On this week’s episode of the Origination Point Podcast, Bill is joined by friend and guest Stacy Parrish for another segment of Hope and Healing with Bill De La Cruz.

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Hope And Healing With Stacy Parrish

We are continuing our series around hope and healing. We are talking to folks around the country about how they are doing, getting through this crazy time that we are in with Coronavirus transition, and systems imploding. We have a great guest who is a colleague of mine from Denver. Her name is Stacy Parrish. I watched her grow from being a teacher to assistant principal to principal. She is a mom and a partner. She has a lot of great attributes and is grounded in her Earth beliefs. I’m excited to have you here. We are going to jump right in. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, and what your family was like when you were growing up? Start with your origination story.

I grew up in a small town in Kansas. It is called Baxter Springs, Kansas. It is famous because it was the first cow town in Kansas. It’s where the first cow towns originated when they came from Texas. That is our claim to fame. It was a small town that had a main street, a Walmart, and a country club. I grew up there through my sophomore year. A lot of life circumstances happened, and I moved to an even smaller town in rural Oklahoma called Adair, Oklahoma. My life changed dramatically. That is one of the first origination points for me.

I went from being a town kid, where there were stoplights and pavement, to a kid on a state highway surrounded by cattle. The whole school campus from kindergarten through high school was on one little plot of land in Adair. It was different from anything I had ever known. There is something beautiful about Middle America at times and the heartland. It was the first time in my life that I was on a tractor, hayfield, and FFA. I was showing steers and heifers. I learned what it meant to work hard and to appreciate the sunrise. I felt like I just started to learn a lot about the strength I had within myself.

You went from a small town to a different small town. What were some of the lessons you got there? How were you interacting with the people there? What were some of those first lessons or messages you got about life or yourself that were important to you?

Life slows down in rural America. I was living with my aunt and uncle for a long time. I then moved in with a local family there. I ended up graduating there while living in their home. A lot of times, you’re waking up early in the morning. You wake up with the sun. I began to appreciate the quietness, the slower pace, and the connection with what it meant to work in the dirt, and the appreciation of learning where your food comes from. We were small-town cow-calf operators.

You appreciate all of the hard work that goes into running a democracy. I started learning what it meant to sweat and do so without complaining. Small towns are great because you have small-time basketball teams. It was the type of town where everything closes down on a Friday night, and everyone goes to the game. You learn about small-town pride and what it means when everybody in a town believes infinitely in what you can do. That is the beauty of small-town life. It is the first time you feel like the whole community is behind you because everyone knows your name. Everyone goes to your basketball games. It is a different place to grow up and become a young person.

 

It is interesting hearing your story because I only know you as the grownup Stacy. When you share that, I connect your strong work ethic and your commitment to the kids in your school. Seeing that, I understand where the roots of it are in terms of that work ethic, commitment, and belief in them that maybe some of them don’t have in themselves. You lived with a local family. Was your family not present? Tell me a little bit about that.

My mother struggled with a lot of things growing up. She was a single mom. I have two older brothers. She worked hard, but she could never make ends meet. She was also wrestling with a lot of things within herself. That made her struggle to be a mom. When I knew she couldn’t take care of me any longer, and when both of my brothers were off to college and out of the house, I knew it was time to find a place that was safe for me. I moved in with my aunt and uncle for a period of time.

I lived with them for a year. They were such a different family unit. When you come from a broken home, when no one is there to say hello to you and how your day was, and when you have food on the table every night, it is not always the dream. It can be overwhelming. It was overwhelming for me to adjust to almost such a stable and predictable life. I struggled with my aunt and uncle at that time. Things didn’t work out. Our relationship deteriorated. An amazing and beautiful local family took me in. I’m forever indebted to that family. I’m also incredibly indebted to my aunt and uncle for everything they provided to me at that time.

I’m Native American. I’m a proud member of the Klamath Tribe, but I was raised by my mother. She is a White woman, and it’s a complicated family dynamic. The fact that I look like my father made it difficult for my mom to teach us anything about our culture and where we come from. I feel like I was this constant reminder of my father. I also grew up void of learning what it meant to be a Native American woman.

