``I feel like I have to fight for my daughter. I feel like I have to be armored, to do battle to make sure my daughter is treated fairly,'' Charlene Thomas, of Blue Bell, told representatives of the Wissahickon, North Penn and Upper Dublin School Districts on Tuesday night at a town meeting on education sponsored by the NAACP's Ambler branch. About 25 people attended the session.
At Blue Bell Elementary School, where her daughter is a student, Thomas said, the few African American kindergarten students were assigned to different classes. That made the youngsters feel like tokens, she said.
That may be more than a perception. In North Penn, only 5 percent of the students are black, in Upper Dublin, 8 percent, and in Wissahickon, 12 percent.
Other parents attending the session echoed Thomas' belief that those numbers led to culturally insensitive systems.
``My child is 14, a typical adolescent,'' said Diane Burgess, of Ambler. ``Chewing gum, laughing, pushing. I get phone calls about that. But when it comes to my child's academic success, I can't get a phone call.''
Portia Hunt, a counseling psychologist at Temple University's College of Education and an expert in diversity training, said yesterday that the challenges and frustrations facing suburban African American students and parents were not limited to Montgomery County. They are rooted, she said, in the cultural blind spots of predominantly white faculty in suburban schools.
``Many teachers in middle-class areas think black students have `arrived,' so they don't see that skin color has any cultural meaning,'' Hunt said. ``They tend to think that black culture doesn't exist.''
That lack of regard for black culture isn't just a social issue, many parents said Tuesday night. Tests for gifted programs do not seem to value the talents of African American students, they said.
