One example: Every year when Cornish’s children were small, Carroll fifth graders were required to participate in Colonial Day, an educational celebration in which students dress up like characters from the 1600s.
Despite Southlake’s many accolades, she’d grown troubled by the steady drumbeat of racially insensitive remarks - some subtle, some overt - that Black people often endure in affluent communities where the vast majority of residents don’t look like them. She thought seriously about moving her five children to Chicago, where she'd grown up. Afterward, the school board created a diversity council of more than 60 parents, teachers and students to come up with a plan to make Carroll more welcoming and inclusive.īut when Frank died of a heart attack in 2008 at the age of 40, Robin Cornish faced a difficult decision. The district hosted listening sessions with parents and students, gathering numerous accounts of racist, xenophobic and anti-gay comments like those described by Cornish’s children.
Within days, it attracted millions of views on social media and seemed to trigger genuine soul-searching by school leaders. It’s where a sixth grade boy once joked with her son: “How do you get a Black out of a tree? You cut the rope.” It’s where, weeks after her husband died suddenly in 2008, a white boy on the football team told her son, “Your mom is only voting for Obama because your dad is dead and she's going to need welfare.”Įver since Cornish moved to Southlake more than two decades earlier, these were the types of stories that were discussed among a small group of Black parents and otherwise swept under the rug. This was the city where, on the day after Rosa Parks died in 2005, elementary school children told Cornish’s four oldest kids “now you have to sit in the back of the bus,” she said.
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