What the small town gave me was an opportunity. I played basketball. I had a great coach who put my name out there. I was gifted this wonderful scholarship to Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. It is a tribal college. I said, “Yes.” Going to Bacone and being in and on a Native American serving campus after being raised away from it, from my father, and from my homelands my entire life had a profound impact on my life because I started learning what it meant to be indigenous.

I had professors that looked like me and professors that taught histories I was never taught in school. Bacone gifted me this beautiful network of Indian kids who are the closest friends I still have now. We powwowed together. We went on the Powwow Highway. We protested to save our college against a lot of things that were happening politically on campus. That is also an origination point for me because it was the first time where I also felt empowered by the community that I was in. I also learned how to be proud of the skin that I was in. I started finding my voice at Bacone.

How did you end up in Colorado?

Those rocky mountains lure you here, especially when you grow up in Kansas and Oklahoma. They are rather flat. I worked in Kansas City as a teacher. I would always vacation out here. I’m sorry I’m one of those terrible transplant people. That’s what lured me out here to Colorado. I came out here when I accepted the assistant principal job.

You have been there ever since. You have had quite a leadership journey. Let’s talk a little bit about some of your early messages about you and being a leader, about who you are and what you are capable of, both from the local family and indigenous community to wherever you landed in Colorado as an assistant principal. I’m sure there is a lot in there that you got in terms of who you are or what your abilities are as a female indigenous leader.

I’m going to start with a professor whom I will never forget. I was at the University of Oklahoma. It was the early 2000s. The class was called something like Diversity in Education. She was my field experience professor with whom I would debrief what I was learning at the school I was assigned. I remember one time, I was fired up about the things that I saw in my first field experience in Oklahoma City. I was ready to share my opinions about what needed to happen.

I was young, bright-eyed, and ready to do so much. She grabbed my hand in a debrief session. She said, “Stacy, the problem with you is you think you can make a difference. The faster you learn you can’t, the better your career will be.” I remember thinking, “You are one of my mentors in the College of Education. Everything I do from this point forward, I’m going to prove you wrong.”

I feel like I have been doing that ever since. That was something I remember that shaped me. That was the first time I thought someone told me no, and that how things are is the way they will always be. That was jolting to me. I remember the first principal I ever had, Raul Quintana. He was this amazing, intriguing man who always wore these powerful suits. I don’t think he ever knew what to do with me because I had a big voice. I always had opinions when I was a young English teacher. I remember teaching in 107B. I know he always looked at me because he was an old-school Latinx guy.

A quick backstory is that I came out as lesbian when I was a young teacher. He got to see my stumbling and fumbling coming-out story emerge as this bright-eyed teacher teaching in the urban environment. He told me one day, “Because you are a lesbian, you are going to have to work harder than everyone else. Because you are a woman of color, you are going to have to work harder than everyone else in education. Because you are a queer woman of color, you will have to work harder than everyone else in all you do.” I remember being mad when he said that and put off by it. It wasn’t until years later that I realized he was exactly right. I understood what he said. That also sticks with me to this day.

Has it happened in your experience that you have had to work harder to get where you are and stay where you are?

Absolutely. Misogynist culture is real. In a complex and larger educational system, misogyny and sexism are real. It is ingrained in everything we do because large school systems are modeled after Corporate America. I find that to be true.

Misogyny and sexism are present in the complex educational system. They are ingrained in everything because large school systems are modeled after Corporate America. Share on X

You and I have had a lot of conversations about institutional bias and institutional racism. How do you maneuver through that system and do the things that I have seen you do to keep yourself and your students grounded? Tell our audience a little bit about the school that you lead and the students that you teach, and also some of the native ideology that you work to infuse into it. I don’t want to counter that with this institutionalized misogynist structure and how you manage to nuance it. I have seen you do things that I don’t think a lot of people would have the guts to do in terms of bringing in your ideology to your students and your staff.

