Just ahead on "American Black Journal," Detroit students are headed back to classrooms in just a few weeks.

I'm gonna talk with Superintendent Dr. Nikolai Vitti about plans to reopen schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Plus, a long awaited honor for Detroit's Black Bottom Neighborhood.

Stay right there.

"American Black Journal" starts right now.

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(lively music) Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm Stephen Henderson, and as always, I'm glad you've decided to join.

The start of the school year is just around the corner and it comes as the nation is experiencing yet another surge in COVID cases, this time due to the Delta variant.

Detroit public schools say they are gonna reengage students in in-person learning as much as possible.

Now, they're gonna do that with safety protocols in place, and they're gonna maintain remote learning options for families who are just not ready yet to send their kids back to school.

I spoke with Superintendent Dr. Nikolai Vitti about the district's plans to reopen schools this year.

So it has been a while since we had you here and lots has happened in the interim.

Of course, we had two years really disrupted by the pandemic.

I expect that this year will also be interrupted as we still try to figure out how to make this a part of our normal lives, I guess.

But let's start with just what your approach is as we get closer to the opening of this year.

You're somebody who has said unequivocally that the best situation for kids in our district in Detroit is for them to be in school all the time.

Of course, we can't necessarily mandate that at this point, but tell me how close you think we're gonna be able to get, even as we see this recent surge in COVID-19 cases.

Sure.

And as you said, I think most of us would agree the best situation for our students, our students in Detroit is in-person.

There's just a relationship connection there that can build in a trust, you know, reteaching small group instruction, because a lot of our students are below where they should be.

But obviously, any time the infection rates are too high, then we have to suspend it, and I think over the last year and a half, we've done that.

So we've been about equity and equity of access, meaning if private schools are open and suburban school districts are open, so should we providing in-person learning because that is about equity, but being very cautious and listening to medical experts when the infection rates are too high and not moving forward with in-person learning.

Now, I'm very excited about the fall.

I am worried about the rising infection rates.

They're not as high in the city in Michigan, as they are, let's say in the South right now.

But I'm worried, but at the same time, I'm optimistic and I'm excited, excited and optimistic for a couple reasons.

One, our teachers are back across the district, so every school, every classroom, every subject area, our teachers will be back in person.

That was an agreement that we made with the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

I'm also excited because we have additional funding, and so for the first time in over 20 years, as a teacher, principal, chief academic officer, superintendent, always in large urban school districts, I feel like for at least two years we have equitable amount of resources to address some of the wrap around challenges that we have with our students and families.

So we're gonna be able to go much deeper with mental health support in the fall with Tier II, Tier III intervention, that means small group, one-on-one.

We're gonna have a nurse at every one of our buildings.

This past summer, we expanded summer school.

We had 10,000 students participate in-person in summer school.

But it wasn't just academic summer school.

It was art, it was music, it was athletics.

We're gonna be able to hire more teachers.

We're gonna be fully staffed in the fall.

Every teacher vacancy is filled and we've hired over 100 more teachers to reduce class size.

We're gonna be able to offer after-school programming in every school this fall and for the next two years.

We're adding vans, district vans to pick up students if they miss the initial bus.

Don't walk to school, don't take the city bus.

So this year for us is a year of recovery.

We have to make up on learning loss.

We've got to get kids back and learning in the regular process.

And so, that's our focus, but I feel like we can do this now in a much harder space in time, but with the resources to actually do that.

And the last reason why I'm optimistic and excited is that our families are ready to send their children back.

So right now, our polling looks at 80 to 95% of parents are ready to send their children back to school.

I think our number or our percentage of students that want virtual school will always be higher than suburban districts and rural districts, and we have a separate virtual school for that, but I'm excited.

And from a COVID perspective, we're always going to be more conservative, if you will, about the safety strategies.

And we've always been aligned to the CDC, always been aligned to state guidelines.

So all of our students, employees vaccinated or not will wear a mask.

We're gonna do the deep cleaning, three feet of social distance.

