Across Minnesota, school communities have lived through waves of ICE raids and immigration enforcement actions that have brought fear, trauma, and disruption directly into classrooms, school parking lots, and bus stops. Students have been detained on their way to school. Families have been separated. Attendance has plummeted as children stay home out of fear. This is not an abstract policy debate — it is state-sanctioned violence and terror playing out in the daily lives of students, families, and educators.

This workshop is a direct response to that reality. Dr. Stanley offers a practical, community-engaged approach to school leadership — one that authentically re-centers students, families, and communities as partners in protecting and transforming schools, especially during moments of crisis. Drawing on the community-focused organizing traditions of Black and Indigenous communities, he presents four practical pillars of responsible community engagement: listening, engaging, advocating, and partnering. Further, this session highlights cutting-edge research that captures Minnesota school leaders reflections on community engagement.

Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the state of educational leadership in Minnesota, particularly how leaders come to understand their roles in the community; concrete strategies drawn from the frontlines; and renewed ideas about how to support their school communities, traumatized students and staff, and work to rebuild trust with disenfranchised families. This session moves beyond theory, giving educational leaders tools they can put into practice now to serve their communities and lead with courage in turbulent times.

Darrius Stanley, PhD, is a proud Black father, husband, son, brother, and friend to his community. Darrius works as an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Minnesota. He is also a graduate of the prestigious Florida A&M University, his hometown HBCU. Darrius is a former middle school social studies educator and administrator. His work centers the political, educational, and philosophical perspectives of Black people to unearth Black genius and possibility in education. He intends to uplift Black people’s communal ways of knowing and existing in education in hopes of envisioning a path to educational liberation. His
scholarship sits at the intersection(s) of Black education, Black educators, and educational leadership. He leverages historical, community-based, and intersectional qualitative methodologies to better understand the experiences of Black educators in K-12 educational spaces. Further, his work builds on the rich legacy(ies) of Black educators as community educators to imagine and conceptualize community-engaged educational leadership praxis. Dr. Stanley currently holds the Carmen Starkson Campbell Faculty Fellowship at the University of Minnesota and serves as a Black Educational Research Center (BERC) Research Fellow (at Teachers College, Columbia University).