I teach in a state-accredited early college in Denver, Colorado, in an area known as the Far Northeast. I serve the neighborhood of Montbello. It has had a complicated racial history since the beginning of Denver. That plays out constantly daily, not only in everything that happens politically in our city but politically in our district. Our campus is tucked away off of I-70. It is 13 acres.

I love our school. We are an early college. It means something when as a Title 1 school, you declare that college and college degrees are for everyone. We don’t mess around on our campus. I feel like we have assembled this powerful group of human beings to lead and influence our kids every single day in this crazy work that we do. I’m emotional now because we just graduated our class. They are the class that was a freshman when I was a brand new principal.

This was the first class that you had seen all the way through, starting from their ninth-grade year all the way through. Congratulations. On top of that, with COVID, you couldn’t do any in-person graduation and all the things that you would have done as the leader of the school.

We had a graduation drive-through parade with all of us social distancing. The beautiful thing about our students is they came with their full entourage of family members. They came fully decked out with flags of the countries they are from, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico. It was an hour and a half of nonstop horn honking, cheering, and howling. We are the wolf pack so we howl. They are just these beautiful humans.

The work that we do on our campus is crazy hard with the early college. When students can start their first college classes and the second semester of their freshman year, it puts this different stake in the ground. Everything we do is about equity. You can’t just talk about it. Every single thing in the school has to be set up on how to support all students, how to get them through, and how to help them navigate higher education, high school, and being a teenager.

I’m proud of the work we do. It is magical. I also feel like, as a leader, it is my job to protect them from everything political that’s happening in our district, city, and state. I’m trying to think of how to put this, Bill, because I don’t want to just ramble. I’m trying to get to my point. What was the first part of your question again, Bill?

We have talked a lot about institutional racism and bias in the educational system designed for White men. The community you work with is mostly families and students of color and middle to low socioeconomics, yet you are being successful not only in getting these kids through high school but also getting them partial college credits as well. How do you manage to do that and infuse some of your native cultural groundings in some of your practices? How do you nuance all of this in a system that wasn’t designed for somebody like you to even be a leader?

In my culture, everyone has a voice and every voice matters. When I speak, I don’t just speak for myself. I’m speaking for my tribe and my people. I’m speaking for everything that we know and believe because we are a collective, and we are this unit. Everything I do and say, and every decision I make, I make it knowing that every single detail will have an immediate ripple on our community. In public education, a lot of leaders might make decisions because they are asked to make a decision because they are supposed to make a decision, or make up their mind about something. They are told to do something and they do it.

 

That is not the type of leader I am. I’m the type of leader that is much like, “How come? Who says? What is the policy? Who is your boss? Who made that decision?” I found this very off-putting in a misogynistic culture that believes in top-down hierarchical authority. Those questions are obnoxious to a lot of people. What I’m getting at is, “Why are we doing the things that we do? Can we do it in a better way that serves the greater community that is more innovative and sustainable for teachers?”

I have found my voice more as a principal because if you don’t have it or you waiver and change when your boss changes or when policy changes, you are never going to have a dramatic or profound impact on the school that you serve. In my school, they are my tribe in a lot of ways. I operate every day that everything I do will impact them not only on that day but for months and years to come. I couldn’t imagine doing this hard work any other way.

You will never have a dramatic or profound impact on the school you are serving if you waiver and change when your boss or policy changes. Share on X

That also means that I have had to stand up to a lot of those messages. Some of these are painful to relive. When I was first a principal, it was like, “Speak when you are spoken to in this meeting. Stay on message. Don’t try to make a point. No one in here wants to hear you talk. You are only a first-year principal. Give it 3 to 4 years, and maybe people will listen to what you have to say.” I have had someone tell me to just sit there and look pretty. I have been told to say, “Please and thank you more.”

These microaggressions happen from individuals who are part of a White dominant culture where they don’t realize how I say something might be threatening, triggering, or obnoxious. I don’t know how I look sometimes. I remember being told by a leader one time, “Why do you wear your hair in braids? Are you trying to out minority other people in the room?” I had no idea what that meant, but I did know what it meant. Somewhere along the way, as long as I’m doing right by my entire school community and I’m making decisions because of them and on behalf of them, what is the worst that can happen?

