Since 2015, community efforts have been instrumental on our road to an Ethnic Studies graduation requirement for our district. Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara, a community coalition of activists, educators, community leaders, and students worked closely with district representatives to bring this requirement to fruition over the course of several years. This local effort has been part of a larger statewide campaign to make Ethnic Studies a requirement for all school districts. In November 2018, the SB Unified school board approved making Santa Barbara Unified among the earlier districts in California to have an Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement that meets the A-G approved list of classes for the UC system.

Ethnic Studies benefits all students by providing a complex, rich, and critical history of the United States. These classes will help prepare our students to be global citizens with the knowledge of and the appreciation for the contributions of multiple cultures and histories. Research demonstrates that an Ethnic Studies curriculum can help close the education debt owed to students by improving our ability to engage students, which results in improved student outcomes such as increased student attendance, a reduction in push-out rates, and increased graduation rates.*

SB Unified has taken significant steps since the Ethnic Studies requirement was approved including the piloting of two cornerstone classes: English 9 Ethnic Studies and a social studies elective course, Ethnic and Social Justice Studies. We identified teachers to teach the courses, the ES Cadre, and hired expert consultants, ARE/Praxis, to help coordinate, train, and facilitate our efforts moving forward. In the 2020-21 school year, all three large traditional high schools will be offering both courses. Our community will continue to be essential to the monitoring and refinement of its expression in our high schools through the Ethnic Studies Consortium which includes representatives from Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara, the Ethnic Studies Cadre, district representatives, students, ARE/Praxis, and other community partners.

*The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies. A Research Review by Dr. Christine E. Sleeter; The Causal Effects of Cultural Relevance: Evidence from an Ethnic Studies Curriculum, by Thomas Dee, Emily Penner. Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson by Nolan L. Cabrera, Jeffrey F. Milem, Ozan Jaquette, Ronald W. Marx.

Ethnic Studies is the interdisciplinary study that centers Asian American, Black/African American, and Chicanx/Latinx, and Native American* peoples who have experienced, survived, and resisted hegemonic systems and structures of oppression. Ethnic Studies courses in Santa Barbara Unified School District aim to educate students to be socially, politically, and economically conscious about their personal connections to local and (trans)national histories. Students in these courses will study race through the intersections of social identities such as ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, ability, language, immigrant status, and class. They will analyze indigeneity, aspects of (de)colonization, white supremacy, oppression and privilege, and work towards empowering themselves as anti-racist leaders who engage in social justice activism. Dialogue drives the learning and supports the belief that each person has important knowledge, experiences, and voices to share. Students will have the opportunity to cultivate intersectional solidarity with groups of people, locally and (trans)nationally, to foster active social engagement, radical healing, and critical hope.

*These are the groups traditionally included in Ethnic Studies courses at the college level and in the California State Model Curriculum.