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"I don't see color," she used to say, "I just see kids."

As a young teacher just beginning her career in 1984, Marla Marsh looked at her students and tried to look past black and white.

"Sometimes you don't know what you don't know," said Marsh, now a Middletown

elementary principal.

"That was my barrier. I taught from a colorblind approach. We were taught that way because that was politically correct."

Growing up as a child, Tracy Ashford wondered if her teachers treated her differently because she was black.

Now a teacher in the Fairfield School District, she still wonders.

"We feel that as teachers we have to perform at 200 percent in order to be recognized at all," she said. "We feel like we represent not just ourselves, but thousands of blacks."

Since last year, educators from Middletown, Butler Tech, Fairfield, Mason, Talawanda, the Ohio Department of Education and the Ohio Board of Regents have worked with Miami University to build the Consortium on Racial Equity in K-12 Education.

Each representative has a racial equity team made up of teachers, administrators, a board member and staff

members.

The goal of the program is to teach educators to take responsibility for their biases and to talk about learning barriers in the classroom, said Middletown Superintendent Steve Price.

"This is requiring adaptive change," he said. "Changing hearts and minds of individuals. That's a difficult change to make."

The consortium is facilitated by Glenn Singleton, author of "Courageous Conversations about Race," and Circe Stumbo of West Wind Education and the Ohio Leadership Forum.

He said the consortium will help teachers and administrators analyze and change the way they view race.

There are some challenges, though.

"There's a ... belief throughout our nation that there is no racism to contend with in the system," he said.

"Most people you talk to will say 'I am not racist.' This kind of transformation is not a technical transformation, it's a cultural transformation."

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