with the need to keep them and educators as safe and healthy as possible. “We need to make sure the legislators in Topeka know we’re still working here, still struggling here to do everything we can to take care of our kids,” DeRosa says. “And they need to understand that just because we’re teaching remotely doesn’t mean that we’re not really teaching.” DeRosa has been impressed with how the administration and the board have included staff in the discussions about how and when to return to class. He and Martin are especially pleased that the district has honored the staff’s
need for health and safety – and that it is conforming with the recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for getting students safely back in the classroom. “I think our district in all transparency has done so much to make sure that when we do return it’s in the safest possible manner,” DeRosa says. “We have safety protocols and backups to support administrators to make sure they maintain all those mitigating protocols.” This process has required its share of long and sometimes tedious discussions. Eventually, the district fell in line with legislation passed last month requiring all Kansas schools to offer inperson classes by March 31. That move, however, only came after a series of deliberations and two votes that underscored the challenge of balancing the needs of the students with the need to keep as many people healthy as possible. At its Dec. 1 meeting online, the seven-member board considered a proposal to extend remote learning until April. Some board members wanted more information about how remote learning had affected student performance. Others questioned whether the decision should be delayed to see if infections would begin to decline. But the fact remained that the number of cases in Wyandotte County had soared during the fall, and that was enough to persuade the board to keep students out of the classroom for several more months. Their vote to return to the classroom in April was unanimous. Then in February, the board, on recommendation from administration, revisited this decision and voted to bring back students who need more reliable online access than they have at home. Staff and computers will be available for these students so they can continue with their remote education. The board’s vote was in line with the consistently cautious approach it has taken throughout pandemic. As wrenching controversies roil other urban districts, the KCK board had set a course that teachers and at least some parents support. “I think the direction we’re going is one of the better we’ve seen,” Martin says. “Other districts
Spencer Martin, the Kansas City, Kansas school district’s science instructional coach for secondary schools, is pleased with recent changes in district leadership. But there’s work to be done, he says, particularly in the area of retaining teachers and administrators.
have had to open and shut down, open and shut down. Some districts as much as six times. Being fully remote is difficult, but the whiplash is difficult for a whole lot of different reasons.” Even with vaccine distribution ramping up, a majority of Americans think school reopenings should wait until all teachers who want the coronavirus vaccine have received it, according to a February survey by the Pew Research Center. But white, upper-income Americans are more likely to say that schools should reopen as soon as possible. There’s also a huge partisan division, with nearly two-thirds of Republicans supporting a quick reopening compared with only 20% of Democrats. Micki Welcome Hill, whose 16-year-old daughter attends Sumner High School, thinks almost everyone in the district – teachers, administrators, students, and parents – is doing the best they can with a horrible situation. “It’s been stressful,” she says of her daughter’s experience, “but she is doing well with her grades. Like all of her peers, she has not gotten the same level of an education as she would in person.” However, Hill thinks that the alternative – exposing students and staff to
the virus, especially when its spread was acute – is unacceptable. To be sure, the district’s steady, consistent approach has come with a cost. Miguel says that recent assessments have shown that students – especially those who have had issues connecting to online instruction – have experienced “learning loss” during the pandemic. Addressing that loss, she says, is her top priority. But to do that, she adds, requires making sure she hears from teachers, parents and administrators. “As a leader, I think it is important to listen to others,” Miguel says. “I want to hear and listen to all aspects of ideas on how we navigate from remote learning to in-person instruction.”
‘A STRESSFUL TIME FOR ALL OF US’
Under Foust and before the current board took the helm, the district had been under scrutiny for failing to listen to and include parents, educators, and community members in its decisions. Critics also contended that the board was micromanaging the district’s day-to-day business rather than
Micki Welcome Hill, whose daughter Trinity attends Sumner Academy, is generally pleased with the new tone that’s been demonstrated at school board meetings and with the course the district has steered to deal with the pandemic. However, she remains concerned about factionalism and is considering running for a school board seat this year. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. In what ways has the Kansas City, Kansas school district benefited from
sticking with virtual school during the pandemic? What costs, consequences and risks could it face?
2. Is this a story about leadership or the skillfull use of authority? 3. Why is holding to purpose an element of exercising leadership, and
where does it connect or conflict with the idea of acting experimentally?
Alicia Miguel, interim superintendent of the district, and Randy Lopez, president of the school board, have been credited with bringing engaging leadership styles to their positions after a period of contentiousness atop the district. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
tending to the big picture. These issues came to the surface during the 2019 school board campaigns, focusing especially on the tenure of Valdenia Winn, who also serves in the Kansas House of Representatives. Because she had recently served as board president, and because she had been criticized for micromanaging administrative duties, Winn, who did not respond to The Journal’s requests for an interview, became the focal point for those who argued the board should set policy, approve budgets and hire (or fire) the superintendent. Her critics portrayed her actions as being at odds with precedents set by previous boards that had largely stayed out of administrative affairs. When the results from the November 2019 election were tallied, voters did not necessarily express a clear preference for one approach over the other. Although they elected three members who had advocated for a big-picture approach – Lopez, Clark and Humphries – they also reelected Winn. Since the election, and especially since the board selected Lopez as its president, the tension created by the competing approaches has not completely gone away. But it has softened.