And I think the big difference in DPSCD will be testing.

All of our employees, all of our students will test vaccinated or not, so we can identify asymptomatic cases, we can identify outbreaks that have not been identified.

And we can talk about the infection rate beyond the city rate, or even the county rate, the state rate based on actual infection rates at individual schools and districts.

We started testing in the spring, and our infection rate numbers have been less than 1%.

In fact, it's been about 0.001 or 0% different weeks.

So I've always been saying I think our students and our employees are actually safer in DPSCD buildings than out in the greater society, because in a greater society, everyone's not vaccinated, everyone's not wearing masks, and you don't have a testing process.

So I'm excited for the fall.

Yeah.

So how flexible do you think you have to be about all of these things?

You know, the idea of in-person schooling, the idea of maybe further kinds of restrictions?

Is this a better situation than we started with at the beginning of last year or are we still in the same place?

Well, I think we're definitely in a better place than we were last fall for a couple of reasons.

One, we ran schools for a year with the COVID challenge.

Now, we had anywhere from 10 to 12,000 students back at that time, and we're looking at probably 40 to 45,000 students back, so the scale will be different, but we did learn how to identify positive cases, quarantine, identify close contacts.

So that's just having done it, I think, is gonna make this year easier.

But we have the vaccine obviously, which changes the conversation from an absolute risk point of view.

70% of our employees are vaccinated, which is you wanna get to that 70% level.

So I feel good there.

I don't feel completely satisfied because I want that to be 100%.

We're not ready to mandate it, but we're continuing to promote it, create awareness for greater vaccine vaccination rates.

I think what's also different, obviously, is our teachers are back.

There were a lot of students that actually wanted to come back last year, but said, "if I have my schedule of six students, six classes at the high school level, and only two of my teachers are coming back, I'm just gonna stay online."

So that's what makes I think the fall different as well.

So having done it, the opportunity to be vaccinated for our employees and our older students, and then just having it done, having doing it last year, and doing it well.

Our union leaders will stand in front of a camera publicly and say the district did everything it could and should have done to keep us safe.

I think that created a lot of credibility with our employees to come back and that obviously trickled down to our families as well.

Yeah.

So I wanna talk a little about teachers.

You do have a new collective bargaining agreement with teachers, but you also have, as you said, you've been able to fill all the vacancies in our schools.

And that's something as somebody who's, I mean, I've been around Detroit for four decades, five decades now, that has always been one of our big sort of speed bumps is the idea that we can't attract enough teachers to get the ratios we want in classrooms and make sure that we're fully staffed.

Talk about the difference that you think that makes.

Yeah, I've said it countless times, if we don't have a certified teacher in a classroom, we can't even talk about getting to high quality.

You know, it immediately starts there.

You can have a great person who cares about the kids, a long-term sub, someone with a degree, they need to be certified, they need to be trained, and then we can start building capacity.

But you can't even get off the finish line if you're not at that point.

And I remember when I started as superintendent and I started to talk at that point with the HR team and the conversation was "we'll never be fully staffed in Detroit."

Right when you told me that, I realized wrong approach, wrong expectation, we've got to move a different direction with just how you think about your job.

So part of the work was honestly revamping HR with people that believed that we should and had to be fully staffed.

So that was part of the process.

I went through two reorgs to get to that point, and I definitely feel like we have the right people there.

But then, it was pay matters, and we can talk about climate and culture and support, and all of that does play a role, but ultimately it is about paying people a competitive wage.

So we've gone from about 36, 38,000 to 51,000 for beginning teacher salaries.

And it wasn't only beginning teachers, but we were able to recruit from Detroit charter schools and from suburban school districts, many of those teachers who grew up in Detroit and left to teach in the surrounding suburbs, so that was a major difference.

And we've been able to retain our veteran teachers.

So our top staff has gone from about 68 now to about 76 at the top, and we've offered bonuses in addition to that.

We wanna get to 80 in the next couple of years, and we're working with DFT on those particulars.

