In That Number

Krystal’s story

Growing up in Selma, Alabama was a very unique experience. I tell people that being from Selma is a salient part of my identity and how I show up in spaces because I feel that the convictions, the beliefs, the hopes, the dreams, and the potential in that space literally run through my veins. In a lot of ways, I am who I am because I was born in that space to the community and the people that are there and all the history that is there.

My name is Krystal Hardy Allen and I’m the Founder & CEO of K. Allen Consulting. In a lot of ways, the educational experience I had from kindergarten to the 10th grade gave me a firsthand experience as to what inequities and disparities look like, yet also, what promising wealth lies within the exact same context. In the 11th and 12th grade I had the opportunity to apply and be admitted to a very highly selective, rigorous college preparatory boarding school that was a public institution in Alabama. That experience changed my entire educational trajectory. It was the first time I was in a racially diverse setting in my state. There were students that are Pakistani, Latino, Black, white, everything, living together in a very segregated, racially tense, state. And every teacher there was a college professor, so you had to have a Doctorate to teach there or Master’s with so many years of collegiate teaching experience. I graduated from that institution and was afforded the opportunity to go to the University of Notre Dame and my peers had access to universities like, the Ivy Leagues, and then the Emorys and Spelmans, you name it. That said, I experienced two wildly different spectrums of what education was like in the exact same state. Because in one school some of my textbooks - and this is in the early 90s - were the same textbooks used in the 70s. I opened them and could see people's names and when they used the book! There were water fountains in the same high school that my parents used. Then I got into a space where I'm taking marine biology, on a small boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, capturing squid to take back to a classroom to dissect. So in a lot of ways, I developed both an appreciation and a righteous feeling of anger about the fact that I had to leave and live three and a half hours away from home at the age of 16 to have access to that. And my peers that I grew up with, they were on completely different life paths, not because they're not capable or able or amazing and brilliant, but because they didn't have access to the same resources and opportunities. That fueled my commitment to fight educational inequities.

I originally came to Baton Rouge and taught in the Jackson-Clinton area. That later translated to me moving from teaching to instructional coaching here in New Orleans, which led to principalship which then evolved into educational consulting, which is what I'm doing now. And that was an intentional choice to say, “What are all the most beautiful experiences that I've had as an educator and what are the ugliest ones I've had, particularly as a black woman in public education?” I began thinking about ways in which I could support and equip educators who looked like me - and even ones who didn’t - with the skills, knowledge, and tools to create transformational spaces for kids but also not lose ourselves in the work or feel that we have to assimilate and die inwardly, in order to be transformational.

There are different types and levels of trauma, racial trauma being one of them, and our babies are experiencing trauma from so many different angles. I think about what happens internal to school spaces, and I think about what happens external to that, too. Externally, depending on where a child lives, who they're living with, and what experiences they're exposed to, they can be on the receiving end of lots of different traumatic experiences. Sometimes it’s community violence or gun violence they've been a witness to, or because of the high volume, they've even become numb to it at an early age and desensitized to the value of human life. Sometimes it’s on the receiving end of a parent or grandparent or family member not necessarily providing the love, the care, the time, the attention, or the emotional support that are needed to affirm how they feel or affirm the types of messages that they need to hear to develop a very positive sense of self-identity. I think about those things, on top of the fact that there are a lot of socio-cultural and political things that are happening in this landscape, that our kids watch on TV. And because we are in a day and age in which social media is widely accessible - our children have Snapchat accounts, they have Facebook accounts, Instagram, etc. – they’re being exposed to a lot of information and they're seeing a lot of things unfiltered. Then I think about the internal experience to schools by the way in which our children are talked to and the way in which they are addressed. Children who often, in a very unspoken way, are asking for help. I think about the amount of times in which children may be misdiagnosed, where they may be displaying a behavior or action and we're not necessarily asking the question, “What is the actual root cause and how are we creating solutions that address what this particular child actually needs underneath the behavior that we see manifested?” I also think about the bullying that can happen in the school context and outside of the school context.

For all of these reasons, I think about the relationship between the environment and children's psyches. Facilities matter. Having worked within a school facility that had limited windows and a lack of grass for children to even play on, I think about what it means to be in a prison-like building for eight hours straight, asked to carry a heavy cognitive lift on doing academic tasks, but not given enough time to play, to exercise, to just be a kid, you know. I think of a lot of ways that children in our city are facing a lot of different traumatic experiences and are not necessarily given the space to voice them. Even if they don't have the technical language to describe what it is that they're feeling, it’s important to create space for them to just talk, to name their concerns, name the things that are stressing them out, and dream.

I can think of a young lady who really manifested a lot of intense, aggressive behaviors, in particular in moments in which she might not have gotten the outcome that she wanted from adults or from a peer. She would scream. She would yell. She would kick. She would run. As a school community, myself included, we gave so much attention to this young lady around those moments in which we saw salient manifestations of these behaviors, and in a lot of ways, when she didn't necessarily manifest those behaviors, the follow-up and follow-through of maintaining support dropped. We operated in a very reactive way to support this young lady instead of a proactive way. That is also sending a message to a child that will think, “I got so much attention doing that. To get that wrap-around some more, if I manifest this behavior that's going to get the desired outcome.” Instead, we should have been saying what are the short- and long- term experiences that she will need, and we should have asked her, “Who do you want to be a year from now?” We should have given her an opportunity for her voice to enter into the process.