Lopez says the board has benefited from monthly workshops with the Kansas Association of School Boards. Last year, before Lopez was selected as president, each board member completed an anonymous self-evaluation with questions drafted by the association. Marcia Weseman, a leadership field specialist with the group who facilitates the workshops, says the aim is not to paper over natural conflicts that occur on governing bodies. Rather, it is to help the board use its conflicts productively, without losing focus on its common purpose: to promote student learning. Listening to one another is a crucial part of making sure conflicts don’t interfere with that overarching aim. “For all board members to be as effective as possible, they have to hone their ability to take on other perspectives,” Weseman says. “It doesn’t mean they have to change their own. But if they can seek to understand rather than be understood first, it helps them to find that common ground. I think all the board members have worked hard at doing that.” Lopez openly embraces that approach, especially during the board’s meetings. At the board’s Dec. 1 meeting, for example, Winn and board VicePresident Wanda Kay Paige spent several minutes
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questioning staff about nurse shortages, at times expressing dissatisfaction that staff did not have the answer to their questions and suggesting that the district would not be prepared to reopen for in-class learning. Tensions rose for a moment when another board member objected to their rapid-fire questioning. Lopez took a stab at calming things down. He politely acknowledged that it can be difficult for staff to answer every concern that comes their way and noted that unanswered questions are written down and answered later. He also acknowledged the board members are within their rights to hold staff accountable. “It is a stressful time for all of us,” he said at the meeting, “and we’re all doing the best we can. The questions that board members ask are good because they make sure that we are doing everything we can to keep our staff and students safe. So I don’t see any issue with questions. But I do want to make sure that our staff has the appropriate time to give the answers, or to find the answers if they don’t have them right away.” In an interview, Lopez says he’s comfortable managing conflicts like this. “When I was elected as board president,” he says, “I felt pretty good about being in that role because I had started building relationships with everyone and finding common ground and sharing what my ideas and vision were for our district, which more often than not were in alignment. Granted we have board members who have strong opinions and thoughts, but for me that’s a healthy thing: How do we learn from each perspective each board member brings?” Hill, a longtime school volunteer and board observer, credits Lopez with introducing a more civil tone to the meetings. “He talks to people and not at people,” she says. “I really think he listens. He doesn’t have an answer before you finish the question. Previous board leaders didn’t have that.” Despite this change in tone, and despite her belief that the district is turning a corner toward stronger leadership, Hill cautions against complacency.
“Randy has been a welcome change and I think we’re having a unifying board, but there are still some factions,” says Hill, who is considering running for a board position in 2021. “We need people who are there not for their own personal and political gain, but are there for the students and the faculty, and are there to create an environment where they thrive.” DEALING WITH TURNOVER
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hen Foust resigned in late July, he left the board in the unenviable position of identifying an interim superintendent just before the school year was to begin – and under the extraordinarily trying circumstances of a pandemic. It acted quickly to name Miguel as interim superintendent, and has since begun the search for a permanent replacement, hiring a search firm and taking steps to solicit public opinion. (The board was expected to name a permanent superintendent by mid-April, after The Journal’s print deadline.) Miguel, a 30-year veteran educator, arrived at the district in 2012. She most recently served as instructional improvement officer. Having also served as director of the English as a second language program, the native Argentinian oversees a district where more than half of its nearly 21,000 students are Hispanic, and almost half are classified as “English language learners.” Still, the challenges the district faces are great. Among them: Recruiting and keeping certified employees (teachers and administrators) who won’t be tempted to use the district as a launch pad for better paying jobs in neighboring communities. In recent years, the district’s annual turnover has hovered in the mid-200s. During Foust’s first year, 2018-2019, turnover jumped nearly 17% with 293 departures. The next year it dipped to 272, but was still larger than in years prior to his arrival. Last year, the figure surged to 346, a 27-percent increase. Martin, the instructional coach, says Foust, who did not respond to a request for an interview, made a challenging situation worse.
