Hope Rias ’97 MAT writes: “After graduating, I taught high school in New York City; Durban, South Africa; and Indianapolis, before pursuing my PhD. I completed my PhD in Education Leadership and Policy Studies at Indiana University in 2016. I am now working as an education professor at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, Virginia. I published my first monograph, titled St. Louis School Desegregation: Patterns of Progress and Peril (2019 Palgrave Macmillan). In it, I examine Missouri’s history of soft racism to show how schools evaded desegregation until the 1980s. In the final chapter, I look at the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 to show that his school never desegregated. I offer the suggestion that the lack of cultural interaction and lack of school financial resources that Brown endured as a result of faulty school policy represent the worst case scenario. I plead with education policymakers to revisit desegregation policies to eliminate the contemporary problem of school segregation.”
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Class of 1997