((PKG)) ADOPTION 2 / EDUCATION ((Banner: School)) ((Reporter: Claire Morin-Gibourg)) ((Camera: Arzouma Kompaoré)) ((Map: Seattle, Washington; Albuquerque, New Mexico)) ((NATS)) ((Nyara, Adoptee)) One of my best friends came over to me and said, “Timany just said she doesn’t want to be your friend because you're black.” That made me get mad and go and walk out of the class sometimes. I would just, I would just go out of school and stuff. ((Stephanie Poole, Nyara's Adoptive Mother)) So, this is the behavior I was talking about. She would get punished for leaving class, when class was an environment where kids were calling her out for the color of her skin. ((NATS)) ((Stephanie Poole, Nyara's Adoptive Mother)) Yeah, Carter's already internalized that and said, “I don’t want to be black.” And that’s a horrible thing to hear your son say that he doesn’t want to be who he is, you know? By the end of kindergarten, they wanted to qualify him for social-emotional for Special Ed also. I went right to the Special Ed department and said, I want these taken off. Because this is literally the school-to-prison pipeline where we’re talking about how can you list these descriptors of 'violent' for a 6 year-old boy? ((Nicholas Zill, Research Psychologist)) The thing that's striking is that with many a large minority and even a majority of adopted children often have behavioral issues in the classroom and they have some difficulty getting along with other children at a higher rate than biological children do. And that was a consistent finding that we had in our research studies. Generally speaking, black children do have a somewhat higher rate of problems within the adoptive population as well as in the biological population. That does show up. ((Stephanie Poole, Nyara's Adoptive Mother)) There’s so many layers of, if you look at the curriculum it's mostly white. If you look at books, they're mostly white. And all of these things just disenfranchised our kids of color year after year after year. And now, having adopted black kids and having to pretty much fight for them so much to get them what they need in school, has changed my lens completely. ((Constance Lindsey, Research Associate, Urban Institute)) If you're growing up in a home that doesn't have a college- educated black person and you're able to see one at school who's your teacher, that might signal to you that, “Hey, I can do this, too.” I actually have another study that shows that having a same-race teacher for black students decreases rates of discipline actions. And so, you're less likely to get suspended or expelled if you have a black teacher. And so, that might be related to how teachers think about misbehavior. So, if you have a white teacher who isn't trained in cultural competency and how to work with diverse students, it might be harmful for students. ((Locator: Albuquerque, New Mexico)) ((Zach Morrison, Adoptee)) I think everything that’s happened to me at the school happened to me because I was black. A lot of people at this school had it out for me from the beginning. My principal was giving me a detention or something I didn't deserve. That made me angry. I did punch a wall and I did break the bone in my hand. ((Dale Morrison, Zach’s Adoptive Father)) He has been, from kindergarten through the only Afro- American male in his entire class all the way through. ((Ramona Martinez, Zach’s Adoptive Mother)) I believe that race was an issue for Zach when he was young when he was a little boy. I think that it was especially difficult for him going to school and not having anyone that looked like him that he could reach out to. ((Dale Morrison, Zach’s Adoptive Father)) Probably the worst incident we had was with the football team. He was the only black kid on the football team, the only one. ((Ramona Martinez, Zach’s Adoptive Mother)) He posted a picture of Zach going into the locker room after practice completely drenched. And it had been a hot day and, after practice, you know, they're all pretty sweaty and it was a photo of him and underneath it, it said, “This is Zach after a long day of picking cotton.” ((Zach Morrison, Adoptee)) I think it affected me a little bit for a while and then I just kind of got used to it. ((Stephanie Poole, Nyara's adoptive mother)) The lessons I’ve learned as a white mom and having black kids, how much institutionalized racism is in our school structure is absolutely phenomenal. And I never had to realize that before I had black kids and yet this has been the truth for all black families as far back as we can remember but because I am white, I never had to, I never had to look at that.