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“I had several teachers leave because of him,” Martin says. “During Foust, we switched from supporting students to blaming teachers for what didn’t go well.” Miguel, however, cautions against generalizing about the reasons behind the departures. Teachers and administrators leave for various reasons, she says, including some who have left the profession entirely because of the pandemic. “I’m hoping people feel supported enough that they will not leave, because we need every single one of our employees,” Miguel adds. “We cannot do any of this without them.” In addition to this challenge, the district has suffered an extraordinarily large number of student deaths. Since January 2020, nearly two dozen students have died, 11 from gun violence. Last summer, the district launched Enough is Enough, a campaign designed to raise awareness about gun violence among young adults and the need for everyone in the community – not only educators and law enforcement officials, but parents, neighborhood organizations, health providers and others – to recognize the problem and adopt strategies to address it. Miguel says the district cannot solve a problem as complex as youth gun violence alone. But it does have a role to play in addressing the students’ and teachers’ social and emotional needs – especially during the pandemic. She believes that the district is working with a strong foundation, having already invested in placing a social worker and a counselor in every building. “This is work that had been started before,” she says, “but we had to change how they approach the work.” The pandemic has made it nearly impossible for the district’s educators to learn about students’ lives through incidental contact at school. So for most of the past year, they’ve had to be deliberate about scheduling home visits, even if those visits must occur on a porch, with masks, and six feet apart. “It sends a strong message to the parents,” Miguel says. “ ‘We care and we will come to your home.’ ”
Miguel won praise from people such as Martin and Hill. Martin says Miguel has improved morale, the pandemic notwithstanding. He cites as an example improvements in collecting data about student performance not simply tied to state test scores. The progress could bolster the district’s next top administrator. Just as important is the board’s leadership. When the board conducted its search in 2018, Martin says, its infighting and dysfunction made headlines, possibly scaring off qualified candidates. “I think a lot of that has stopped. I’m significantly more hopeful about the direction of the district than I was two years ago.” That cautious optimism springs from Hill’s belief that the board has learned its lesson from its last search. “I think that Randy and the rest of the board have heard how disappointed we were in the previous selection,” she says. Former Superintendent Cindy Lane shares some of Martin’s optimism, but she believes there’s still work to be done. “I do think Randy is a strong leader and he’s the right person to help the board become a strong governing body,” Lane says. She adds that no matter who the next superintendent is, that person must be focused on the community. Student achievement is obviously important, but that cannot come without leaders who are committed to engaging with and understanding the community they serve. It’s that commitment from many past leaders that has given the district political and administrative stability. “We’ve had 15 superintendents in 105 years,” she notes. “How does it happen that there were only 15? It was because the board always functioned as a strong governance board that set a vision and held people accountable. At the same time, they were always supportive and always out in the community and being ambassadors.” Lane said she hopes the next superintendent will do the same: “That’s what made KCK public schools such a successful place.”
Schools everywhere began scrambling last year to deal with the pandemic. Dominick DeRosa, NEA-KCK president, thinks his district has done its best to balance safety and learning – an opinion that’s not universally shared within the Kansas Legislature; If there’s one universal longing in the KCK district – and across the nation – it’s for normalcy. Near the top, if not at the top, of everyone’s list is that soon students will again mingle, that their voices will fill classrooms, and that books and backpacks will be in the correct places. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)
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Joining Hands for the Community
B Y: B E CC Y TA N N E R
Sherman County’s aging nursing home had become a problem. But just as a plan to fix things was ready to be unveiled, the coronavirus hit. Organizers could have put things on pause, but instead they conjured up an informational campaign to persuade their fellow residents to put uncertainty aside and invest in the common good.
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hackled with an aging nursing home so outdated that seniors were leaving the area and moving into care facilities in other counties and states, residents in and around Goodland realized about two years ago that change was needed. The town’s Good Samaritan Society facility, a 45-bed skilled nursing home, needed critical attention. “The building is almost as old as me,” jokes Ron Schilling, a board member of the Topside Manor Nursing Home, the name the facility took after it changed hands. “It was built in 1960.” And although it’s been remodeled twice in its six decades of service, it needed updating, rearranging, replumbing, rewiring – re-everything. “It was built long before the needs and requirements we have today,” says Kevin Rasure, another Topside board member. “We do not have bathrooms for every resident. Their shared electrical needs are a far cry from what they need today.”
Not only was the building nearing the end of its useful life, but the Good Samaritan Society, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was pulling out of Sherman County. The society, operator of more than 230 integrated care and skilled nursing homes throughout the nation, would no longer have a local presence after the 2019 ownership change. So two years ago, county commissioners formed a five-person board to explore the possibility of building a new facility. What would be needed? What would it look like? Just when things were starting to happen – public meetings and an architect’s rendering were being readied – the coronavirus nearly ground things to a halt. (According to The Kansas City Star, Topside was the site of a coronavirus cluster last fall affecting at least seven employees and 33 residents.) Some locals told the board members to stop and wait, wait for the pandemic to be over. But that wasn’t in any of their natures.
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That set the stage for a passionate group of individuals with a diverse array of skills to find creative ways to keep the effort moving, even as a pandemic eventually sickened hundreds of their fellow county residents and disrupted economic security throughout the country.
