By Kelsey Blanton

Assistant Editorials Editor

Blue Springs South has never been known for having a very diverse staffs, but with the increasing numbers of minority students  coming to South, the administration will have adjust their teaching staff and find a way to make it diverse as well.

South principal Charlie Belt has a lot of say in who gets hired at South.

“We are able to interview teaching staff, our secretaries and our custodians,” he said. “We interview with the consultation or the help of Human Resources department at the district level; we make decisions on who the best candidate is and offer the position to the best one that we have to choose from,” Belt said.

Having a lot of say in who gets hired means he has a say in whether or not a minority gets hired as well. Since the Blue Springs School District includes kids from Lee’s Summit, Blue Springs and Independence which are 80 percent white, while African Americans and other minorities only account for 8 percent of the population in the towns that feed into South, it makes it a little bit harder to attract minorities to the district because the towns feeding into it aren’t very racially diverse.

Belt has a theory on why South struggles with being able to hire minorities.

“I think it is a combination of a bunch of factors,” he said. “One, I think that we have had a hard time attracting candidates that are African-American, Latino or any other ethnic group that we could talk about. I think that it is common across suburban school districts. I think it is also a problem.”

Being an African-American student at South, I do believe that it wouldn’t hurt to hire more teachers who not only have the same skin color as me but can relate to me in a way a white teacher might not be able to. I am not saying that I would only want an all-black staff. But for some issues, it would be nice to have someone I could go and talk to that would understand me. Having a more diverse staff doesn’t help only the kids who attend South; it could also potentially help boost the student enrollment by showing the community that there is a concerted effort to increase diversity in the district.

Belt discussed the ways that the district has been trying to increase the number of minorities in the staff.

“We have had human resources staff, along with principals, go to historically black colleges and go to education school recruitment days in an effort to try to increase diversity, but we have not been successful. It is certainly something that we recognize and want to continue to work on,” Belt said.

South plans on doing more than just going out to historically black colleges and recruitment days to expand the diversity at South. With just recently hiring two African-American teachers, Brandon Dean and Marlee Bunch and already having Darrin Brownlee, one of South’s custodians, they have seemed to make some improvements. This is good but the district can always do more and really make it known that they are looking to make their teaching staff more diverse.

Belt shared what he thinks will help with diversity and making South a better school overall.

“I think the other thing that we continue to talk about here at South and at the school district level is to recruit our own, to make education and teaching high school and coaching high school sports attractive, make it something that is interesting and a great profession to all of our kids at South,” Belt said.

Minorities do make up over 14 percent of the student body at South, and that may not sound like a lot, but it is. It won’t hurt the district to push a little more to see more minorities step into their office for an interview so the teaching staff can start to reflect the student body. Having only 3 staff members who are African-American is a small step into something that needs to take off sometime soon.