SUMMER 2010

NAIS honors Reveta Bowers

When Reveta Bowers, long-time head of the Center for Early Education (California), received the 2010 NAIS Diversity Leadership Award presented at the NAIS Annual Conference in San Francisco this past February, it’s not surprising that she turned around and honored the audience.

“Diversity is the hardest work I have ever done,” said Bowers, looking over the audience with tears in her eyes. “I accept this on behalf of the people who stood shoulder to shoulder with me.” As she urged her colleagues to stand up and be counted, Bowers told them, “This is your award for the battles you undertook.”

The NAIS Diversity Leadership Award, as NAIS Vice President Gene Batiste told the audience, seeks to honor “women and men who have left an indelible mark on our work to maintain inclusive independent school communities.” It is the only award NAIS gives out annually.

Bowers, who began her career as a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the Center for Early Education, left her mark not only on her students, but, as she rose through the administrative and managerial ranks of educational and civic organizations, became, in the words of NAIS President Pat Bassett, “a formidable power in our midst,” who was able to “change the course of events.” Over the years, her service on boards has ranged from individual schools, such as the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, to being president of the executive committee of California Association of Independent Schools, to serving as treasurer of the NAIS board of directors. Among her many other duties, Bowers currently serves as board chair of the California Community Foundation, and on the faculty of the Emerging Leaders Institute at Cal-West.

In honoring Reveta Bowers, Gene Batiste quoted e. e. cummings: “It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”

Bowers told the San Francisco audience who she really was through three stories from her family’s history. The first took place in 1921, when Reveta’s mother was a survivor of the worst race riot in U.S. history in Greenwood, Oklahoma. “The impact of that night,” she told the audience — a night that never made it into the history books until 2001 —“changed my parents’ lives forever.” The second story took place in California in 1941, where her parents had started their lives over after Greenwood. “When Pearl Harbor happened,” she said, “the community became fraught with racial tensions. Japanese-Americans were gathered and sent to relocation camps in California and Arizona.” During the Korean War, her parents adopted two abandoned war babies who were Korean and African-American. “I learned how to speak Korean so I could negotiate the playroom,” she said. For Bowers and her family, the diversity lessons from war and immigration came from learning “a lot about complicated histories.”

In 1972, Bowers, who never intended to be a teacher, took a job teaching kindergarten at The Center for Early Education in Los Angeles. She got hooked on education and has been involved with the Center ever since. In 1976, she became head of their elementary school, and, as she told the NAIS audience, “I was the only head of color in the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) for many years.”

Working with her CAIS colleagues, Bowers began her campaign to advance diversity throughout the state of California. It began with writing diversity questions in accreditation documents. “If we ask them to count the kids of color and we ask them what they are doing about diversity, maybe they’ll get the idea,” Bowers said. “And so it began.” Today, the Center for Early Education has grown to 538 students, with 45 percent students of color, and 30 percent faculty and staff of color.

At the end of her acceptance speech, Bowers exhorted her fellow educators to send people to NAIS’s Call to Action and People of Color Conferences, to “enjoy” the hard work of diversity, to cry the tears, to hold the frank conversations.

“If you don’t push the diversity ball, we’ll never get to the place where we can kick it and sail over the finish line,” she said. “The polarization of neighborhoods is increasingly challenging us to make our schools safe places for our students.” She also told everyone that “finding the time to tell stories is paramount.” The telling of Reveta Franklin Bowers’ story brought the large audience to its feet, with cheers — and tears — alike.

For more information about the 2010, and the 2011 NAIS Annual Conference, visit www.nais.org/go/annualconference.