PLANTING THE SEEDS
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ennifer Golden House happened to be attending a Sherman County Commission meeting two years ago on another matter when discussion of the nursing home came up on the agenda. “My father was in the facility off and on,” House says. “It was personal for me. I sat down with the commissioners and I said, ‘You guys, we’ve got a problem here. We’ve got an issue with this facility. We have an aging facility, and we need to do something.’” House, who works at a community foundation and manages her family’s fifth-generation farm, spent more than a quarter century in banking. She had served on numerous state and local boards and suddenly found herself on the planning board along with four other people: a farmer, a former county commissioner, a contractor, and a local chamber and economic director. (Editor’s note: House joined the KLC board of directors earlier this year.) In July 2019, the board partnered with a Garden City architect, and plans were drawn up for a new $10 million building. Public approval would be needed, so a decision was made in January 2020 to schedule an election for late April. “Because of the nature and culture of presidential elections, we did not want to run the bond issue in November,” House says. “We began our process of ordering brochures, posters, easels, all kinds of stuff. We had schedules for dog and pony shows for all the events – the Senior Center, the Rotary, the Kiwanis and Lions clubs.”
Then, the coronavirus arrived. It was time, House says, to get creative. The project needed an informational campaign unlike anything Sherman County had ever seen. “We called our high school media department, and the teacher came over,” she says. “He videotaped us. And, after that, the class worked on this project.” Six videos were created – each between one and 10 minutes long. And then, the videos were put on Facebook in the days before the vote. The videos were crisp but didn’t rely on anything too flashy or fancy. At the heart of them were plain-spoken, factual appeals to the common good delivered by credible sources – Schilling, Rasure, House and Mike Mersch, another Topside board member.
BUILDING AWARENESS
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oodland, located on the High Plains, is perhaps best known as the Sunflower Capital of Kansas. It is home to a 24-by-32 foot reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s “Three Sunflowers in a Vase,” placed strategically on an 80-foot easel and weighing more than 40,000 pounds. Most Kansans are aware of Goodland’s location because it’s adjacent to Interstate 70 and about 17 miles from the Colorado state line. It’s either the first Kansas town of any size that Plains travelers get to see or the last. Goodland is the Sherman County seat and boasts a population of 4,300 residents out of 5,900 in the county. But it’s more than numbers. Entrepreneurship is in the town’s DNA. It’s where the first patented helicopter was designed in 1909 by William J. Purvis and Charles A. Wilson.
Goodland is the county seat of Sherman County, which has a population of about 5,900. In addition to the 4,300 people who live within the city limits, it’s also the home of Topside Manor, a nursing home soon to be replaced by an updated facility; a bustling agricultural service center; and an 80-foot-high reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Three Sunflowers in a Vase,” which was erected in 2001 by artist Cameron Cross.
The new Topside facility will consist of four pods. Three pods can each house 15 residents; a fourth pod will contain an administrative area, chapel, safe area, laundry and beauty salon. All the residential pods will open into a common area with a dining room, living room and kitchen. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
Home grown natives are pragmatic – get-erdone people. They are used to being self-reliant whenever they can. But there’s a catch-22: Many rural Kansas communities face declining populations and are shouldering more and more responsibilities in needed services than they can provide. So, how do you get people who cherish their individualism to sacrifice for a community project? One approach is an appeal to pragmatism and common sense. That, and the price tag was small for the benefit the community would receive. Ron Schilling, one of the board members, likened the process to building a home – decide what you can afford, what steps you can skip. “When you build a house, one of the things you want to do is put windows in,” Schilling says. “If you wanted, you could build a house without windows – it’s a lot cheaper. But we put windows in it because it helps the quality of life. It’s the same way in building a community.
“You know, we could live in a community without paved streets. We can live in a community without sewers. I mean, we don’t have to have those things to have a city. But we have taxes to help pay for these kinds of things because we want paved streets; we’ve become accustomed to them. We have a sewer system because we really don’t want to use an outhouse in the backyard. We need protection, that’s why we have police. And we need a tax to help the senior citizens of this community. It’s our duty.” Strengthening the community appeal was the fact that the new nursing home would be locally owned. No corporate entity would administer its day-to-day functions. Yes, taxes would go up. Rasure, a former county commissioner and lumberyard owner, says that the new facility would cost a homeowner of a $100,000 house an extra $6.70 a month in taxes. “Most of us spend that much on coffee or pop on a weekly basis,” he says. “I feel like it is an investment that’s needed for the residents of Sherman County.”
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The trends in long-term facilities have changed since the 1960s, Rasure says. More electrical outlets are needed in rooms to support oxygen, televisions and more. Residents and their families expect private bathrooms. And long hallways leading to individual rooms are no longer acceptable. Furthermore, the primary beneficiaries would be loved ones and neighbors. The median age in Sherman County is 39; roughly 20 percent of the population is 65 and older, according to the U.S. Census. Providing an opportunity for residents to age within their home county needed to be a priority. “We want to keep our people in our own community,” Rasure says. “As we get older, we hate to go someplace where our families and friends can no longer see us. We want them to visit us without a lot of trouble.” The old facility in Goodland, Rasure says, was not suitable to meet his father’s needs. His father ended up moving to Ohio to a facility near Rasure’s brother. “It made it very difficult for me to go see him,” Rasure says. “But his friends … were not there so it made it difficult for him to enjoy the last few years of his life. A new facility is a small investment. It’s needed to provide for our people as we get older, for the residents of Sherman County.”
