by Ari Robin McKenna

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After participating in the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition’s (SESEC) Advocacy and Policy Cohort in 2020, Liz Huizar wasn’t sure how she would put what she’d learned to use. Then, El Centro de la Raza — where she worked at the time running a dozen educational programs — decided to open up a new location in southwest King County to serve people who had been displaced from Seattle. Huizar took out her cohort notes.

Thanks to what she and a couple of colleagues had learned as part of the eighth SESEC Advocacy and Policy Cohort in 2020, Huizar says El Centro’s Youth Services Department, tasked with the expansion, felt empowered. “We knew where exactly to start putting the plan together, and that’s because of the trainings that we went through.” They had learned how to create a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and who to initiate conversations with about financing the expansion, and when they had additional questions, longtime SESEC director Erin Okuno was ready and willing to answer them and provide resources.

Huizar said, “There was a moment where we had to have the parents of our programming do testimonies to the City Council. … Erin [Okuno] had a PowerPoint and pointers on how to give a phone testimony. So we trained our parents in Spanish to be able to do the testimonies, and they ended up getting funding to secure a program. That was through the network we had built with SESEC, and the tools that they gave us.” El Centro now offers programming for more than 200 youth at a Federal Way location on the east side of Interstate 5.

Huizar, who began working at El Centro five years ago, was offered broader responsibility quickly. After a year as a middle school cultural enrichment instructor (a position now called an ethnic studies instructor), she became a coordinator of the Seattle after-school program. Then she began to manage both the Seattle and Federal Way sites and provided daily supervision, grant management, and funding development for 12 of El Centro’s educational programs.

And now, after a six-month search to replace Okuno — who transitioned into a job with the State — SESEC’s board unanimously voted to make Huizar its new Executive Director.

Huizar takes over SESEC’s formidable rolodex, stuffed with over 50 local, regional, and national partners. Founded in 2012, SESEC is a key convener of Community Based Organizations (CBOs), schools, and parents/caregivers in the South End. It has advocated for southeast Seattle during times when bell time changes or board director district boundary changes were on the table, and it has co-hosted school board candidate forums. According to its website, “We believe that a just and equitable education system will only be achieved through a collective voice – one that centers BIPOC communities and those who are most often missing from these conversations.”

At SESEC’s well-attended monthly coalition meetings, community members engage with Seattle Public Schools district officials, learn about upcoming changes or rollouts, and get their questions addressed. Huizar describes them as “a place to keep people accountable” and plans to “revamp” them into hybrid meetings where people can “have an opportunity to be in person, network, to just be in space,” but “not limit [people] if they’re not able to make it.”

Besides the Advocacy and Policy Cohorts Huizar once participated in, SESEC has a Data Cohorts Project, which its website states is for people who “are interested in learning how to access and use data to better serve their communities.” Additionally, it runs an innovative Youth Participatory Grant Program, which the Emerald’s Lauryn Bray wrote about in June, and SESEC “facilitates local seminars and discussions for community members to better understand equity with a focus on education” as part of its nationally affiliated Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) program.

Huizar says SESEC’s common thread is to “create advocates for educational justice,” and she credits Okuno for her “deep relationship building in the region.” She recognizes that SESEC has, year after year, “become a little more structured in their output,” and Huizar hopes to use her qualities as an organizer, educator, and program manager to build on that legacy.

“As executive director, what I’m hoping to do is navigate. I am action driven. I’m solution driven. I want to bring us together, but say, ‘Okay, now let’s go out and put the outcome in place — and not just sit and talk about it.’ I’m very practical in that respect,” Huizar said.

Huizar mentions the confusion surrounding students being suspended from school and parents having inadequate access to information about special education as issues to address on the immediate horizon. 

Though out-of-school suspensions can pose serious challenges to working families, with the student in question falling behind academically and often left to their own devices at home alone, Huizar says communication about them is often confusing and inconsistent locally, and a nationwide trend of inequity surrounding due process bears that out. “A student can’t just be suspended, there has to be a discussion that happens and a formal process. Who is that discussion had with? When do you loop in a parent? When do you loop in a principal? It’s a process that not very many people are familiar with.” While Huizar believes each area school should have a restorative justice coordinator, she doesn’t see them being used in concert to address systemic issues in southeast Seattle.

“Let’s bring our restorative justice coordinator to each campus, but then not really provide them the tools, the guidance, the connection to one another, or inform the community that’s being served; It’s like hoping the program works without setting it up to work,” she said. If you go to a school pickup and just start asking parents, ‘Did you know there’s a restorative coordinator on campus?’ Most parents have no idea what that even means. And that’s where we come in; we take and share some of that knowledge and bring it back to people who are going to receive that service.”

Huizar mentions similar challenges she feels many southeast Seattle parents have with the special education system, and in particular advocating for learning plans or accommodations. “Parents don’t really know how to navigate it. So how do we share what is available to them in the immediate?”