But I think it's one recruiting, it's pay, and then once we get 'em in, I do think people feel more supported when they get to their school with stronger principals, more principal training.

And I'm also excited that we're building our own bench.

And so we're taking academic intervention, as paraeducators, people that have four-year degrees that aren't certified, using master teachers that have been in a system to train them in the classroom.

So we're actually thinking ahead also in building a bench so this can be sustainable as we know our most veteran teachers will probably start to retire in the next three to four years.

So we'll be well-positioned to actually build our own people that know our kids, been in the classroom, know the challenges and the opportunities, and it's a very diverse group and I'm excited about that.

We're, by memory, I think 90% of the candidates that we're building to become teachers are of color, and there are many black men in that cohort as well.

And that's the other part of being intentional about matching the needs of our students with our teachers.

Yeah.

I should describe myself, it's not a full collective bargaining agreement, it's an agreement about safety protocols and- Re-opening of schools.

Yeah, but it makes a big difference in terms of, I think, just the outlook that teachers have that they're being kept safe and that the kids are also being looked after.

Quickly, I wanna ask you about the money coming from the federal government, an unprecedented amount of money, both to the city and to the school district and what you wanna do with that money and what difference you think that's gonna make for our kids.

Yeah, so that is primarily focused on recovery.

So this is how we're going to expand mental health support throughout the district.

We expanded summer school this past summer and the upcoming summer.

We're also hiring teachers in surplus.

So we have an allocation plan where we're fully staffed on the teacher side of staffing where we're hiring more teachers to reduce class size to maintain social distancing and to anticipate the retirements that are gonna come in the next couple of years.

We're using the money for home visits, which has been very successful.

So we did that throughout the year, but since school ended, 30,000 home visits have happened.

So we're canvasing throughout the city to knock on doors for DPSCD parents, and even non-DPSCD parents about DPSCD.

These are principals, teachers, central office staff just meeting one-on-one with families to talk about their school or a potential school.

In addition to that, we're gonna be able to continue to go one to one with our laptops, internet access.

And probably not directly linked to recovery, but probably one of the greatest long-standing issues we have in DPSCD is our facilities.

So about 600 to 800 million of that 1.2 billion that we're going to receive is going to attack our facility issue.

So we were having a lot of community engagements before the pandemic hit about just how funding works, the legacy debt with the operating debt in the bond.

And it was clear that we were probably moving in the direction to do another DPSCD bond, which was gonna be a hard hill to climb.

But now with this funding, we don't have to go to the taxpayers, we don't have to raise taxes, and we can put a major dent in our facility.

So by January, we'll have a 20-year facility plan, which will be like a blueprint set of recommendations on how to deal with buildings like Pershing, Osborn, and Cody that needs substantial work, but which the size of the school is not needed, the number of seats.

So we're gonna engage the community by feeder pattern.

Do you agree with the plan?

Do you disagree?

You know, should we renovate?

Should we build new buildings that we consolidate?

And the whole conversation is not how we take away, but how do we give back something better and not to replicate what I call the sins of emergency management of the past.

Truly engage people, know that there is a finite amount of money, but how do we best use it, and then take that back to the school board and then create a 20-year facility plan and start making major investments in our facility so we get to a point where all of our schools have air conditioning, reliable HVAC systems, roofs, masonry work, fencing around parking lots, upgraded IT.

But it's gonna take us about two to five years to get to that full implementation, but by the end of this school year, we will have a 20-year facility plan with funding connected to it.

Yeah.

Okay, Dr. Nikolai Vitti, it's always great to talk to you, and it's always exciting this time of year thinking about the opening of schools.

Good luck with everything and thanks for joining us on "American Black Journal."

Always good to talk to you.

Thank you.

The rich history of Detroit's predominantly black neighborhood known as Black Bottom is being celebrated with the installation of a Michigan historic marker.

Now, this is an area that was dominated by prominent black businesses and black residents until it was raised in the late 1950s and early 1960s to make way for the I-375 Interstate and for the Lafayette Park residential district.

