One morning, Tracy Staley rounded the corner at Ponce de Leon Elementary School in Clearwater and found one of her fifth-grade students asleep by her classroom door.

The girl’s father had murdered her mother.

School security cameras showed the girl had slept by her classroom since 2 a.m.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” says Staley, who teaches science and writing. “I realized that for some of my students, seeing me is the only constant in their lives.”

By most accounts, this child was headed for an uncertain future. Instead, after heading straight for the place she felt safest, she’s excelling in school and has her sights on a law-enforcement career – thanks in large part to Staley’s participation in a groundswell to raise the consciousness of America’s teachers toward the root causes of racial, social and economic disparities.

The University of Florida Lastinger Center leads a charge toward improved equity in schools. In partnership with the National Equity Project, The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, SRI International and the Quality Rating and Improvement System National Learning Network, the Lastinger Center is developing and facilitating a myriad of programs designed to help effectively and compassionately address the issues that give rise to academic inequities.

Starting early

Helping teachers effectively address issues of racial equity is at the heart of the Lastinger Center’s efforts to improve racial equity in Florida’s schools.

“Racial equity is the foundational element of all that the Lastinger Center does,” Director Don Pemberton says. “Our work is focused on the fact that the most vulnerable schools are those with the least experienced teachers and the least amount of educational resources. Our goal is to ensure that vulnerable schools have the best possible teachers.”

The Lastinger Center and its partners have launched several innovative initiatives that embed racial equity in the daily work of Florida’s teachers, principals and counselors.

One such project is the expansion of the Florida Master Teachers Initiative in Miami-Dade County public schools. Funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education Investing in Innovation (i3) grant and supported by the UF College of Education’s School of Teaching and Learning and School of Special Education, School Psychology and Early Childhood Studies, The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and SRI International, the program combines cutting-edge online pedagogy with professors-in-residence who work with teachers in their schools.

A portion of the program involves a free, on-the-job master’s and specialist degree program for 100 early childhood teachers in 25 high-need elementary schools. Participating teachers create professional learning communities within their schools and organize special training opportunities for their colleagues, benefitting more than 1,100 area teachers and impacting more than 30,000 of Miami-Dade’s youngest and most vulnerable children.

One participant in the Master Teachers Initiative is Staley. Recently named Pinellas County’s Teacher of the Year and a finalist for the state title, she incorporates racial and gender equity in her classroom using inquiry-based, hands-on instruction that allows every child to better understand subject matter.

“It’s all about the presentation,” Staley says. “Anything can be boring and anything can be exciting.”

Staley has a knack for making lessons tangible. For instance, when teaching about evaporation, she began with a prop.

“I hung a pair of wet jeans and we waited a day or two for them to dry. I asked my students what happened to the water and they said, ‘It evaporated to clouds.’ I looked around and said, ‘I don’t see any clouds. Do you?’”

Staley’s students then filled Dixie cups with water, placed them in sealed plastic bags and hung them around the room.

“When the water evaporated and stuck to the inside of the bags,” she recalls, “they got to actually see what happened to it.”

It’s that kind of approach that helps level the playing field in the classroom. Staley uses the boost in her students’ interest in science to improve reading, writing and math, as well as apply these skills to the real world.

Heart of the matter

Ensuring that Florida’s kids get the best, most equitable education has less to do with academics than the “very gut-level matters of the heart,” says Pedro Bermudez, who runs professional development support for the Lastinger Center. These matters include the often-invisible factors that negatively affect a student’s success.

For instance, according to the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, the Texas Education Agency, the Child Trends Databank and the New York Civil Liberties Union:

• African-American and Latino boys with disabilities are more likely to land in special education classes, where dropout rates are high and chances of graduating are often are less than 5 percent.

• One of every three young African American males nationwide is in prison, on probation or on parole and the arrest rate among African-American youth ages 10-17 is nearly twice that of their white peers.

• African-American students in Texas are more likely to be kicked out of classrooms than are students of other races, and African-American students in many cities are two-and-a-half times more likely to be expelled from school than white students.

• African-American students in New York served more than half of school suspensions but account for only a third of city students. They receive a particularly high proportion of suspensions for subjective offenses such as disruptive or disrespectful behavior.

• The high school dropout rate for African-American and Hispanic students in California is 37 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

Hispanic students are twice as likely and African-American students are three times as likely to live in poverty as white students. Poor families are less able to afford good health care, nutritious food and enriching experiences.

Bermudez recalls several examples throughout his two decades as a social studies teacher in the Miami-Dade school district:

• A star competitor in the Model U.N. competition (in which high school teams from throughout the country simulate a United Nations session) who dropped out at the last minute because he was living in his family’s car and had no dress pants to wear.

• An African-American girl who planned to leave Miami’s William H. Turner Technical Arts School for a less successful public high school because she had no idea what college-ruled paper was but felt it “sounded expensive.”

• A group of young students who were often hassled by teachers and bus drivers for failing to wear uniform shirts – the same shirts that would have gotten them beat up in their neighborhoods.

“We teach from a middle-class, white stance. But many people don’t live that reality,” Bermudez says. “We need to question the things we assume that work for us, but don’t necessarily work for other people.”

Therein lies the crux of the matter for many students. Even the most observant and compassionate teachers often assume that a child’s shortcomings in the classroom are a result of laziness or a disinterest in school subjects. Instead, the reasons could be much more complex and affect every aspect of a child’s life and education.

