The Tucson Unified School District held a meeting Tuesday night where community members expressed their concerns over reallocation of funds into the equity, diversity, and inclusiveness program at the district.
At the end of September federal pandemic money is ending for TUSD. The school district is looking into how to reallocate money to support their desegregation program which helps students of different backgrounds who could be experiencing learning loss because of the pandemic.
All school districts that received funding were required to spend a minimum of 20 percent of the funding provided to address areas of learning loss related to the COVID-19 pandemic. That was a minimum of $34.5 million for TUSD.
The district says the desegregation program helps students who belong to each major racial groups, kids with disabilities, homeless students and other groups.
However, TUSD emphasized because pandemic era funding is ending and to prevent over 60 teachers from being cut, eight administrators with their equity diversity and inclusiveness program are being reassigned to other departments.
The district said the administrators can go to any department and will be keeping their pay for the first school year.
They said the money will be reallocated to other programs like the African American Student Services Department and Mexican American Student Services Department.
Damond Holt, the president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance Tucson, attended the meeting and said money should be put into the EDI department to help students.
“We want to make sure that they are getting the support, they are getting the funding they need so that we can deal with the disparities that we see, Holt said.
Beginning last January the district says they started looking into where they can reallocate money from. They found it would take about $5.1 million for the desegregation program to support the current positions and they will take effect this July first.
TUSDs board decided on Tuesday to delay voting to a later date to allow community members to weigh in on how they should handle their EDI program. They said they have to do it before February 13.
Holt said he hopes TUSD makes a community advisory board with community stakeholders.
Its about kids being successful. Lets not get caught up in the different issues at hand without thinking about our kids, he said.