In That Number

Rashida’s Story

I was raised by an educator - my mother was a teacher, school counselor, and principal, and she founded two charter schools at the end of her career. My mom inspired me to be in this work. I fought it. I started out as a communications major and I didn’t really enjoy it. Then I realized the impact that I was really trying to make was with children. I was wanting to make a different kind of content than what I was seeing because I felt like media was influencing children in negative ways - particularly African American children. So I ended up becoming an Elementary Ed major because I felt that I could create curricula and teach young people content that could be elevating and uplifting.

My name is Rashida Govan and I am the Founder and Executive Director of Project Butterfly New Orleans and the Executive Director of the New Orleans Youth Alliance. I grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, which is kind of a small city of about 50,000 people and fifteen square miles, so we were all jammed in there pretty tightly. I always loved New Orleans, though. My first visit was when I was in middle school. I was in band and we came to do a musical. We toured the schools here, which was my first experience of seeing disparities at the level that I saw because in my city there was only one high school and two middle schools – everything was pretty much the same. But to come to New Orleans and be at a school where the water wasn't working properly or another school that was “flossy,” as we would say at home, was interesting to me. But regardless, the young people were dope - very kind, very warm. So later on in my adult life I visited New Orleans like probably every year for years before I moved here. I had already loved the city from that angle but really wanted to be in a space where I could be a responsible scholar.

I was in Baltimore for 15 years before I came here and I've been here for 11 years. Back then I was looking at doctoral programs when I called a colleague who lives here as a professor. I said, “I'm looking for schools, where do you think I should go?” In the back of my mind, I was hoping he was gonna say New Orleans because that's where he was and he said, “You should come here. If you want your research to impact your community, I have an opportunity for you here.” So that's what I did. I came.

I have all my degrees in education, all three of them, and what is heartbreaking for me is that spaces like schools, that are supposed to be in theory safe spaces for children, are actually sometimes the most harmful spaces for kids. I recognize that young people are having really oppressive experiences in institutions like schools and are hindered by the structures of those institutions. Even if you're not enacting physical violence, which in some cases we are, the type of violence you do to a person's mind can be everlasting. In a worst-case scenario young people walk out with an internalized, anti-blackness, anti-immigrant kind of sentiment and a sense of self-hatred. I also see that worst-case scenario, young people leave without the abilities to substantiate their ideas or to develop concepts. They basically are focused on rote memorization and just getting through; education is not supposed to be about just “making it through.” It's supposed to be something that's exciting and engaging, and a light that can spark ideas and creativity. Worst-case scenario, none of that is happening, or even worse than that, it’s a pathway to prison. But I’ve found that I could do some really liberatory and innovative stuff outside of that space and I can do that in very intentional ways and impact how other adults who are working with young people interact with them.

All things being equitable, education, to me, is the seed of empowerment. If you get the type of educational experience that arms you with the skills and the critical social analysis to navigate the world and to enact change on your own behalf, then it can be liberatory. But that requires us to think a little bit differently about the school setting to really be clear about the history of schools and how we got here in the first place, and what it is actually designed to do. If education were designed in a way that had liberation at its core, and with the thought that children will be cared for, will be nurtured, then they would have a platform for them to cultivate their ideas in really tangible and meaningful ways so that they can create the life that they want. And that's what education ideally should be doing.

The impact of trauma surfaces in so many ways in the way that children engage with school. It could show up as oppositional behavior in instances when it's not appropriate. As in, somebody might be there to support you and yet, you're resisting the support. Mainly, I think it’s because of a lack of trust in adults, because oftentimes trauma is rooted in the failure of adults. Other ways, it shows up are in really low self-esteem, behaviors where they're harming themselves. Trauma also surfaces as an inability to focus. It can surface as young people being easily triggered, very angry, depressed, anxious, and I think children sometimes operate in a perpetual state of fear. Even though they will not articulate that fear, that usually comes across articulated as “toughness,” which is really just their survival mechanism.

I remember one year I worked with a school, where there was a young person who caught a bus home and when she got off the bus she was abducted and raped in an abandoned home. I learned about it from one of the administrators, and I remember them having provided her with some counseling, but there was no other kind of conversation as a community about these being some of the things that our young people are dealing with and this is how we, as professionals, outside of counseling, should be responding and thinking about it. A year later three young people from a lower school that was connected to the school were murdered and they were found in an abandoned building in their school uniforms. That trauma, it’s a collective trauma. The entire school was traumatized, even if they knew these young people or not. So I was asked to come back, and they were doing this morning meeting where they were talking to the kids. They asked us to do a check-in and find out who the kids were that were really struggling and to let the counselor know so they could respond. The kids kind of shared their issues then they went off to class, and when I walked upstairs I saw a teacher yelling at a girl and kick her out of class. I saw who the person was; it was the young person who was kidnapped and raped the year before. I went up to her and I was like, “Just come with me.” I didn't even know this young lady. I was just like, “Just come with me. Let's talk. Don't worry about that. This is not as important. You okay? You want to talk?” She didn’t disclose what happened to her before, but she was telling me what she was thinking about and how it was making her feel, and I knew that it was triggering. So I talked her through it and I was really disgusted by the instructor’s response. Like, “Yo, we just sat downstairs for 40 minutes, because we recognize that this was something that was triggering and traumatic for children. A young person came in and had a very mild interaction with you that you didn't like, and you threw her out of a classroom? It didn’t register for you, for even a moment, that she might be reacting to this experience?” I feel like his belief about her “misbehavior” was that she was just being disrespectful, and that comes from anti-blackness, in my opinion. It's an internalized belief that black girls have attitudes and not that black girls have feelings, or that black girls are human and have experiences that require us to show them love and appreciation and to provide them with protection. When really, what young people have experienced is significant trauma, and the assumption that that girl was just “disrespectful,” it really pissed me off. And I think that a lot of our response to children comes from our own trauma and we internalize this idea that we have to respond to children this way, and really harshly to black children. Because we don't do that for white folks and white kids do all kinds of stuff.