Producer AJ Walker was there for this long awaited tribute to an important part of Detroit's black history.

Black Bottom was demolished.

Black Bottom is gone, but its magic remains, its legacy remains, and as Detroit shows the world its true resilience as a city and we celebrate the future, we also celebrate the past beginning today and in this moment of memorial and recognition.

So we never forget and always revere what was Black Bottom.

AJ: It was a moment that had been decades in the making.

To remember a piece of Detroit's history, celebrating a marker that will forever memorialize the thriving predominantly black community that was Black Bottom.

I wanna be clear.

Acre for acre, Black Bottom is the most culturally rich, historically significant area in Michigan's history.

The whole state of Michigan, not just the city of Detroit.

It's everybody's history.

All the seeds that was planted here in Black Bottom produced something that we bear witness to today.

You're all a part of the growth and development of those seeds that was placed here in Black Bottom.

AJ: People stood humbly, looking on as they witnessed firsthand a moment that meant so much to so many.

I'm standing on behalf of the Michigan Historical Commission, also on behalf of the Michigan History Museum and our parent agency, the Department of Natural Resources, for this important moment.

And honestly, I couldn't be more honored to have this as my assignment.

Every long-time family in this city has heard stories from their parents, their great grandparents about Black Bottom, about Paradise Valley, about the history of this city and their family.

So much of what we have today came from this area.

AJ: The Detroit mayor, Mike Duggan, acknowledges that all of the stories about Black Bottom weren't pleasant.

And there is both good and bad history.

This area was wiped out, Black Bottom largely, so Lafayette Park could be built.

A couple of years ago, I was very proud of the fact that the name of that mayor was taken off our convention center.

It's not a party history that should be celebrated.

AJ: Ray Smith, one of the founders of the Black Bottom Group says the process to get the marker started back in 2017 and it was not an easy one.

The main thing was the research in terms of making sure we've got all the correct information to reflect the truth of this area.

AJ: Their hard work paid off, but the legacy of Black Bottom, a thriving financial mecca filled with pioneers of its time, is not only engraved on the marker.

It's etched in the hearts of those like Barbara K. Hughes Smith and Sharon Sexton.

Both had family members who lived in Black Bottom.

My ancestors were a part of Black Bottom, so I have a rich history of Detroiters.

And some even came through the Underground Railroad here.

AJ: We caught up with them outside of the celebration to hear more about their families in Black Bottom.

This is my grandfather, Robert Isaac Greenidge, and he lived in Black Bottom and thrived there and made many contributions as a medical doctor.

Well, I don't need a marker to remind me that Black Bottom existed, but it's great that there is a marker that people can read 'cause there are people who go by and read historical markers.

It's kind of like a post, we were here, we existed.

But what really got to me is the fact that the mayor of Detroit even admitted that Black Bottom existed because for so long, Black Bottom wasn't included in the maps of Detroit, was not even talked about among white people.

These are pictures of my family.

This is my father.

Like I said, he was the one who was born and raised in Black Bottom.

All of these people lived in Black Bottom, except for my brother, he lived with us, and we didn't live in Detroit at the time.

But all these individuals, they were all very successful at what they did.

AJ: As Sharon and Barbara swap stories about the proud heritage of their Black Bottom family, they take solace in knowing that as real as these photos are, now so is the marker that commemorates Black Bottom.

We need to share an update about this year's Detroit Jazz Festival, which we recently previewed on the show.

The Jazz Fest had planned to return to in-person audiences this year, but now organizers have decided to go virtual because of the recent surge in COVID cases and because of construction that's still taking place in Hart Plaza.

So performances are gonna be streamed and broadcast live for free.

More details are gonna be released soon, and we'll make sure to relay those to you here on "American Black Journal."

That's gonna do it for us this week.

You can always find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org, and you can always keep up with us on Facebook and on Twitter.

Stay safe and we'll see you next week.