DESIGNING A MESSAGE
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he technological know-how for the communications project came from Jeff First, who teaches the video production class at Goodland High School. Most class projects traditionally involved recording sports and musical events at the school. One of the challenges in creating the care-facility videos was that none of the students were in school. “We were mid-pandemic, so the students were
not on site,” First says. “But we got together via Zoom to plan and discuss the project. I called in and, as a class, we set up the cameras, lights and filmed the interviews over the course of a morning.” The students, all high school seniors, determined the production elements of the videos. “On the day we filmed, I went in and set up an iPad with my students virtually participating,” First says. “We discussed how to set the cameras up. Then, they got to talk to the people. We had the equipment to do two camera views and combine those videos together for a better presentation.” The students came up with the plan to break up the interviews into short videos, which were posted on Facebook over the span of a month. Most of the videos had between 600 and 1,100 views and contained bite-size information for Goodland residents to consider. “Each interview was accompanied with images that would have normally been available at a public presentation,” First says. “We talked about having a good social media plan on how to release the videos and keep it fresh in people’s minds.” In addition, “I did fall very ill in December, so there were several months they did not do much, then in March, when the schools shut down, we had to reimagine how we would carry on with the class,” First says. “This made it difficult for us to have content to video.” The videos were produced in less than a month. But they apparently helped. On April 28, 2020, 932 ballots were cast in the special election: 554 in favor, 377 against. The outcome capped a very unusual election, in which a $10 million bond issue passed with nary a public meeting. Most people didn’t vote in person because of the pandemic, so mail-in ballots drove the vote. “I do believe that the videos had an impact on the outcome of the voting,” First says. “These videos gave a clear and concise stance on why
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DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. How would you diagnose the situation facing Goodland’s nursing home board?
How would you describe their leadership challenge?
2. What aspects of the campaign’s approach do you think contributed to its success?
What leadership behaviors do you see at play?
3. What do you think it means that voters were willing to approve a local project
that increased their taxes during a time of uncertainty? How might that inform future efforts to improve your own community?
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“The people living here are the people who built Sherman County. We need to serve those who served us. You know the people who are up there (in the facility) are my 4-H leaders, our teachers, the people who pumped our gas and dumped our grain trucks, our bankers and lawyers. They are people from Sherman County.” RON SCHILLING Topside Manor Nursing Home board member
It’s been a challenging time for the Topside Manor Nursing Home board, from left, Mike Mersch, Kevin Rasure and Ron Schilling. They’ve been at the forefront of planning for a new facility while dealing with the pandemic. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
the committee felt so passionate about the choice they were making. “They provided a public conversation board for community members to ask questions.” One of the board members, Suzanne McClure, age 61, died two months after the bond issue was passed. “She was very vibrant in our community,” House says of McClure. “It was another hit for us.”
KEEPING FRIENDS AT HOME
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he committee members are grateful the bond issue has passed. Many of them credit one another for its passage. “We got people on the board who are pretty passionate about the project,” Rasure says. “But we all have different stations in the community. We don’t all go to the same church or same restaurants. We go in different directions, which
means we know a different group of people. Our diversity in interests was a positive. You don’t always have to be good friends with somebody to respect what they bring to the table. Hopefully, that’s what our community does. “When we found someone who we heard might not be fully supportive of the project, we tried to reach out and talk with them, find out their concerns and get information to them.” The new facility is roughly the same size as the old one, to help keep costs low. Groundbreaking and construction is to begin this spring. It is to open in April 2022. “We’ve got an elderly population here, so I think we got a lot of their vote,” says Mersch, a retired contractor. The new long-term care center will be four pods built in a home-like atmosphere. Three pods can each house 15 residents; a fourth pod will contain an administrative area, chapel, safe area, laundry and beauty salon. All the residential pods will open into a common area with a dining room, living room and kitchen.
Jeff First, who teaches the video production class at Goodland High School, got his students together via Zoom, where they laid out an informational project for the nursing home bond election. The proponents were then interviewed. The students then edited that video into bite-size segments that were posted on Facebook. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)
“It’s all good for the community,” Mersch says. “When we get the construction going, you’re going to have a lot of money coming in from construction workers that are living and eating here. It’s a win-win for Goodland. Nobody wants to increase taxes, but some taxes are good taxes. They are necessary taxes.” Schilling says it was essential for Goodland’s future that the bond passed. He is passionate about why the new facility is needed. “The people living here are the people who built Sherman County. We need to serve those who served us. You know the people who are up there (in the facility) are my 4-H leaders, our teachers, the people who pumped our gas and dumped our grain trucks, our bankers and lawyers. They are people from Sherman County.” But one of the things that sold him most on the new home was the home-style cooking. As people age, Schilling says, it’s not uncommon for people to lose their appetites and not eat like they used to. What appeals to him, he says, is
that the kitchens will be as close to having family cooking for residents as possible. “If people are eating, they are healthier. In the mornings when they start cooking, you will get the aroma of the eggs and bacon frying. We want to give everybody a high quality of life. I think this facility will really do that. “One thing about it, people are always going to continue to get older,” Schilling says. And, as people age, he says, they typically want one thing: “We want to die in our own house in our own bed with control of all of our bodily functions,” he says. “But not all of us are that fortunate. “So, if we can’t do that in our own house, we want to stay in our own county. This is where all of our friends are.”