I reflect a lot about best practices that I've enacted as a teacher and as a school leader, but I also think a lot about missteps and failures and errors on my part, as a teacher and as a school leader. If you're honest and transparent with yourself, and you lean into learning and growing, you can transform and you can either prevent that for other folks or help people navigate those same waters. When I think about that scenario, I think a lot about how folks as educators and even parents and community members can be proactive and show up on the front end for our young people instead of being on the back end and being reactive, even with our policies. How are we fueling dollars and programs and putting supports in place to prevent things from happening?

Educational systems have a lot of power, in being able to help children see who they truly are and who they can be. In a lot of ways, it shapes their schema of possibility. Conversely to that, when we're not intentional or when systems are not intentional, education systems have the potential to do the exact opposite. Sometimes they narrow and eliminate the focus and the vision of what children can be, what they can aspire to accomplish, and in a lot of ways, crush the very essence of hope and optimism within them. Systems have the ability to foster liberatory thinking, particularly for black and brown children and other marginalized groups, because they can learn and discover ways of thinking, ways of resistance, ways in which communities - that our elders and ancestors who have come before us knew - have made sense out of. They have thought through community uplift and principles that foster the liberation of our entire community; not just in terms of financial freedom, but in the audacity to say to ourselves that no matter what we face, and no matter what we go through, we will overcome. When systems are not intentional, they do the opposite in terms of fostering a means of thinking where children believe that their story begins with slavery, an image in which we’re the victim and not the victors. In which we passively experienced the oppression that we've had to experience face-to-face, without telling the story of the ways in which we have rejected that and fought and been resilient and have persevered. Educational systems have the ability to equip kids with technical knowledge, and also more qualitative and transformational knowledge to be whomever they want to be. Conversely, when we're not creating high-quality educational environments, we cripple children's ability to live into who they actually want to be.

The things I've shared so far really speak to the children's experience of it and that is who we should be putting first in the conversation. Yet other folks experience our educational system; parents experience it, educators themselves experience it, and other stakeholders to education as well. I think a lot about preparation of teachers and preparation of educators, in general, even if they’re principals, even if their school social workers. The way in which we train and develop our practitioners matters. It's going to be harder for me as an educator to decipher and identify any issue if I don't have the lens to even know what the issue is and what the symptom and/or manifestation of it could look like. There’s room and space for our educators to be trained on not only what trauma-informed practices are, but also the why and the how. What are the different types of trauma? What does it look like? And really, it helps adults navigate through their own traumatic experience because it's going to be hard for me to lead you to a place that I also haven't navigated. We need to create spaces for adults as practitioners to process their own experiences and how those experiences show up in the way they speak, the decisions they make, how they designed their classroom, and the rules and expectations they set for kids. We can provide space for a certain degree of healing for those adults. That coupled with giving them the technical tools and the language and strategies and methods to really operate in a more trauma-informed way is important because you have to balance the work of the head and the heart. You really are compelling a different way of thinking. You're shifting beliefs and you're shifting convictions, along with giving them actual tools. There's a delicate balance there that comes through a series of professional development and under adult learning opportunities.

Another avenue to plug into is the wisdom, strength and collective knowledge of our communities. Our communities are rich with so many assets that we don't exhaust to leverage in schools and systems. Often when the word assets is used, the train of thinking is financial; it can be towards funding and development. Yet there's so much that local churches, nonprofits, elders, and communities can provide. The list goes on of people and stakeholders who have so many gifts to give to our children to help create this holistic, vibrant community that our children not only need, but they deserve. A lot of the work on systems and schools is also creating much more intentional and strategic and deep community partnerships, because a lot of the partnerships we have are very transactional, very one and done.

Ultimately, what happens when we give our children the mic and we give our children an opportunity for the screen? What types of stories would they tell? If we do that for our parents, what are they going to say? When we bring that together, it elevates our sense of awareness of what trauma actually looks like so that there's not an archetype for a traumatic experience. Rather, we can recognize all the micro and the macro ways in which it happens every single day. That type of opportunity just makes all of us far more conscious and far more reflective around things we've experienced in our own lifetime, but also ways in which we unintentionally perpetuate the very same things that we profess to and are convicted to fight. Aside from that, there's an opportunity for policy to be shaped and crafted differently so that this type of professional development for educators and opportunities to increase parental voice and increase community input can be institutionalized. Because when it’s not, there's not necessarily the incentive for systems to make it a priority, because it's not a part of an evaluation. And if it's not being evaluated, and if there are not explicit asks and requirements, or, for some folks, dollars connected to it, people have a tendency to not either do it or not follow through on it. How do we make it just standard practice?

I think about being from Selma, and I think about civil rights history being a mandatory course that you're taking. I grew up knowing the names of giants so I didn't walk in my own city and not know the story of the soil that I was stepping on. So how do we say this is our city? This is New Orleans. What makes us New Orleans? How do we institutionalize that knowledge in schools? If we have high traumatic experiences that our students are exposed to, how do we make sure that every educator in this system understands how to meet our babies where they are? There's something to be said about constantly asking questions. Where are we now? What's our community facing? How do we as a school system adapt to where we are in this moment? Because there's just not a permanent answer to that question. Fifteen years from now, it may be different.