But in both cases, Huizar wants to make sure SESEC’s role extends beyond being reliable disseminators of in-depth, up-to-date information. When SESEC convenes groups of parents and teachers impacted by an issue, Huizar wants it to be a step toward both systems change and accountability. “What is our collective experience? How do we navigate that system? And that system sucks right now; it’s not great. So how do we start working towards a better way … a better system? And how do we imagine that, and how do we hold people accountable to move towards that better system?”

Another issue Huizar would like to impact is the stalling of the 2017 Ethnic Studies Resolution in Seattle Public Schools. As a child, Huizar’s parents moved from Anaheim, California, to Riverside when they could afford a house, and Huizar remembers the confusion she felt not being represented in the curriculum. 

“I remember going to school and we never learned about where Latinos were a part of the narrative. I always remember [thinking], ‘Well, where do we fall into this?’ was my question. As first generation Mexicanos, why are we not in these stories? … We’re not in this. Why are we not in this? But I didn’t realize what that meant at that age.”

Huizar recalls going to the library with friends and finding a copy of Esperanza Rising and thinking, “I have familiarity with this. This is so cool to see it in a book! But that was the one book we read, and that’s because we found it at the library and not because it was part of our schooling.” 

As an educator at El Centro, Huizar made sure her class had access to culturally relevant texts and, when possible, hyper-local books, such as Patrick Flores-Scott’s American Road Trip — which starts out in the city of SeaTac. She points to the importance of students feeling included within the learning. “It just makes you excited to keep reading. because you’re like, ‘I understand this. I see the airplanes too.’”

By the time Huizar was in college, she had begun “to intentionally seek out spaces that reflect — culturally but value-wise — what we want to represent.” She became a Chicano studies major, joined Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), and became a youth leader at the Copley YMCA in San Diego, where she tried to bend the sometimes rigid curriculum toward the holistic needs of her students. At that point, Huizar began to feel more grounded within her own education, which allowed her to shed former patterns she had been conditioned into that are destructive to learning. “I didn’t want to ask for help, because … they’re gonna tell me, ‘Why don’t you know this already?’ And I think that was impostor syndrome at that point, right? I need to know this and not ask for help. Over the course of everything, that’s where I feel like I learned that it’s okay to, like, ask questions and ask for help and be fine.”

While Huizar hopes to support the formation of a Latine ethnic studies class to join SPS’s high school offerings of LGBTQIA+ studies, Black studies, Arabic, Filipino U.S. history, and Women of Color comparative literature and composition, she doesn’t feel that’s nearly enough. Currently, those classes are described as “hidden gems” on the SPS website and are listed under the subheading “Exploring Diversity and Inclusion Classes.” Huizar would like to see ethnic studies be a part of all students’ experience, K-12. “What I feel passionate about now is that incorporation of ethnic studies at every level.”

Practical and a realist, Huizar is already anticipating a couple of challenges to the results-focused approach for the SESEC she envisions. One of them is funders’ imperative for data — usually based on surveys published annually — which often delays funding that is needed to meet students’ emerging needs.

“But one of the things we learn about in our Data Cohort,” Huizar said, “is to ask the question, ‘Why is the burden of proof on us?’ … Day by day, we’re seeing things happen with our own eyes. We’re seeing students have needs. All it does is prolong the process, and for what? There’s an obvious accountability piece where the dollars actually are used for the work that is going to happen, but also, it’s almost as though we’re having to go to great lengths to elevate difficulties in our community — many of which are structural — to say, ‘Please fund us because this is happening.’ … We’re saying this is what we need immediately. So help us out.”

Huizar also mentioned the red tape surrounding change in Seattle Public Schools and other school districts, and that wealthier pockets of schools are usually able to get what they want. “Ultimately, I do believe there are good individuals in the district who care for students and who want to create quality education. And I think there’s a lot of red tape about how to make that change happen. … The parents, the families, and the students that we worked with don’t always understand what’s happening in the background. … They want the best education for their students, and they trust that the district is looking out for them. And we’ve often had to say, ‘Well, actually, it’s not as simple as that. Here’s what you need to be asking, and where you should ask those questions.’ We know in more affluent regions of the city, these questions are being asked 100% of the time.”

Huizar hopes her new-look SESEC can help level the playing field between southeast Seattle and the areas south of Seattle where people have been displaced to, and the more affluent regions of Seattle that have historically advocated for their students’ educational needs.

“What my hope is, as a SESEC representative who is trying to elevate and organize more advocates in the community, is that the district will open itself up more, and … that they don’t tiptoe around questions, and [have] as much transparency as [possible]. Which I think is asking for a lot, but at the same time, it’s that accountability piece, right? And so I’m hoping that we can just keep putting heat to them, and saying, ‘You need to be responsive to what’s happening.’ And not just to the people who are in the wealthier pockets of schools, but to people on the ground who want education prosperity for their kids.”

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SESEC has recently relocated to a larger office space on the third floor of the historic Beacon Hill School building; has a new website, updated mission, and vision; and will host a Grand Opening on Sept. 15 from 3:30–5 p.m. You can RSVP here.

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📸 Featured Image: New SESEC Executive Director Liz Huizar. (Photo: Ari Robin McKenna)

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