“A teacher may say, ‘I don’t understand why a student sleeps the whole night at home, then falls asleep in my classroom.’ Maybe you don’t understand because you lead a nice, peaceful life in the suburbs. But some kids may be living in hell at home,” Bermudez says. “It was big thing for me, just becoming aware of that and asking myself, ‘What does this mean? What implication does this have for the way I understand my students and what they need?’ ”

Much of the Lastinger Center’s efforts to improve racial equity in schools began with a Miami institute by the National Equity Project (then known as the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools) for top leaders of Ready Schools Miami in 2009.

“That really pushed us to do some serious thinking about expanding our understanding to individual and institutional racial and structural barriers that tend to reproduce what people refer to as ‘racialized outcomes,’ ” Bermudez says, referring to the structural and institutional factors that bear out statistics showing that African-American and Latino students fare worse than white students in across-the-board academic standards. He and a team of educators from Miami-Dade, Pinellas and Duval Counties recently returned from another National Equity Project institute in Sonoma, Calif. Together, they and other top area teachers, principals and administrators will lead efforts to advance racial equity in all participating school districts.

“We’ve made a commitment to doing it and doing it well,” Bermudez said, “and infusing it into our work in a way that doesn’t create a separate line of work, but integrates it into the core of the work that we do.”

Rating the system

The Lastinger Center is working with the Raleigh, NC-based Quality Rating and Improvement System National Learning Network, formed by a coalition of states and national organizations seeking to develop and implement improvement strategies to elevate the quality of early childcare and education systems nationwide.

“The premise is that if you rated childcare programs with one to five stars the same as hotels, it would encourage families to choose higher quality programs,” says Abby Thorman, a QRIS administrator and independent consultant in early-childhood education policies and programs. “It creates a ‘buyers beware’ sensibility because not all families know what to look for. We want to empower families with better information.”

A look at the statistics shows why this is an important endeavor.

“Thirty-five percent of children in this country are not ready for kindergarten because of a lack of communication and learning in the home and a lack of early education programs,” Greg Taylor, then vice president for programs with the Kellogg Foundation, said at a recent Lastinger Center symposium on racial equity in schools in Orlando. “And, 60 percent of teachers do not believe that all kids can learn.”

QRIS provides training for teachers and grants for facility improvements designed to help boost a center’s quality of care. Both are in high demand in Florida, particularly in Miami-Dade County, where Thorman works.

“We’re living in a city where 70 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced lunches,” Thorman says, also noting a continuing influx of immigrant children, including those who seek refuge from disasters. This includes hundreds of children whose families fled the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.

“It is more likely than not for a kid to be living a challenged life in Miami,” she says. “We’re tackling lots of problems with limited resources. And we have to do it all in a way that is culturally respectful. Everybody here is from somewhere else.”

Thorman notes substandard conditions of childcare facilities in many of Miami-Dade’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. Often, they’re filled with asbestos, have broken air-conditioning systems and backed-up septic tanks, and lack safe playground areas. Such issues distract children and teachers from focusing on learning. Add the fact that these areas typically receive the least educated and least experienced teachers, and you’ve got a troubling mix.

“When we map out the quality of childcare in Miami-Dade in relation to race and income, we find that there are fewer high-quality spaces and programs in areas where black and Hispanic children live than in areas that are predominantly white,” Thorman says. “There are huge systematic and institutional issues we need to change as a community and many of these are invisible issues. The stakes are high, the challenges are many and the resources are shrinking.”

With Thorman’s assistance, the Lastinger Center is working to identify the area’s most vulnerable schools and focus support where it’s needed most.

“We used to give everyone the same package. Now, we’re stratifying support based on which part of the city your program is in and the demographics of the kids you serve,” Thorman says. “Instead of looking at everything countywide, we’re zeroing in on particular neighborhoods, making our support more strategic and direct and making it accountable to the data.”

Straight to the principal’s office

The Lastinger Center is strengthening its focus on helping principals create and maintain racial equity in their schools.

A recent Lastinger Principals Institute featured Harvard University Prof. Pedro Antonio Noguera, author of “The Trouble with Black Boys: The Role and Influence of Environmental and Cultural Factors on the Academic Performance of African American Males.”

“In his book, he talks about several black boys that he has followed through the public school system and about the power of mentoring and finding other adults to pull into our schools to work with at-risk students,” Lastinger Center Principal-in-Residence Kathy Dixon says.

The principal’s institute also will explore alternative disciplinary plans to suspension, a long-held tactic that’s proven somewhat pointless.

“The focus is on finding techniques to keep them in school with support, such as offering a lot of tutoring to close the gap, having high expectations for the curriculum, but offering students the support they need to be successful,” Dixon says. “The issues are not just academic. They’re also about the lack of basic shelter or medical attention. That all has to be taken care of before the academics can happen.”

Whether via funded programs or simply a personal, grassroots commitment on the part of educators to help all students succeed, positive changes are happening. Dixon recalls working as principal at a school where she and teachers performed social work including making home visits and arranging transportation to school and doctors appointments. A recent movement to make needed services more accessible in Collier County gave rise to a University of Florida dental clinic and a Florida State University medical clinic located near schools. Several Miami area schools have on-campus medical clinics.

Still, “Anyone who says there is some magic moment in all this is on the verge of being a charlatan,” Bermudez says. “There are no easy answers in this work.”