Opinion: Prince William schools should stop shielding its new chief equity officer

It’s been five months since Prince William County Public Schools hired its chief equity officer.

Dr. Lucretia Brown was the first high-profile hire by Dr. LaTanya McDade, who took over as Prince William schools superintendent after Dr. Stephen Walts retired a year ago. Before coming to our area, Brown was the Deputy Superintendent of Equity, Accountability, and School Improvement for Allentown School District in Pennsylvania.

Now at Virginia’s second-largest school district, she’s made few public appearances and has yet to address the county School Board. In light of the recent focus on critically responsive teaching, a statewide gubernatorial election that put Critical Race Theory under a microscope, and a string of School Board meetings with parents demanding a more significant role in their children’s public-school education, it’s fair to say many of us are curious about her, and what she plans to do in her new role.

This year, McDade established the school division’s Equity Office and will staff it with 10 employees working under Brown, with a $1.8 million budget. Over the next year, Brown is charged with delivering an Equity Audit, completing a Resource Equity Diagnostic, and coming up with an Equity Action Plan to be implemented for nearly 90,000 students and nearly 12,000 employees.

Each of these concepts is relatively new, and the general public has little knowledge of them. To borrow a line from 1999’s Office Space, “Well, what would you say… you do here?”

This week, Insidenova reported on a recent Superintendent’s Advisory Committee of Equity meeting held by McDade, to whom Brown reports. The news reporter and Brown gave us this insight:

Without providing too many specifics about [her daily] activities, Brown described her position to the equity council… as a cross-disciplinary job that reaches into other departments. Ultimately, though, Brown is responsible for the division’s informal diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) work.

“It’s not this marginalized position that sits out here and has to wait, if you will, for an opportunity to engage with other officers or work. It’s a bonafide discipline and office that’s rooted in the research that I’m sharing with you,” Brown told the committee at its meeting in late March. “A big concept that our superintendent has introduced in our division is the notion of interdependencies, and when you think of it, it is counter to that idea of bureaucratic silos, so making sure that as I fit into the environment and the [concepts] that were already here before I got here.”

Brown isn’t the chief DEI trainer, she said. Instead, she said her role is one that consults laterally with other division heads, advises McDade, and serves as a “change management specialist” who will interrogate practices and policies that exist within the division’s many departments today and advise on what’s good, what needs tweaking and what should go.

OK, everybody got that? According to the quote, Brown assures us her job is rooted in academia, and then she compliments her boss for her apparent forethought to create her position. Then there’s something about interdependencies and bureaucratic silos.

If you read all of that and are confused, you’re not alone. To make matters worse, according to the news report, McDade won’t allow anyone to interview her star hire so that the public can get some clarification or insight into the meaning of those big words.

It sounds like Brown and her staff have some work ahead of them. McDade is clearly throwing a lot of money at the job. We’d like to know, in plain English, what’s being done, for whom, and how.

Potomac Local News occasionally writes editorials and accepts opinion-based letters to the editor on local issues. Readers may email letters.