When hundreds of alumni, students, former teachers and parents in San Jose’s Valley Christian High School community banded together last summer to call out what they saw as a deeply-rooted culture of racism and discrimination, they expected change.
Amid the backdrop of a national racial reckoning sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, the school’s alumni gathered nearly 200 testimonials from current and former students and submitted a letter to campus administrators in June with a list of 21 demands, from hiring a diversity counselor to making the work of the campus’ diversity committee more transparent to carefully selecting chapel speakers.
Administrators of the top-rated K-12 private school in south San Jose, which serves about 2,800 students, declared they got the message loud and clear, pledging to chart a new path.
They held two listening sessions, began unconscious bias and micro-aggression training for faculty members and hired a nationally recognized search firm to identify candidates for the newly created position of director of diversity.
Today, a group of remnant alumni who have been keeping close tabs on the school’s progress have concluded there has been little progress. Worse, they said, the school seems to be moving backward, not forward.
For example, school administrators invited to speak at a teachers retreat a controversial pastor known for preaching that the Bible and critical race theory — the belief that racism is ingrained in U.S. institutions and White people benefit from it — are incompatible.
They also temporarily halted their search for a new director of diversity, and the school’s diversity and inclusion committee has stopped meeting.
“The combination of them not holding up their end of the compromise and then doing things that were so obviously backward has made us really upset,” said Sarah Bauer, an alumni leader. “The school just keeps failing.”
In response, Rob Valiton, chief operating officer at Valley Christian Schools, said in an interview Friday that the school recently re-launched its search for a director of diversity and its diversity committee was just waiting to get direction from the eventual hire.
“I appreciate the passions that our alumni have for this change. I appreciate them actually holding us accountable,” he said. “It’s important that we hire the right person but we’re not resting on our laurels either. We know there’s work to get done and we’re committed to getting it done.”
Part of that work will entail convincing students and alumni to look beyond its recent track record.
Clifford Daughtery, the school’s president and CEO, wrote in a 2019 book that the nation’s Founding Fathers are being discredited for being slave owners even though “some could argue, for the most part, they treated their slaves with dignity and respect.” That same year, a teacher was placed on leave for alleged ties to a white supremacist and Neo-Nazi group involved in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In a June 9, 2020 statement responding to the letter from alumni, Daughtery apologized for the “insensitivity” of the passage in his book, which since has been stripped from future published copies, and acknowledged that “further change must take place.”
Several months later, the school announced that Keith Crosby, lead pastor at San Jose’s Hillside Church, would be speaking at an upcoming teacher retreat. Alumni quickly uncovered a recent sermon in which Crosby had argued that “critical theory and intersectionality is based on revenge culture” and spewed a Russian state-sponsored disinformation claim that Black Lives Matters protesters in Portland had burned a stack of Bibles. The school later said he wouldn’t be going after all, though not because of alumni backlash.
Then at the end of March, after an “exhaustive” six-month-long search for a director of diversity, Daugherty informed the school community that administrators were “unable to cross the finish line” despite having “some solid candidates.”
One of the final candidates, who requested not to be named as it could affect his employment, went through a three-month-long hiring process, had seen a draft of his potential contract and was preparing to move his family across the country.
But during a Zoom meeting with members of the school’s board of directors in mid-January, it “became crystal clear that there was one, two, maybe three board members that just didn’t even agree that the school should create this position,” the finalist said. He was informed by the search firm shortly after the video call that he did not get the position.
The school’s board of directors, like those for most companies and institutions across the country, is predominantly White. Of the 17 board members, four are people of color and just three are women.
“In my opinion, White supremacy won,” the candidate, who is a person of color, said. “I firmly believe that the principals and leaders of that school want to do this and want to see change, but you’ve got some powerful people there with deep pockets who have got a stranglehold on that institution.”
Valiton, the school’s chief operating officer, disputed that idea, saying that he was “unaware of any board member objecting to this hire.”
Since last June, a de-facto accountability board has been created by Valley Christian alumni who have been routinely emailing school administrators and faculty members seeking updates on diversity and equity initiatives. They have created a Facebook group with nearly 1,000 members and an email listserv, providing updates to the group whenever they uncover new information.
The group members span multiple generations but they all share the same goals: ensuring that future Valley Christian students of color are afforded a better experience and that all students are given a more well-rounded education than they were.
Ericka Dorsey, a graduate of the class of 2000, for instance, still can still feel the piercing stares she received from her classmates on the first day of school as the only Black student in her seventh-grade class.
She vividly remembers how teachers singled her out during discussions about slavery and affirmative action, how school leaders rejected her plea to start a Black student union, how coaches characterized her defense in basketball practice as “too aggressive” and how she was forced to educate her own counselor on what HBCUs — Historically Black Colleges and Universities — were.
“As a Christian, as an American citizen, as a mother, I want the next Black mother who desires to give their child a Christian education to be able to go to Valley Christian and know that the words they’re saying and the scripture they’re professing matches the experiences that their children will have in school,” she said. “And I want that child to know that their color is not only seen — but loved.”