It sounds like you are fully aware of the culture that you work in. You haven’t lost sight of who you are. You are still able to bring that into everything you do, even knowing that there may be some repercussions from it from people who are systematized that they want to try to make you fit in versus letting you be yourself. That is commendable that you haven’t lost sight of who you are, even within a system where it would be easy to do that and know the population of students you work with.

A couple of other things I got from that conversation is that you are looking at it from this circle of life perspective that everything that you do on one side comes back in some way. That is what you give to your students. What I also got in that is the seven generations look. It is not about what is happening now. It is about what is going to happen in the future. That is a great value about who you are and that you are able to infuse it.

That is important for people to understand that when we become systematized, we lose our sense and sight of who we are. The system slowly erodes the values and beliefs that bring people into education and gives you messages that you must comply, or you have to do these things this way. You have been able to maintain that sense of who you are. It is a great message as a leader and for the folks you lead and the students in the building that you graduated.

As we think about your kids, what do you think of this world that they are going into with COVID, the pandemic, high unemployment, and the things we have seen over and over about the way Black men are being treated in America? What are some of the things that keep you up? What do you think about in terms of where you are sending your kids out into the world now?

In indigenous culture, there is the teaching of the medicine wheel. Nuances change from tribe to tribe, but the general essence is wherever you are is where you are for as long as you choose to be. You make a choice not to be there anymore, and you step into another place in the wheel. I have always loved the teaching of the medicine wheel because it is about not only being deliberate and making a decision, but it also gives you a lot of grace about when you can step into your own power and make a choice to grow. When I think about our students and who we are graduating, where they come from, and what we have tried to teach them these four years, I feel like these particular students have seen our school grow from a school in chaos. It was unsafe and in a mess four years ago.

 

I was in and out of your building with you on some of those things to support that.

People had this attitude. District people were like, “You will learn. You will see how it is out here. Don’t get too comfortable. This is how it always is.” I was like, “No, it is not. How come? Who says? Who is your boss?” I remembered my first day with our new staff four years ago. I remember presenting this ambitious vision and telling them everything we were going to do to do that. A staff member raised his hand and said, “How long do you anticipate it is going to take before we do all of that? How many years?” I remember saying, “This October. We can do it by October.” Our staff was like, “October?”

It was in August.

I know they were like, “She is crazy.” That’s how our kids were. Kids vibrated into the building, and I was a brand new principal. The kids were probably like, “This woman is crazy. She wants us to do what? She expects us to do what?” What any great leader finds out is kids are going to rise to any expectation that you set. Everyone in a school community will keep the pace that you set when it is driven by something ambitious and when it is a challenge.

 

When I think back to this senior class, they are the class that saw us do this work for them and on their behalf. They just kept seeing us cross things off the list. We weren’t in early college. Now we are in early college. We need to triple the number of professors on our campus. I was like, “Done.” We are going to start awarding college degrees. “Who is going to be our first one? You are. Done.” We are going to renovate this campus.“No, we are not. We don’t even own this building.” We now own the building. We dropped $11 million to renovate it.

Everything we said we were going to do, even if there was a fight involved, a board comment involved, or a town hall that was involved, our kids saw us do it. I feel like we are graduating these amazing human beings who were like, “We don’t know what is in store. We don’t know what this principal is going to make us do.” They look around the school. They were like, “I don’t know if it’s the best school right now.” They saw us rise, question, fight, and scrap.

When you see our campus now and the outcomes that we are getting, which are insane, we are graduating students who are like, “I have 48 college credits. Doesn’t everyone?” They walk a different way. They have attitude and voice. They say it and walk in a certain way. We have shown them and truly modeled to them that you are fully in charge of creating your own community. You are fully in charge of putting big ideas out there, and going after them.

Without sounding corny, I feel like this graduating class is the most ready, not only academically but with the spirit and attitude that you are going to have to need as a person of color walking around in America now. They are the class with self-actualization. They can and will do it and have every right to. They are going to vote and bring us out of this on the other side in a different way than we imagined.