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X, Y AND Z CATCHING UP
B Y: C H R I S G R E E N
A subtle generational shift taking shape in the Kansas Legislature
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put them in Generation Z, Reps. Aaron Coleman and Avery Anderson.
Born in 1969, Masterson is the first member of Generation X to serve as president of the Senate. Across the rotunda is House Speaker Ron Ryckman Jr., born in 1971, who in 2017 became the first Gen Xer to serve in that post.
Boomers, born from 1946 through 1964, still have the majority, accounting for 56% of the House and nearly 68% of the Senate. But that’s down from 59% and 83% in the previous session. That puts the Kansas Legislature more in line with Congress, where 53% of representatives and 68% of senators are baby boomers, according to the Pew Research Center.
hen the Kansas Senate elected Republican Ty Masterson to succeed Susan Wagle as Senate president earlier this year, it wasn’t just a passing of the political torch but a generational one too.
The baby boom generation still dominates the Legislature, and there are still more members of the silent generation, ages 76 and above, than Gen Z, whose oldest members are now 24. But younger generations made significant gains in the 2020 elections, according to birth year data analyzed by The Journal using the Pew Research Center’s generational classifications. The number of Gen X, millennial and Gen Z members increased by nearly 33% from 2020 to 2021 to now account for 61 of the Legislature’s 165 lawmakers. The gains were particularly noteworthy in the Senate, which added two millennials, Sens. Kristen O’Shea and Ethan Corson, and five Gen X members. The House added one Gen Xer, five millennials, and two members whose birth years
But the rate of change is still slow in Kansas. The median birth year for lawmakers jumped only slightly, from 1957 to 1959, and 40% of legislators will be age 65 or older this year even though that age group makes up only about 20% of the voting-age population. Those younger than 45 make up only about 21% of the Legislature despite being about 45% of the voting-age population. What Kansas faces isn’t much different from the nation as a whole, where many of the top authority figures, including President Joe Biden, are in their late 70s. But it raises questions about not only how the composition of the Legislature might affect the way it shapes public policy, but also about how well society has prepared those who will step in once the long-dominant baby boom generation finally steps aside.
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KANSAS SENATE 40 members
GENERATION Z (1997-2012)
MILLENNIALS (1981-1996)
GENERATION X BABY BOOMERS SILENT GENERATION (1965-1980) (1946-1964) (1928-1945)
KANSAS HOUSE 125 members
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‘WE’RE NOT THE VIRUS’ Violent acts prompt Kansans of Asian descent to speak out about providing a safe environment for all
W
hy, especially in times of crisis, do some groups of people become targets for being dehumanized? And what kind of leadership is necessary in response? In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans rose in some locales. After six women of Asian descent were killed in a series of shootings in Atlanta this spring, people across the country mobilized to make progress on stopping Asian hate. In Johnson County, home to about one-third of the state’s Asian population, a rally provided an opportunity for residents to speak out and remind their neighbors that they could do the same. About 200 people attended a March 27 rally in a grassy area near 119th and Grant Streets in Overland Park, where they chanted and held signs. Rally participant Kayla Reed told a local news station that she’s recently embraced her Asian American heritage and hopes such events will grow a movement around kindness and love. (Photo by Matthew Cunningham)
B Y: J E R R Y L A M A R T I N A
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HERE ARE THREE VOICES FROM THE GATHERING:
suffering. So, I would hope that they would come out personally and bring out the support.”
Peng Zhan, 35, moved to Kansas City, Missouri, from San Francisco about a year and a half ago. He immigrated to the U.S. in 2005 from a small town near Shanghai.
She says she has not been physically attacked. “But I definitely have had verbal attacks in school, when I go out for a walk and people are around me.”
He came to the rally “because we want to let people know that our Asian people, especially our Asian Americans, we’re not the virus. We’ve been living here for a long time. We, probably some of us, never have been back to our country for at least five to six years, like me. … I’m here to help a little bit, to spread the word out, to let people know what kind of situation we are facing today.”
This mostly occurred in middle school. But when COVID started, in high school there were definitely some racial phrases thrown around.” She had other Asian friends who experienced similar things.
