A Community Leader Steps Up
Outside of the classroom and his day job, which keeps him plenty busy, during these chaotic times of COVID-19 and forest fire haze, Richardson, 38, has remained engaged in several community projects and organizations, including sitting on the board of the Reno Arts and Culture Commission, hosting the Up in the Mix podcast and a radio show of the same name on KWNK on Friday nights and also helping with The Holland Project, a youth-centered organization with a music space, an art gallery and a workshop area.
“I've been on the board for [The Holland Project] for over five years and I personally do a fundraising Art Show every year with local artists focused on hip-hop and lyricism. [The Holland Project] is really focused on civic engagement, art, and just getting youth more involved in society and that's one of our main goals,” Richardson said.
“We've done workshops in the past based on sexual harassment, voting and civic engagement and through that we work with several other organizations and that's been one of the ways I tried to connect people who were trying to make a difference in the community.”
Connections made through his time with The Holland Project and other organizations at times puts him at the forefront of community activism. Earlier this summer, Richardson was asked to speak at a vigil held in Reno supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Although he is not directly or officially associated with Black Lives Matter, Richardson views it as his duty to make Reno a better community to live in for everybody.
“Through those organizations and the people I know, I try and network with people who want to make a difference,” Richardson said. “Whether that's by getting police reform or whatever it is, I’m just trying to connect like-minded people into situations where they can make a difference or getting them in touch with someone who can, because I might not necessarily be that person but I do know others who are.”
Richardson was, however, a part of a group that met with City Councilman Oscar Delgado to put police reform issues on the agenda.
“I was a part of a group that pushed for some specific changes with the Reno Police Department and their use of force policies,” Richardson said. “We met with councilman Oscar Delgado to try and get some of the reforms on the agenda and highlight some of the disparities and shortcomings in the Reno Police Department, specifically, and they did change some of their policies.”
Their discussions included the GUINN Report, which was a study on community policing conducted by the Washoe County Sheriff’s office, Reno PD, Sparks PD, Councilman Delgado and Dr. Angie Taylor several years ago, full of recommendations.
“I don't know that lasting change has been made because I don't think they have metrics or any way to measure what changes have been done,” Richardson said. “The lack of transparency and data to show that they're doing what they say they're doing is what's lacking and missing. Until that is provided or they can come up with these metrics, I don't really think you can [say progress has been made].”
“In addressing the discrepancies within the Reno Police Department, they need to better their hiring practices because there was a culture of intimidation found there and there's a higher attrition rate with officers of color,” Richardson said of changes that need to be made. Photo with permission to use courtesy of Cesar Lopez.
Progress Needed On Many Fronts in Reno
Richardson sees links between changing our policing but also how local schools operate.
“That's one of the things I would like to see for the school district, too. There's a petition that was started by students for a change in the English curriculum to feature more authors of color. This is a minority-majority school district and they need to take steps to address some of these cultural biases in their curriculum because they don't feature people of color or authors of color.”
An additional change Richardson would like to see is more hiring of diverse teachers, as students are proven to succeed better in the classroom with a teacher they can relate to.
“There needs to be a plan to get more teachers in the education system who are people of color because studies have shown that [minority] students do better when they have a teacher of color,” Richardson said. “There needs to be more done with diversity and inclusion training and implicit-bias training for all of our institutions. We need more diversity and more representation, whether it's on the school board, the city council, or our police. That's something that as Reno grows, they're going to have to look at and address.”
The About page of the podcast he runs with Cesar Lopez has this bio: “Shaughn Richardson, aka The Truth, is a teacher, coach, poet and musician along with co-hosting Up In The Mix. The Bay Area Native has lived in the Reno/Sparks area for over 20 years, where he attended the University of Nevada Reno and earned a degree in Psychology and Philosophy. After working a corporate desk job that killed his soul for a couple years, he eventually returned to the University of Nevada to earn a Master's degree in Education. He now teaches middle school Social Studies, coaches basketball and volleyball, and raps in the local Hip Hop band 7-Out. “
Surviving a Chaotic School Year
As a school teacher in the age of COVID, Shaughn Richardson has had to regularly adapt to various learning-style approaches for his students.
“You can't prepare for what you don't know, so I think [the Washoe County School District] wasted an opportunity with that by hoping to be in-person,” Richardson said of the start of the school year. “I also think more people signed up for distance-learning than they anticipated or they just weren't realistic of what it would take to make distance-learning meaningful and successful with as many people that were going to [choose] it.”
In a field where long-term planning is essential for his students to understand content and for him to do his job effectively, his job is further complicated by what he and other teachers view as a lack of direction from the Washoe County School District.
“[The School District] made the final decision to open schools two weeks before school started, but then they gave parents the choice of whether or not to sign up for distance learning or to do in-person learning,” Richardson said. “A lot of parents took their time with that [decision], so you had basically a week or less trying to figure out numbers in the logistics of what students were going to be where and doing what. It just wasn't enough time [for teachers to plan effectively] and they could have done it if [the School District] had planned it out further or delayed starting in-person.”
