Interview With Lee Collins-Lambert On Students 4 Racial and Social Justice

Four Rivers has always been a community where people are encouraged to speak their minds and make a difference. However, despite this culture of mutual acceptance, something was missing. In a majority white school and community, there needed to be a safe space for students of color to speak their minds. Beyond that, there needed to be room for the students to make the change they wanted to make. After the incident last year, in which a teacher said the N-word in class, a group of faculty and parents joined together to think of ways to make Four Rivers a safe space for students--more importantly, students of color. Lee Collins-Lambert took it upon himself to create this much-needed space for active students to focus their energy and efforts towards making real change.

Lee Collins-Lambert was a parent at Four Rivers in years past and recently started teaching as a coach and a crew leader. He says that in the parent group last year, some feared sending their children to the school in case another racially motivated act occurred which could hurt their child. This needed to change. The group began with the Four Rivers faculty discussing how they can create forward motion around the issue of racism and social justice in the small school. While there is no doubt the staff and faculty are doing everything in their power to make this change, there is only so much time in the day and they are working around the constraints of running a school, one that students do not have to uphold. I asked how the work the parent and staff group was doing compared to the work of the students, to which Lee Collins-Lambert responded, “they don’t”. The fire under the students in Four Rivers was brimming and ready to be ignited.

Giving students a space to have their voice heard was the idea behind creating the group. Lee Collins-Lamberts’ own high school experience was fairly decent. He did go to a majority white school with white staff and classmates and being one of the few black kids was never easy. He let slide many racial jokes and looking back he says he wished he could’ve said something back then. So he wanted to carry this forward and give us as students that push of support he wished he had.

Lee Collins-Lambert was hopeful that creating this group would allow him to give the students of Four Rivers something to start with and then hand over the reigns. He is also hopeful that initiating this sort of conversation around hard topics like race will in some way unite the students. The younger students can learn from the older students so that when seniors, like myself, move on, we can pass over the group and its strength can be kept alive for years to come. So far, Lee Collins-Lambert is beyond impressed with the powerful students who have just taken this opportunity and ran with it.

Alongside the all-inclusive Students 4 Racial and Social Justice Group (which you all can still join) Lee Collins-Lambert was also trying to find a way to organize a POC student group. I myself can stand by the fact that having a designated space for non-white students would feel so different. While white students are extremely beneficial to the BLM movement and many others, having a space for only POC students would feel so very empowering. While the white students mean well and many are active in not only a performative stance, having an all POC group just could not compare. Though Lee Collins-Lambert was also talking about the constraints of this idea. While allowing this space would help, it also is hard to talk with white students about creating a group with only POC students. This was the topic of his “People of Color United Workshop'' and still acts as a topic of conversation in this majority white community.

As a whole, Lee Collins-Lambert is working towards making Four Rivers an even more accepting and open-minded community. He feels that so far Four Rivers has been extremely successful in this area, taking time to make decisions and never shying away from hard topics. The workshops this year in particular, while putting some stress on Lee Collins-Lambert as the sole black advisor, felt like they served a significant purpose. They opened up a space to talk about hard topics and opened a door for further conversations. Lee Collins-Lambert also feels that Four Rivers as a whole is an extremely responsive school and community with an extremely strong and influential student body. He is such an incredibly wonderful addition to this community.