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Author: Guest Contributors/Friday, February 20, 2026/Categories: News
February is Black History Month, a meaningful time to reflect, uplift and learn. Throughout the month, we’re sharing stories and perspectives from NSPRA members that honor lived experiences and explore how communication can foster belonging in our schools and communities all year round. If you would like to contribute a personal reflection connected to Black History Month or share a communications strategy, initiative or campaign your district is leading to celebrate, educate or engage your community during the month, please email Janine Thorn at vpdiversity@nspra.org.
Building Trust Without a Blueprint
Building a Beloved Community
Why Carter G. Woodson Still Teaches Us
Finding My Voice Before I Knew I Had One
Originally published Feb. 20, 2026
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I did not step into an established communications department. I stepped into possibility.
When I began this role, there was no precedent for districtwide communications—no handbook, no inherited systems, no clear definition of what the work was supposed to look like. This position had never existed here before. What did exist was a growing recognition that how a district communicates matters just as much as what it does.
I am still in my first year. I am still building. And much of this work is happening in real time.
Being the first means operating without the comfort of hindsight. It means creating structure while simultaneously testing it. It means learning the culture of an organization deeply enough to speak on its behalf, while also helping shape how it listens to itself.
As a communicator in public education, and as a Black professional navigating institutional space, this kind of work feels familiar. It requires discernment, patience, and an understanding that voice is never neutral. Every message carries history, expectation, and impact, even when it is simply trying to inform.
Black History Month invites reflection not only on legacy, but on labor—the often unseen work of building systems that make belonging possible. For me, this season has been a reminder that communication is not an accessory to leadership. It is foundational to trust.
In these early months, I have learned that communication gaps rarely exist in isolation. They are often the result of years of silos, inconsistent processes, or well-intentioned urgency that outpaced clarity. My role has been to slow things down enough to make sense of them. To listen before prescribing. To ask questions that had not previously been asked—not to disrupt, but to understand.
There have been moments already where the weight of the role has become unmistakable. In moments of uncertainty or heightened concern, words take on outsized importance. Tone matters. Timing matters. Silence matters. I am learning, sometimes in real time, how to balance transparency with care, accuracy with empathy.
Because this role is new, every decision sets a tone. Every process becomes a prototype. Every message helps define what our community can expect from us going forward. That responsibility is not lost on me.
What grounds me is the belief that school communities deserve communication that respects their intelligence and honors their lived experience. Families deserve information that is clear, timely, and honest. Staff deserve alignment and consistency. Students deserve to see themselves reflected in the stories we tell and the values we elevate.
I am still learning what it means to hold an institutional voice. I am learning how to advocate for clarity when ambiguity feels easier. I am learning how to build trust not through perfection, but through consistency and follow-through.
Black History Month reminds me that voice is shaped over time. It is informed by experience, sharpened by responsibility, and strengthened through accountability. The work of building something new, especially within long-standing systems, requires patience and intention.
I am proud to be laying the foundation for something that did not exist before, even as it continues to take shape. I am mindful that what is being built now will influence how this district communicates long after my first year is complete.
History is not only what we look back on. Sometimes, it is what we are quietly constructing, one deliberate step at a time.
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Across the country, school communications professionals are carrying a tremendous weight. You are navigating polarized environments, responding to criticism that often misunderstands your purpose, and working every day to keep communities informed, connected, and grounded in truth. In moments like these, it can feel as though the work is under siege. And yet, you continue. You show up. You hold the line. That persistence is not accidental; it is the quiet, steady heartbeat of public education.
We often talk about love and compassion as if they are soft, effortless qualities. But anyone who has done this work knows the truth: love is forged, not found. Compassion is shaped, not stumbled into. They are not organic states that simply appear when we need them. They are the result of the heat of conflict, disagreement, frustration and the uncomfortable work of staying in the room when everything in you wants to walk out.
Even in creating our district's "Beloved Community Campaign," I had to confront that reality. There were disagreements. There were differences of opinion. There was stonewalling. There were moments that stirred real anger and deep frustration. I had to sit with emotions I didn’t want to feel, and conversations I didn’t want to have. But that journey, that messy, imperfect, human journey, is what ultimately led to a deeper understanding of love and compassion. Not the easy kind, but the kind that is earned through struggle.
At the center of this work is the vision of the Beloved Community — a concept created by philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce and popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It describes a global society rooted in justice, equal opportunity, and unconditional love, where poverty, racism, and violence are eliminated through nonviolent means. It is a world where conflicts are resolved peacefully, universal understanding is nurtured, and every person’s inherent worth is recognized and celebrated. This vision is not abstract for us; it is the foundation for the culture we are striving to build in our schools.
Together with Superintendent Dr. Kelly Aramaki, we created the Beloved Community Campaign and Toolkit to intentionally build that kind of environment across all 28 of our schools in the Bellevue (Wash.) School District, one where every student, staff member, and family feels safe, valued, and seen. The toolkit is not just a set of materials; it is a roadmap for culture-building. It includes shared language, communication templates, guidance for school leaders, family-facing resources, and clear expectations for how we talk about belonging, safety, and dignity in our schools.
