NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. (WKBW) — “We’ve been talking about this for too long. Now it’s time to get in there and make change,"Niagara Falls superintendent Mark Laurrie said.
Laurrie, is on a mission to create an administrative class that better reflects the racial makeup of its students.
“We’re a 60% minority district, 40 percent white,” he said.
But only 23% of all employees in the districts are minorities
“The teacher number is less, the teacher number is around 18%,” he adds.
But his long term goal is to even out that ratio.
“It’s aspirational but the numbers got to climb.”
So he put together a meeting with minority staff members in his district to hear what they had to say about the school system.
“This is a particular group of people we’ve haven’t had a lot of conversations with and every voice has got to matter," he said.
Laurrie is hoping the conversation with his employees will give him better insight on how to lead the district.
“I'm excited to hear things that I hadn’t thought about. I'm excited to hear that maybe there are subtle things that we do, that we don’t even realize that puts a wall between us.”
While today’s meeting is only with minority staff members, Laurrie plans on extending the conversation to his students.
“This is not the end, this is only the beginning of a lot of steps we want to take,” he said.
