Pillar 4: Culturally Competent & Diverse Workforce

Intentionally invest in an equity mindset for all individuals throughout the District with the purpose of developing a racially diverse and culturally responsive workforce. This shall include building teacher and staff cultural competency and culturally responsive pedagogy implemented by teachers.

Racial Equity Priorities

The REO advances the district’s mission for racial equity by facilitating professional development and providing access to equitable investments.

• Equity Mindset Professional Development is offered to all Dallas ISD campus and central office staff to ensure common language and understanding of racial equity best practices to apply in the workplace and classroom. Examples of topics include: Implicit Bias, Cultural Intelligence, and Putting the “I” in Equity.
• Black History Month Celebrations are commemorated annually to expose stakeholders and students to the rich cultural, diversity, and contributions of the AA community. The events include career webinars with established Dallas AA professionals, engagement with AA authors, distribution of AA literature, interviews with AA Dallas ISD staff, etc.
• Male Residencies seek to increase diversity in the workforce by providing students who are less likely to have access to teachers of their race and ethnicity with male professionals and role models.
• No Place for Hate offers campuses the opportunity to partner with the Anti-Defamation League to engage in school-wide activities and projects that promote understanding, acceptance, and appreciation for diversity and difference.
• Upstander In partnership with the Dallas Holocaust & Human Rights Museum, the Racial Equity Office (REO) offers campuses a tailored database of educational materials. These resources aid educators in fostering vital life skills among students and promoting upstander behavior, whether inside the classroom or beyond its walls.

Culturally Competent & Diverse Workforce Pillar Matrix

Pillar 4 Metric: For this pillar, we assess students’ sense of belonging, measured through the percent of students who express a sense of belonging at their campus.

Target: We track and measure student sense of belonging as one of our Constraint Progress Measures as a system: by 2025, we want to see 64% of students expressing a sense of belonging at their campus. Based on this overall goal, we set school level-specific targets, accounting for the differences in responses between the elementary and secondary school level.