If I use all the buzzwords, what you are doing is you are infusing culturally responsive practices, social and emotional intelligence, and all of the things that people think you teach separately. You are infusing those into everything you do like vulnerability-based trust and all of the things we talk about. You are actualizing those through the ways that you show up and model to your staff and kids. What a beautiful way to lead. Thank you so much for that story. What are you doing for self-care and to heal yourself? What are you hopeful for? We have been through but we are still in this crazy time. Nobody knows what the next normal is going to look like. Tell me a little bit about your own self-care, healing, and what you are hopeful for.

The sun and the dirt are what have kept me grounded in all of this. I started growing traditional plants and traditional medicines to use in ceremonies. I started growing them on our little plot of land here, and something beautiful happened. I started planting sweetgrass. My wife made fun of me because she was like, “You are watching grass grow.” I will lead her out into the yard and I’m like, “Look at it now.” She was like, “Yes, it is growing.” She doesn’t get it. She has her own thing. Have you ever seen sweetgrass growing wild?

I have a challenge finding it out here. I can talk to you off-air about that.

The blades are wide. They have this overwhelming smell of vanilla. They change the soil. As the grass grows, it becomes black and has a difference to it. I love to go out in my garden and check out the sweetgrass and how it is going. I love to invite people over to harvest it. I started growing tobacco. I started growing my own tobacco plants. Have you ever seen tobacco as well?

I haven’t seen tobacco.

It is a huge plant that grew far taller. I’m 5’7” and it was far above my head. It erupts in these top blossoms. It has this wild fragrance. The leaves are waxy and firm. I grow traditional plants that I can tend to harvest myself, use medicinally, bring back home to Oregon to use in ceremonies, and share with my family and friends. That is the thing that keeps me completely connected to this earth.

What are you hopeful for?

Speaking as a public educator, when other leaders all around the country start seeing their district plans for remote or hybrid learning, I’m hopeful that they will speak up when districts are replicating what we do in person and trying to shove it online. I’m hopeful that more leaders will speak up and be vocal about what education can look like. I hope that school leaders go rogue and do what is best for their communities to truly change the way we deliver education. I’m hopeful of that.

As Stacy, the mom, the partner, and the gardener, what are you hopeful for?

I’m married to this amazing woman who is an attorney turned kindergarten teacher. We are moms to a rising first-grader. This pandemic has already made us slow down, but I’m hopeful that it keeps allowing us to figure out new ways to communicate, move, and be a family with one another. I’m hopeful that this global pandemic will keep making us a different family unit than what we looked like when we were in the mad rush of commuting every day, an hour-long commute, getting home, and going to the grocery store. It was fast-paced. I’m hopeful of the lessons we have learned of slowing down, turning off tech devices, and listening to the birds every morning together. That has been something crazy that we have started doing. I’m hopeful that we don’t lose any of that and that we keep this pace.

The COVID-19 pandemic made everyone slow down. We should be hopeful that it keeps allowing us to figure out new things to communicate, move, and take care of our families. Share on X

I have one more question for you. How do people get in touch with you if somebody was moved by something they heard from you? What is the best way to reach out to you?

On Instagram, I’m @StacyParrishKlamath. Instagram is the best for sure to get ahold of me that way. I love networking and connecting online.

This is my last question. What is your legacy going to be? What do you want to be known for?

When you ask me that question, I immediately leap to something that takes me out of the education world, but I also don’t want to just do that.

Do whatever you want.

There are many rules. It is society’s pressure.

We have no boss and nobody to answer to but the higher power right here.

I want my legacy to be the school leader who finally leads a large district courageously and boldly in anti-racist practices that truly decolonize how education has always been delivered. Everyone has been looking for that leader and district. They don’t find it for a lot of reasons. I want to be that leader. I would love it.

It is great to chat with you. You have been listening to Stacy Parrish, a leader, mom, partner, and an all-around great person on the Earth. We will see you next time.

 

Important Links

• Stacy Parrish
• @StacyParrishKlamath on Instagram
• @BilldelaC on Twitter
• @BilldelaC on Instagram
• Bill de la Cruz on Facebook