He says he had not experienced any hateful words or actions, but a few weeks ago, his 75-year-old former vocal teacher in San Francisco, originally from China, said he and his friends could not go out alone at night. “They’re not afraid of the virus right now; they’re afraid of those attackers.” Lily Ren, 16, Overland Park, is a sophomore at Blue Valley North High School. Her T-shirt listed the names of the Atlanta shooting victims. “I’m here because I feel devastated by what happened in Atlanta, and I’m also here because I want that feeling of support and because I want to be able to speak out. Obviously, on social media I can speak out, but no one’s going to really listen. So, given the chance to come here and see people who are trying to understand … their position on privilege who are coming out to support us, it definitely is something that I’m wanting to see. “I hope leaders would put on their big boy pants and realize that they need to be careful of how they speak. And I would also hope that leaders would be supportive of these movements and be vocal about it. Because people who watch the news or read the newspaper who don’t necessarily support it, they don’t get the exposure because they only listen to the leader. They don’t listen to the people who are
During the summer, she saw on social media: “Thanks a lot for starting the virus.” “I had a friend who got a (direct message) from another kid who said ‘Thanks for, like, eating a bat’ and stuff like that. It was honestly heartbreaking and infuriating that that was still happening, especially that when you’re in high school, you’d think we’d be a little bit more responsible with our words.” A minority of her fellow students say hateful things in person, but not a minority on social media. Daniel Xue, in his 50s, lives in Overland Park. He was one of the rally’s organizers. He says many groups took part in organizing it, not just one group. He stood in the center of a circle of attendees and spoke with a microphone. “A lot of people still have their concerns, still have their worries, still have the (idea that) silence is good. Silence is the worst. We don’t want the silence to encourage all those crimes. … Until we can speak up, until we can work together, stand together, until we can make this happen together.” He told the crowd to “talk with your neighbors, talk with your friends, … let them know that we’re not the virus. … We live here. We work here. … You guys are the heroes. We want love. We don’t want hate.”
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Mapping a route to resilience and reconciliation BY: K E I T H TAT U M
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E D I T O R ’ S N O T E : T H I S C O M M E N TA R Y I S B E I N G P R O D U C E D A S A PA R T O F E L E VAT E 2 0 2 1 , W H I C H A I M S T O S H A R E T H E V O I C E S O F N E W W R I T E R S O N I M P O R TA N T C I V I C I S S U E S .
The aftershocks from the seismic events of 2020 continue to reverberate this year for Americans of all walks of life. Although we appear to be finally mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been less successful at bridging the divides that have emerged in the process.
our divides, not just for my benefit but for the good of my family and my community. Surely there were others seeking solutions to these same issues? Perhaps I could find contemporaries seeking to overcome these same grinding and debilitating social ills.
Like most Kansans, my family has been tested by the changing dynamics of remote public education, not celebrating holidays with loved ones and saying goodbye to people we lost to the pandemic. We wrestled with translating the protest images and actions we saw on television into dialogue our children and grandchildren could better understand. We experienced the pain of losing good friends simply because they chose to embrace a specific political perspective.
To be certain, times of great crisis are opportunities for great leadership. The guiding competencies of the Kansas Leadership Center include taking the temperature, speaking to loss, working across factions and inspiring a collective purpose. Utilizing these competencies as guideposts – in addition to such characteristics as resilience, compassion and the sustainability of hope – I began to reach out to leaders in my own community who are laboring to address these challenges. If I could locate and communicate with some of them, I might be able to use what I’d learned to impact my day-to-day world.
As a husband, father, grandfather, community leader and Kansan of color, I felt compelled to seek answers to these ongoing trials of bridging
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Making progress on both racial unrest and political division requires clear purposes amid uncertainty.
As a member of the Black community in Kansas, I was acutely affected by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and other Black Americans in 2020. Their pain was my pain, and my heart broke for them alongside the hearts of their friends and loved ones. Added to these societal tragedies was an election year that found Americans more politically polarized than perhaps ever before. The temperature on both issues became red-hot and remains so. To that end, I realized making progress on both the racial unrest and political division required clear purposes amid uncertainty. I decided to reach out to leaders on both sides of these challenges to understand the broader perspectives. I picked up the phone to contact Ron Gish, a retired lieutenant with the Topeka Police Department. I’d never met Gish but knew he was also a member of a local law enforcement advocacy group called Blue Shield and would likely be able to provide me with a police officer’s perspective. Gish says Blue Shield originally came together as a community group to protest the City Council’s ban on no-knock warrants. He says violent crime is up in Topeka and money is being distributed away from local police in a time when people just want to be protected. He’s frustrated with law enforcement being “turned into monsters” when police officers risk their lives every day. He encouraged residents to volunteer for programs that broaden an understanding of police procedures. “It’s unfair to use a broad brush to paint all of us,” he tells me. Ron also made no excuse for the killing of George Floyd
