Today’s educators don’t just feel the pressure to teach students to read, write, add, and subtract—they also feel the responsibility of ensuring their pupils leave the K-12 school system as more empathetic human beings.
At least that’s what Paso Robles Joint Unified School District (PRJUSD) and the Diversity Coalition of San Luis Obispo are working toward for the county’s youngest students.
Last October, PRJUSD implemented its first Academic Inclusion and Excellence Training to help its staff address a district-wide issue of students using racial slurs in the classroom.
District Superintendent Jennifer Loftus said the district noticed students increasingly using the “N-word” starting as early as the second grade, a behavior that would progress into high school.
“Our students and our parent community have expressed over the last couple of years a great deal of distress about how casually that word is used in our school environment, and so we took a stance in the last school year that that kind of language is not appropriate at school,” Loftus said.
At a November 2024 PRJUSD school board meeting, district staff specified that the diversity training would not only better equip district educators to address the use of harmful language but help the district to identify how it may be setting its own marginalized students back systematically.
Loftus said both of these areas of work are continuing into the 2025-26 school year.
“We have groups of students who are very successful in school, and we have groups of students who are not having success in school. We want to ask ourselves, what can we do during the school day to maximize the number of students who are achieving success, right?” she said. “Sometimes we find that we have things happening in our system that are unintentional—that have created barriers for groups of students.
“So how can we take those barriers away so that we’re not unintentionally creating barriers for students, even with the best of intentions.”
Loftus said, for example, if an English-learning student is focused on taking language-learning courses, they are missing out on other courses that could help them beyond high school, she said.
“Are there ways to manipulate that schedule, or to allow them options so that they can also take the classes that they need to take for dual enrollment or for post-high school success? And if there is, why not open that up for them?” she said. “We find that often there are things like that that we can do that don’t take away from anyone else.”
When it comes to racial slurs, Loftus said that district staff have already reported feeling more confident addressing the issue right in the classroom since the diversity training started.
“If you’ve not had that conversation before, it’s hard to know how to navigate it because you don’t know how your students are going to respond. … You have to be able to pivot based on the feelings and the emotions in the room of the students that you have,” Loftus said. “When we left that training last year, many staff expressed, through their feedback, that they felt as though they had some tools in their back pocket that they could use. They felt as though they had strategies that they didn’t have when they walked in.”
And students are also noticing the difference, expressing that they now have an opportunity to amplify their own voice at school.
“I think that in talking with students myself, they shared with me specifically that they felt that … with regard to the use of the N-word, they appreciated the conversation, and they felt that it got better in some ways,” Loftus said. “One of the things the conversation did was that many of their teachers had the conversation in their classroom, and they allowed a safe space for students to talk about how that impacted them when that language was used around them, and why that wasn’t OK.”
She added that she thinks the most important thing is that the students who were uncomfortable feel heard, “and that somebody is trying to help them have a voice in this place where they didn’t feel as though they had a voice before.”
Nonprofit Diversity Coalition of SLO provides perspective in another way for the county’s K-12 students by offering the opportunity to connect face-to-face with those who survived historically significant events like the Holocaust and genocide.
Kathleen Minck, a retired Lucia Mar teacher, is the director of the Diversity Coalition that’s been organizing school speakers for the past 10 years or so.
The local nonprofit organization provides about 16 free assemblies per year to schools across the county, featuring speakers including Holocaust survivors, Ukrainian refugees, and Native American elders.
“It exposes them to stories and lived experiences that they haven’t heard of before,” Minck said. “This past year, we have focused more on the immigrant community, the refugee community, because of what’s going on in the news, and we want to make sure that the children see these people who have experienced such an upheaval in their lives firsthand, and we want to humanize them for the students.”
The school speakers program provides three primary benefits to students, Minck said. First, the students get to learn about history. Second, students are exposed to people who don’t look like them. And the third is that some marginalized students get to identify with the speaker, and this enhances their sense of self.
“We went to Paso Robles High School with our Cambodian refugees, and a young boy in the back—there were like 200 people in this big auditorium that they have—and a young boy in the back, during the Q-and-A, he raised his hand, and he said, ‘I’m Cambodian.’ He said, ‘I’ve been embarrassed to say that to anybody, but now I’m proud of it,’ and that just really touched me,” Minck said, her voice shaking.
By providing more education and dialogue around diversity, PRJUSD Superintendent Loftus said, the district hopes it will help create more understanding students, especially after it had heard from the community last spring that it wanted its graduating students to have more empathy.
“A key indicator of empathy is you understand that how you act, how you treat others, has an impact on them. That you can empathize with how they’re feeling,” she said. “We just have to remind ourselves and remind our students that our words have power, right?
“Our actions have power, and we need to have empathy for one another and just be considerate.” Δ
Reach Staff Writer Libbey Hanson at lhanson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Education Today 2025.