The highest vote-getter in this year’s school board election this year had served on the board from July 2016 to June 2025. The second-highest represents a demographic that has historically been vastly underrepresented. The false equivalency is that there have been women of color on the board or that there have been women in board leadership roles. There has historically been women on the school board for many years. There have been many women who have served in board leadership roles – president and vice president. Women of color have only been elected to the board in recent years. In recent years, those who served did not serve a full term.

Systemic inequality (systemic bias is the same thing) is when people of color don't reach board leadership because of all the barriers in society that make serving without remuneration and winning local elections difficult in the first place. The barriers that make it challenging for historically marginalized communities to even reach the board table can't be blamed on a small handful of people. Every year young people, people in poverty, people of color or people who speak English as a second language don’t run in the same numbers as white people. The result: The same people who have always won always win and will always be making the decisions. It's labeled “systemic" because it's a totality of everything embedded in the system that creates deficits in things such as leadership roles.

To make a small deviation, I want to touch on something interesting I learned about systemic inequality recently. Like most sectors, in education the CEOs of school districts (superintendents) have historically been vastly underrepresented by women compared to men. When you look at the roles that make the greatest impact in a school district (the teachers, obviously) this flips entirely. There are far greater female teachers than male teachers and there always have been. You can say that women have been historically marginalized in leadership roles of all kinds, but if you consider teaching to be among the most consequential leadership roles, as I do, you might feel a small drop of hope in the large bucket of history. When you look at other examples of disparities among genders, you get things like men disproportionately die in coal mines and penal colonies and are disproportionately drafted in war.

Back to the school board. Across time, historically there were far greater years in which only white men served. While the modern Kingston City School District’s foundation dates back to around 1915 – marked by the consolidation of the Uptown Kingston Academy and the downtown Rondout Ulster Academy into Kingston High School – comprehensive demographic rosters of the early board members have not been digitized. To be blunt about it, the first person of color or the first female to be elected to the KCSD wasn't even celebrated enough to be easily searched. It was maybe mentioned once in printed media at the time, only to be forgotten about. In contrast, Helen Reed de Laporte was elected on Aug. 9, 1900 to serve on the Rhinebeck school board in Dutchess County. Leonard Van Dyke became Kingston's first Black alderman in 1965. Numerous digital historical records detailing those milestones exist. But since we can only get 10 percent of KCSD residents to show up and cast a ballot for the school budget/school board elections, we get closer to illustrating where to place the blame. I'll get there.

Let's explore some solutions first. The obvious one would have been for the newly elected school board president to recognize that white males have historically had all the power, reject the nomination and nominate the newly elected black woman who is far more than qualified as she was once majority leader of the Common Council. Obvious to me, anyway.

A serial consensus is strictly illegal and inconsistent with the state Open Meetings Law. A serial consensus, or walking quorum, occurs when members of a public board use a series of direct messages, phone calls or intermediaries to discuss official business and build a majority agreement outside a noticed public meeting. An odd quirk of the school board is that votes for leadership positions don't count. Nothing about that vote was impromptu. Except perhaps the long winded monologue prior to the vote attempting to influence the predetermined outcome. While the public has an absolute right to witness how decisions are made, I'm told it's totally fine to make that one in the shadows. That could have been a solution but is now a missed opportunity.

Other solutions include civil service reform. Pretty much every single position in the school district is a civil service position. If the civil service system wasn't full of implicit and systemic bias, there would be more teachers and principals of color who retire and be in a position to run for the school board. Historically, those who gain the endorsement of the teachers’ union always win the school board elections and members of the teachers’ union always get the endorsement. I don't recommend holding your breath for any of that to change.

It's absolutely absurd to blame systemic inequality on eight people. Truthfully, it's all of our fault because it's dug into every aspect of our society. Remember how many people sat out of this past election – 90 percent.

On a final note, let me switch gears with a different example. The City of Kingston is reviewing and possibly revising its charter. When they pick a dozen or so people from those who threw their name in the hat, whose fault will it be if there aren't any Asians? None of Muslim faith? None who have faced or are currently facing extended periods of housing insecurity? In the spring of 2024, I noticed that the school board meetings were mostly empty. I rightly predicted that elderly white people would be the only ones to step forward to serve. I decided that as a young, Hispanic person with the same developmental disabilities many students in the district experience, I could be part of the problem or part of the solution.

The only way we’ll overcome systemic inequality is if everyone constantly evaluates, from an equity lens, when to step up and when to step back.