In 2015, we held two summits with more than 35 educators including backgrounds such as a community advocate, a Diversity and Inclusion Director, university professors, and high school teachers. The group committed to a collaborative approach and came up with these three objectives:

1. An investigation into the history of racial politics in KC and its schools and how that affects us today.
2. Intentional and multiple dialogues between diverse students of the KC area, held digitally and in-person.
3. A counter-narrative website that allows KC youth to tell and react to shared stories, and break down barriers.

Among our observations at the 2015 and 2016 Educator Summits, we found several things to be key motivators for follow through, including:

1. Representatives from higher learning institutions seemed to immediately see the importance and value of facilitating events for high school students on their campuses.
2. The support of and commitment from higher learning institutions serving as partners proved to be key to the collaborative student approach of 2015-2016.
3. Working alongside representatives from higher learning institutions ignited high school teachers to build a collaborative, strategic plan to connect their students.

A partnership manifested in the summer of 2015 and continued in 2016 between Shawnee Mission East in Johnson County, Kansas, a largely white, affluent high school, and Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, an urban, largely black/Latino high school. This partnership has fostered intentional dialogue about the structural forms of racism in America and in Kansas City today, focusing on the American education system in particular. Rockhurst University contributed by facilitating deliberative dialogues in small groups and will continue this partnership. Educators from the Kansas City, Missouri, Metropolitan Community College have committed to using Tanner Colby’s book for 2016-2017.