in Minnesota. “Topeka cops weren’t there, but we are often treated as if we were,” he replies. “There’s no one who wants to get rid of a bad cop more than a good cop.” There was an abundance of resilience in his statements. How then could I use this information to make informed decisions about how we engage one another to rebuild our community in 2021? The other person I called on this journey of discovery was Glenda DuBoise. Glenda is the executive director of the Topeka Center for Peace and Justice. Her organization’s role is to build community and build relationships. “Systemic racism is real,” says Glenda, “but we need to look for productive ways to address, heal, and unite these issues in our community.” Her goal is to bring people together in peace, often through prayer. DuBoise touted her organization’s role in successfully engaging the Police Department in constructive dialogue. She says residents should acknowledge the experiences of loss and then look at ways to support their community in moving forward. I took this as sage advice containing both hope and compassion, since there may be no other viable method to cool the temperature and restore our sense of community. Putting what I’ve discovered from Ron Gish and Glenda DuBoise into a meaningful whole is complex and daunting, but necessary and vital for our community to flourish. Even as my investigation concludes, my quest continues. The task now shifts to synthesizing viable answers
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from the ideas I’ve learned. How do I as an ordinary citizen continue to make sense of pervasive issues moving forward? I will close with my own takeaways from this productive journey, hopeful that readers will also share in these insights. SETTING ASIDE MY BIASES
We all have them. Glenda states the importance of building relationships, and mitigating my biases is a crucial piece of it. The challenge for me now is to know my triggers and be intentional about working around them. For example, keeping an open mind when someone talks to me about cancel culture. Even on emotional issues, I’ve learned to make it a priority to give others the benefit of the doubt. SEEKING TO UNDERSTAND
Glenda discusses the importance of acknowledging loss. This cannot be accomplished without first seeking to understand. Thankfully, my family has been spared the ravages of COVID-19, but that also means we have a responsibility to recognize the experiences of those less fortunate. This is true especially of those holding a different perspective than mine. I am strengthening this virtue by trying to find points of commonality, practicing empathy and being willing to listen to opposing views to recognize shared values.
MAKING MYSELF AVAILABLE
Ron encourages volunteering for things outside of one’s routine. Though sometimes uncomfortable, that means reaching outside my own sphere of influence to invest in others. For example, I recently helped lead a winter clothing drive through a local nonprofit benefiting residents in need. By becoming available, I’m in a better position for continuing to volunteer for local organizations promoting unity and common ground, or for sending care packages to those hit hardest by COVID-19.
TAKING CARE OF MYSELF
Lastly, amid these trying times, I need to prioritize staying healthy, both physically and emotionally. That means exercising regularly, eating well, maintaining hydration, getting plenty of sleep and staying connected with friends and loved ones. These activities promote resilience, and resilience is key in sustaining long-term change for me, my family and the community around me.
“Systemic racism is real, but we need to look for productive ways to address, heal, and unite these issues in our community.” GLENDA DUBOISE Executive Director, Topeka Center for Peace and Justice
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THE BACK PAGE
Good grief By: MARK MCCORMICK
My friend, the Rev. Junius Dotson, hoped he would have more time to produce a series of inspirational columns that we – I was his editor – could string into a book. He thought his cancer diagnosis might cause people to drop their guards just enough to hear his message of grace and salvation. There would be grief related to his grim prognosis, but he saw transformative opportunity in that grief. He saw the sun and the Son in all things bleak. “God is still good and can be trusted,” he said in one of his last communications with me. Culminating in 2020, Junius spent months at a New York negotiating table where the United Methodist Church denomination ultimately split. As general secretary, he lobbied along with others, on behalf of an international network of children in schools, orphanages and hospitals dependent on church funding. Through heated internal debates that spilled into public view via the news media, Junius held out hope for fleeing denominational leaders to see the person behind the color, the souls behind LGBTQ labels, and the church’s future beyond immediate disagreements. He spoke often of how painful it had become watching people plead for their humanity. But he walked calmly through the tumult comforting and helping. He heard whispers falsely accusing him of seeking higher church office when he wanted nothing more than a trustworthy process, and the resources for vulnerable people to find security, sanctuary and acceptance. Negativity only deepened his resolve. He made longrange plans to hasten the crucial reckoning American Christians have with their tolerance of and complicity with all forms of discrimination. But searing back and side pain drove him into the emergency room on New Year’s Eve and in this
age of unthinkable pain and loss that was precisely the kind of news he received: late-stage pancreatic cancer, perhaps the most unforgiving form of the disease. When he called to break the news to me one Saturday afternoon, I heard an unfamiliar tremor in his voice. He rambled some and then read a column he’d begun writing to comfort everyone who loved him. He didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. He spoke boldly of his faith and his intention to fight. This moment, he said, was golden. The only time we truly hold people’s attention on life’s stage is as our spotlight begins to dim. His illness offered a microphone through which people might hear the urgency and righteousness of his message. But the rampaging cancer ravaged his liver before he could even begin chemotherapy. He died the very day I learned he’d been sent home for end-of-life care. My final images of him came through loved ones who said when his pain eased, Junius would try to write. He urged despondent friends and family to listen to music. He put others at ease through laughter. People should live the way this man died. To Junius, “good grief” wasn’t a bitter interjection, but a declaration of a way we live to give our faith depth and resilience. A barometer for love and for grace.
Mark McCormick previously served as editor of The Journal.
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