Season 5 - Election Season, a recap and where and how do we hold humanity of others in the midst of polarization

 

 

Contributors are listed here: Danielle S. Castillejo (Rueb), Cyon Edgerton, Rachael Reese, Chasity Malatesta, Debby Haase, Kim Frasier, Briana Cardenas, Holly Christy, Clare Menard, Marjorie Long, Cristi McCorkle, Terri Schumaker, Diana Frazier, Eliza Cortes Bast, Tracy Johnson, Sarah Van Gelder, Marwan, and more

 

Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. You'll notice there's going to be some updated changes and different voices on the podcast this season. It's season five. It's October 1st, 2024. I haven't recorded a podcast since June of 2023, and at that time, if you've been following along in my town in Kitsap County, we were working through what would prove to be an extensive and prove to be an extensive fight for justice in our school district. And at this time, we have made some very significant shifts. I want to get into this episode to kind of catch you up on where I'm at, where the podcast is at, and hopefully as you listen to myself and some different voices on these upcoming podcasts, you understand that we have this fundamental common theme amongst us, which is our humanity. And when we drop down into that humanity, because our work, our lives, our families, there's all these poles and all these different ways for us to separate ourselves from our humanness and be busy or accomplish this or accomplish that.

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And I know because I'm in there too, we actually separate ourselves from our neighbor. And so I'm hoping as we engage tough topics of politics and we get into the sticky points of it, that there's a sense that, yeah, I don't agree with that person or I agree with that person, but there is a sense that there is shared humanity. And so as we talk about these different subjects, I wanted to emphasize that first, an article was released in the fall last year saying in September of 2023 saying that there was, the school district's investigation had concluded and they had deemed that there was no racism in the North Kitsap School district. As you can imagine, a report like that on the front page of the paper, after all we'd been through after sitting through numerous hours of meetings listening to families and their experiences was disheartening.

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We came to find out that some of the families felt or experienced what they deemed to be threatening tones from the investigators or understood that they could possibly be under penalty of perjury depending on what they answered. And I'm not saying that this was always the case, but the threat was on the table. And when you're dealing with working with majority world peoples who are marginalized in the United States, that threat can be very real. And the impact of it is very great. So I began to understand that this investigation wasn't actually looking for the truth and how to solve the problem. It was actually looking for a way of complete and utter defense against what these families had reported their students had experienced. It's a very different thing. And I think there were rumors like were these families going to sue the district, bring a lawsuit to the district?

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And we've seen in neighboring school districts, just in recent times, lawsuits have been filed for much less. I mean, we had 90 original complaints. We have more people that had come forward as time had moved on. And yet there was never a move to actually file a lawsuit. We didn't file a lawsuit. We continued to move forward with our lives and think about our students. I think at some point in last fall of 2023, there was just a sense of deep despair like we put in years of effort. And the result was this report that basically attempted to delegitimize all the stories of all these families. It was horrible and heartbreaking and followed the fall. And in the late winter there was going to be a vote for this school bond. And as the yes for the bond campaign rolled out, led by a committee of yes folks, which included some Paul's Bowl rotary members and then the superintendent, it became clear to different community members that there were a lot of questions still to be asked, a lot of information we wanted to have and a lot of things that just felt like they were missing.

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I'm not saying they were all missing, but there were pieces and details that appeared to be missing. And when we asked the questions similar to what happened with the complaints, we didn't get answers. The answers were couched in long paragraphs or explanations, and the architects seemed like they didn't have access to the buildings. Again, we didn't know all the details of what happened. And this is just a general recap. You can look at the ensuing political drama online. If you Google superintendent signs and polls Bowl, Washington, P-O-U-L-S-B-O Washington, you will find articles on NBC to Fox News to video clips, all of the