Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Guico.
Kevin, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
When I first came to Dallas, all I had were two suitcases and a cat. I came bright-eyed, ready to start my new 6-month-long role with the City Year Dallas start-up team. I wasn’t sure if I wanted a career in education, and I thought my short term role here might give me an answer. Five years later, I never thought that educational equity would become the centerpieces of my life, career, and passion.
Growing up, I had the privilege of accessing quality education. To my parents, who immigrated from the Philippines, that meant a private, Catholic school. I didn’t know then how much sacrifice that meant for them. For years I thought it was normal for a mom to work morning into the night at the same school as my sister and I to be able to afford tuition and day care. I thought it was normal for dad to stealthily turn road trips into fun challenges, mentally calculating our rate, or estimating our MPG. I thought it was normal for a mom to cleverly turn playtime into captivating reading time about interesting stories with creative questions about what I would do as a character. I didn’t know how much time and effort it took to craft these real life word problems and reading comprehension assessments, all after working their full time jobs! I didn’t understand how fortunate I was to have parents who pushed me so hard (without me even knowing) so I can get awarded academic scholarships, which opened doors to the elementary, middle, high school, and college I attended that I wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise.
In Dallas, those five years ago, I first set foot in my first classroom. I saw that many of my students had the same story that my family had: hardworking, dedicated, energetic and eager students whose families were working hard so that their move to the states would open new doors to the “American Dream”. Yet I saw obstacles in their way that were very different from the education I had. Old and worn school facilities that we’re unable to keep the rain out of buildings in the colder seasons and keep the rooms from burning up in the warmer ones; overpacked classrooms with assertive students ready for anything and a single teacher tasked with differentiating for a vast spread of reading levels; long term substitute teachers tasked with providing quality education in core subjects that students could not graduate without passing. Although these challenges were new and heartbreaking to me, it was just another normal day for my students and their teachers.
Fired up and agitated at the disparities between my experience and my students with similar stories as mine, I quickly centered my energy and my work on to these two truisms: Every student deserves access to a quality education, and families should not have had to sacrifice as much like mine to have access to a quality education. I spent four years in public classrooms, and two years after that, developing and training educators to go into classrooms to achieve these mantras. I realized the hard work educators do every day is only half the battle when trying to achieve these things. Someone once told me, “Systems only produce the results they were designed to produce.” To truly change systems that have been so deeply rooted for so long, I started to get involved outside the classroom and join a more significant movement.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Some of the challenges we faced in the community that I taught in happened outside of our school. I taught in Bachman Lake around the time that there were a series of residential explosions that killed a student at one of our neighboring schools. It is the same community that had our sister middle school and our high school totaled by the recent tornados in 2019. It also was a school that had its own struggles, where my three personal electric fans and a portable HVAC were not enough to keep my students and I focused during the summer heat. In these experiences, I learned so much about how hard the students and teachers work inside of the schoolhouse, and how many challenges they still face from outside.
Other passionate educators and I started Bachman Lake Strong. We focused on addressing some of the community issues that our students may carry with them into their desks. During the gas leaks, we put together a respite event at the local recreation center to provide city and evacuation information, emergency donations, food, and games for the students so that families can have a place to rest and be in fellowship while all that was happening. After the tornados, we put together a digital document that was continually updated to provide city information on the tornados, fundraisers and donation drives for teachers and schools, volunteer opportunities to help, and information on road closures and police updates.
Along with the challenges of being a teacher, it was clear that my curriculum was not the only thing that challenged my students. This inspired my work with Dallas CORE, where we will focus on systemic challenges and policies that were made a long time ago, and made by people who did not look like my students or me. Our teachers and students are working extra hard, and I want to make sure that we support them by providing community input into our educational policies, budgeting, and decision-making so that all students can have the quality education they deserve.
Dallas CORE – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
In 2019, other educators who were also passionate about educational equity and I founded Dallas CORE. It stands for Dallas Communities Organizing to Reach Equity and is a community group that is grounded in truth and equity. Our vision is to leverage the power of organized people in diverse communities to create lasting equitable systems in Dallas for all children. We are a community organizing group that specifically organizes community action around public education in Dallas.
What that looks like is a series of House Meetings where we’ve listened to different communities in Dallas to gather what educational issues exist in Oak Cliff, Pleasant Grove, Bachman Lake, Fair Park, and all over Dallas. It looks like hosting our first Issues Assembly, where over 75 community members got to vote to choose three issues, out of the 15 trends we uncovered in our House Meetings. It looks like our Issue Action Team Launch taking place on Feb. 26, where we will divide into three teams to tackle these three issues: Socio-Emotional Learning/Trauma Informed Practices; Racial Equity/Quality of School Facilities; and Supporting Vulnerable Student Populations (our students experiencing homelessness, undocumented students, and LGBTQ+ students). It looks like the community taking back its power, and giving our communities voice in what their children’s education looks like.
Follow: @dallascore
RSVP to Issue Action Team Launch: bit.ly/corefeb
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Our vision is to leverage the power of organized people in diverse communities to create lasting equitable systems in Dallas for all children. The overall goal is to dismantle oppressive systems and co-create with the community fair systems in public education. As our vision is intentionally lofty and idealistic, our more immediate definition of success varies based on our community action. Ultimately, success will look like our community members affecting policy and/or decision making in Dallas public education and moving it towards equity. This could look like better policies that support our undocumented students, policies that mandate cultural responsiveness and trauma informed practices in schools, budgetary changes that call for socio-emotional learning and after school programs, or equitable funding where schools that need the most support get a proportional amount of the budget and staffing. The wonderful thing about community organizing is that our outcomes and success will be defined and completed with our active community members.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.equitydallas.org/
- Email: dallascoreteam@gmail.com
- Instagram: @dallascore
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dallascore4all/
- Others: RSVP to our Issue Action Team Launch: bit.ly/corefeb
Image Credit:
Shartajeye’ Wright
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