(reverent news music) - I'm Starla Sampaco in the Crosscut KCTS 9 newsroom.

The third season of Crosscut's podcast "This Changes Everything" explores what the pandemic helped us understand about public schools and where we might go from here.

Some families are choosing not to send their kids back to school, while some students want to make sure we never go back to normal.

This season, host Sara Bernard explores racism and inequity in the classroom.

Sara spoke to Erin Jones, an educator consultant.

- [Erin] I had families calling me who were saying, "Our black children are going to school "and trying to talk about Black Lives Matter "and they're getting shut down in their classrooms.

"We don't talk politics here."

And for those black students, this was not political.

This is about their own identity, right?

And so, their identities were on the line, and this failure to engage was sending a really clear message that they did not matter.

- I'm Starla Sampaco.

You can listen to "This Changes Everything" wherever you listen to podcasts or at crosscut.com/podcasts.

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