The Role of High School Business Administrators in Creating a Racially Just School Resource Ecosystem

• In Event: Becoming Educators: Mentorship and Justice-Oriented Praxis

Abstract

Ladson-Billings (1998) contends that “no area of schooling underscores inequity and racism better than school funding” (p. 20). Through a multimodal qualitative case study design examining high school business administrator (SBAs) dispositions, this study demonstrates that institutional racism can be perpetuated as well as disrupted through decision points made during the management of school funds, operations, and the school resource ecosystem at-large. This paper contributes a new story about the dispositions of SBAs and their resource management practices demonstrating how they both perpetuate and disrupts historical notions of the SBA’s role as separate from racial justice. As mediators of the school resource ecosystem, SBAs are uniquely positioned to affect the levels of racialized justice enacted by a school in relation to resources. These belief-driven practices need to be deeply understood, rectified, and amplified. We can not ignore the capacity of practitioners to influence access to educational opportunities in racialized ways.

Author

• Kimberly Sterin, Drexel University