Young people, in particular, as well as adults, need access to mental health professionals, and where else are they going to get that? We don't have the bandwidth in terms of the community of professionals to actually meet the full needs of everybody in the city. There are institutions where we can provide that, and school is where kids spend most of their time, in many cases, so absolutely, there should be mental health professionals in that space. At the same time, it’s not just on those professionals to respond to the needs of children. Our culture and our schools and our climate need to be restorative and supportive and loving. And if we're not using any of that language and coming from that end goal, then I think we're probably gonna do harm to kids.

I'm an educator, so I also know it can be difficult in the moment for you to latch on to the “best practice,” but if we come into our spaces with compassion and love, it is a very basic principle. If we come into the space, with compassion and love and believe in the best of our children, our response will reflect that. And believing in the best of our children doesn't mean showing tough love; our kids get enough of that. Instead, it means to actually show compassion. For example, if a young person was being defiant or disrespectful or rude, mean, whatever, my response might be in the moment, like, I have to take a minute because I don't want to show up in the same way. I'm supposed to be an adult, right? My response would then be to say, “You know what, I didn't expect this from you. This is not like you. Is there something you need? What's going on? How can I support you in this moment? Because this is not going to work for any of us and I know that this is not what you want.” Sometimes stuff is super extreme and you might need to have additional support, like mental health support from therapists or social workers, or what have you. But generally speaking, things don't rise to that level if you have a rapport with them and if they already know you're invested in them and love them, if you know your kids. And if you operate from compassionate love before you operate from discipline and structures, then you will have an in to your kids to actually figure out what's going on. There are some teachers that don't like them and with Project Butterfly, when we do training we say you gotta kind of do your work. I hate that phrase but you gotta do your personal work before you walk in a room with kids because young people, particularly young people who reflect you, are going to trigger stuff in you. And when you see a young person with unresolved stuff they’re representing, you’ll respond to them as you would when you were a child.

The thing that's really crazy about trauma-informed work is that it didn't have a name when I was growing up. It was part of being a teacher that you understood that young people walk in the room with stuff and we walk into the room with stuff and it's our responsibility to create a space where we can be healing for everyone. I'm really pushing for folks to get into healing justice because healing justice is about everybody building everybody's capacity to transform, dismantle systems that oppress, and create new systems. It calls for us to use culture and service to build up our capacity and help us see things through that lens, which I think is important because we rarely examine the problems through the lens of somebody else who doesn't have our experience or shared values. But healing justice says, “We recognize that these institutions themselves are the problem and that we have the capacity as a community collectively to do this work to make it better.” If educators were thinking and learning how to be that, healing justice practitioners, or as we call them, Soul Rebels, in the classroom, education would look a lot different. Where educators, in particular, can go to begin to think about this is to the elders in this community and to the young people. If you want to know and understand how to be responsive and thoughtful about the needs of young people, talk to young people with respect and treat them with dignity. Talk to elders. Then there's also tons of trauma-informed trainings around the city. Tulane has a program, I know IWES does tons of this work. We do tons of work at the New Orleans Youth Alliance. There’s a ton of places. There is actually no excuse not to know at this point.

At the end of the day, New Orleans public schools need more New Orleans. I'm not a New Orleans native, so I recognize what that means when I'm at a table and I'm in a room. And it's a struggle because I am a part of this community and I feel like this community has shaped me in very significant ways as a professional and personally. Regardless, I'm a Jersey girl, period. This city needs more of its natives involved in the public school system and leadership in the design, decision-making implementation and evaluation components of the work, point-blank period. That ability to relate to young people, I think everybody has to do the work to figure it out. I think there is this thing that happens in public schools where there's this underlying belief that folks from New Orleans can't lead. That folks from New Orleans aren’t smart enough to be changemakers. That folks from New Orleans can't educate their own children and these external people, or transplants, usually white folks, have the answers. But people who are from here know what young people need and require to thrive here. Finally, love and compassion have to be at the heart of this work along with a desire for young people to thrive in whatever way thriving means to them and their family. There has to be a respect for what people want for themselves and love, compassion, and belief in their ability to get there. I think we need actual educators, people who are committed to the field of education, not drive-bys, who are gonna be here for two seconds and leave. Not folks that are not fully committed. And ultimately they need to be paid more because it's hard to keep people in spaces if they can't pay their bills.