Gwinnett County Public School’s Chief Equity and Compliance Officer Dr. Tommy Welch spoke live on GCPS Talks with host George Franco about educational equity within schools on Jan. 11, 2021. 

In this session, Welch discusses points from the previous session discussing equity, answers live anonymous questions and responds to the feedback from the equity survey and what will be included in the Equity Report for a future GCPS Board meeting, which will be broadcasted live and available in multiple languages. 

Welch thanked the community for the responses on the survey.

“Thank you all who have taken the time to complete this survey and to those of you who provided feedback,” he said. “We received thousands of requests and feedback.” 

Welch also mentioned that out of GCPS’s six focus areas of equity, the community has a strong interest in teaching and learning, student support and opportunities and high expectations for all students. 

“The feedback thus far shows that we’ve had great success, but also shows we have place to grow in areas like implicit and explicit bias training, the variability of enforcement and discipline codes, and translation services,” he said. 

One of the live anonymous questions was, “How will GCPS engage the community beyond parents in the implementation of the recommendations?” to which Welch responded, “In this space of educational equity, if we are going to increase transparency, it is important to engage our community which means if you’re a business partner [or] if you’re in the community we want to make sure you are a part of the solution as well as the parents and students.” 

Host Franco and Welch said the ultimate goal of improving GCPS educational equity is student achievement. 

— Jordan Askew