The goal of the campaign goes far beyond the toolkit or the posters now displayed in our buildings. Those are the starting points, the shared foundation. The real power emerges when students and schools begin creating their own meaning and living into the values in ways that reflect their unique communities. We saw this almost immediately at Tillicum Middle School, where students created a video sharing tangible ways they plan to “call in” peers who may not feel part of the “in” crowd. They also developed a resource list of supportive phrases students can use when witnessing bullying or when someone is “othered.” This is exactly what the Beloved Community looks like in practice: students taking ownership of the values and shaping them into everyday actions.
This campaign is not separate from policy — it is anchored in it. Our School Board strengthened several key policies to support this work, including BSD’s updated non-discrimination procedure, its revised student discipline policy, and a set of supporting reinforcement policies that collectively affirm the district’s commitment to culturally responsive learning environments. Together, these policies ensure that discrimination is clearly prohibited, that restorative and fair discipline practices guide our responses to harm, and that every school is accountable for creating spaces where all students feel safe, valued, and respected.
And yes, the work is being challenged. Yes, the noise is loud. Yes, the pressure is real. But your presence matters. Your voice matters. Your commitment matters. You are not just communicators: You are culture shapers, trust builders and caretakers of the public narrative. You help communities remember who they are at their best.
If there is one message I hope you carry with you, it is this: love and compassion are not the absence of struggle. They are the result of it. They are what emerge when we choose to stay engaged, stay grounded and stay human in the face of challenge. The beloved community we all hope for is not a distant dream — it is something you help build every single day.
Why Carter G. Woodson Still Teaches Us By: Janine Thorn, chief communications and engagement officer for Bellevue (Wash.) Pubic Schools Originally published Feb. 10, 2026
Originally published Feb. 6, 2026
Before I ever understood storytelling as a profession, I understood it as survival.
I grew up as a little Black girl who looked physically different from the people around me. My skin was Black, my features were Black, but my eyes were the lightest shade of blue. At a time before social media, before curated feeds and affirmations telling us we came in every shade and expression, difference felt isolating. There was no algorithm to normalize what made me stand out. There was only the mirror, and the quiet work of trying to make sense of who I was in a world that did not offer language for it. And in a world where bullying was the exception to embracing what looked “different.”
By the time I reached high school, that confusion had hardened into self-criticism. I carried it with me into the classroom, especially English class. Every day, Ms. Jackson, my English teacher, asked us to begin with a journal entry. No prompts. No guardrails. Just write.
And I did. Honestly. Repeatedly. Painfully.
My entries were filled with self-hate, insecurity, and frustration. I wrote exactly how I felt, unfiltered, unpolished, unresolved. What I didn’t know then was that Ms. Jackson was reading between the lines. She never corrected my tone. Never tried to soften my language or tell me how I should feel. She didn’t take my voice away. Instead, she paid attention to it.
One day, she introduced me to the book The Bluest Eye.
The irony landed immediately. A story centered on a little Black girl who longed for the very physical feature I resented. As a high school senior, I wasn’t prepared for the complexity of Toni Morrison’s prose, the way she refused simplicity, and held beauty and pain in the same sentence. The way Black girlhood was rendered with depth instead of decoration. It was the first time I encountered storytelling that didn’t explain itself to be palatable.
It changed me.
Ms. Jackson didn’t assign the book casually. She had connected my journal entries, my interior life, to a body of work that offered both mirror and meaning. She saw that my writing wasn’t something to be fixed, but something to be fed. She told me she believed I had a gift, but that gifts require inspiration and perspective to grow.
She encouraged me to make my story, my realization, the focus of my college essay.
So I did.
That decision altered the trajectory of my life. I went on to attend Hampton University, an HBCU where I was immersed, and exposed for the first time, to Black authors, poets, journalists, and media professionals who treated narrative as both art and responsibility. I learned that storytelling was about expression, context, power, and truth. I learned how history lived inside language, and how voice, when sharpened with care, could shape understanding, challenge systems, and hold institutions accountable.
I majored in journalism and communications. My personal reflection became a professional calling.
Today, I work in public education communications and crisis response, spaces where words carry weight and silence carries consequence. Black History Month, for me, not only honors the past, it recognizes how history shows up in the present. It informs how I listen. How I frame. How I decide what must be said, what must be protected, and what must be named plainly.
The journals I once filled with self-doubt taught me something essential: people often reveal their deepest truths before they know how to advocate for themselves. My job now is to create space for those truths to be heard without distortion. To tell stories that do not flatten complexity. To lead with integrity when narrative is contested and trust is fragile.
I often think about Ms. Jackson and the quiet precision of her leadership. She did not rescue me. She did not rewrite me. She recognized potential and paired it with exposure. That is what education, and communication at its best can do.
Black History is the stories we celebrate and the lineage of people who made room for us to see ourselves differently. It is the reminder that voice, once discovered, carries obligation.
I carry that with me every day.
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