Despite the late notice of a mixed, hybrid approach, Richardson says he and his colleagues at Washoe Inspire Academy have handled distance-learning for their students better than last spring, when the COVID-19 outbreak forced an abrupt transition to distance-learning.
“At my school, we're doing much better [with distance-learning than in the spring],” Richardson said. “It's easier to start the school year that way with expectations for distance learning so that students can come in and know that this is how it's going to be, rather than switching to it abruptly during a break. We have teachers and administrators and staff who have learned from the spring what works and what doesn't work and how to improve [distance learning].”
Particularly with exclusionary policies that have been enacted as a precaution for students showing possible COVID-related symptoms, that classroom can become a revolving door of sorts. At one point earlier this year, he says nearly a third of his students were excluded from in-person learning due to COVID-19 precautions.
“[The School District] is being overly cautious, but at the same time, for most students we just get an email saying those students are going to do distance-learning and there's no time to prepare for it or anything,” Richardson said. “[The students] are not allowed to come in [to the school], so there's no transition and if they're gone for two weeks that's a difficult thing when you constantly have that happening: kids leaving and coming back from distance-learning to in-person education and having to keep track of those students and who's going to be responsible for working with them. These are the unintended consequences from the decisions that are being made and the burden is being placed on administrators, teachers, parents and families dealing with a lack of planning by the decision-makers.”
Richardson stresses that many schools like his are prepared to support students during distance-learning, as long as those expectations are established ahead of time. “The key is to set expectations regardless of whether they’re in class or not,” Richardson said. “If we tell them the day before that tomorrow might be a smoke day, we can make sure we have devices they can check out. Then we schedule phone calls and make sure we tell them to check their email so we can check in with them when they're doing distance-learning.”
A New Wrench with the Smoke and Using New Tools
This school year and its hybrid approach, however, has been further complicated by the smoke days caused by the wildfires spreading throughout the region. At the time of our interview with Richardson, his school has had nine smoke days already this year. Consequently, over a third of the school days so far this year have been all distance-learning.
“The wrench that's really been thrown into all this is the smoke,” Richardson said. “It's impossible as a classroom teacher to prepare meaningful lessons when you don't know if you're going to be in-person or online in a day or two. Teaching is all about long-term planning and making sure your lessons flow and build upon what students have learned. There's so much planning that goes into it that and when every single day, you're not sure how you're going to be teaching the next day, it makes it harder and limits your options of what to do. So everyone's just having to adjust on the fly and I don’t think anybody is happy about the current situation from parents all the way to the school board.”
Although besides the challenges COVID and the smoke days have brought to this school year, one resource that has proven to work well for Richardson’s students is an online program called Edgenuity. His school introduced the program to their students during the 2019-2020 academic year, prior to the COVID outbreak in the spring.
“We used [Edgenuity] last year for all of our students prior to COVID hitting, so we made the decision to keep it this year based on the fact that we could be going back and forth between in-person and distance-learning,” Richardson said. “Now it's easier for us to switch back and forth because [students] are using the computer program regardless. When we're in-person, we can augment and help them with their lessons and content and then they can go home and do the computer lessons on their own. So it's been easier for us with this transition than for other schools and students are adaptable if you give them a heads up and there's clear expectations of what's expected of them.”
“Things are tough now, but I think there's a lot of people in this community who are working hard to improve things and make sure Reno keeps growing, getting better and making Reno a great place to live,” Richardson said. “If you want to get involved, there's so many different ways to. There's so many people out there doing it and it doesn't take anything special. You don't have to have a lot of money or any special talent, you just have to have the desire to get involved and make your community better.” Photo with his podcast and radio co-host Cesar Lopez provided with permission to use by Cesar Lopez.
Many Challenges for Students at Home and Teachers Pulled in So Many Directions
That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t a variety of challenges for students learning from home.
“There are some students who don't have devices or they have siblings, meaning they have to share a device,” Richardson said. “That's a problem a lot of schools are running into is that if there's two, three or four kids in a house, not everyone's going to have that many devices. So luckily we have the resources to be able to provide them for our students, but I know not all schools have that resource. But [distance-learning] is not an ideal situation because for those students who don't have a device or don't have Internet at home, it just makes the burden harder for them to learn.”
Moving forward in the school year, Richardson hopes to see not only more patience and realistic expectations for teachers navigating the COVID-era classroom, but also for the School District to recognize the unintended consequences of their last-minute decision to re-open schools with an opt-out option.
“[The School District] really needs to take the time to listen to teachers and administrators who are in the school buildings, the ones actually trying to produce the content and the lessons for the students,” Richardson said. “The job of the School District isn't to babysit kids, it's to educate them and to do that safely and effectively. So if that means we have to go full-distance-learning for a month or two, it's better to make that decision ahead of time so there's time to execute a plan and make sure you have everything that's needed, rather than doing what we're doing now.”
As he has increasingly taken on a role of community activism, Richardson views it as his obligation to make Reno a better place to live for him and his students.
“As a teacher, I feel like it's important to speak up and fight for what's right, especially as a social studies teacher so that's another thing that definitely motivates me,” Richardson said. “I love this community and I want to see it thrive and see it get better and better. Part of that is getting down in the trenches and working to make those things happen, because they're not going to happen on their own.”