McALLEN — Students in McAllen schools will have the opportunity to take two new electives in the fall, a Mexican-American studies course and a class in African-American studies, classes added to the curriculum at least in part because of cooperation between the district and a group of high school and college students who began pushing for more inclusive course offerings over the summer.
According to the district, few if any Rio Grande Valley districts offer the courses they’re planning to roll out in the fall.
Updates to Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills requirements in 2019 and 2020 allow the new courses to — unlike most electives — count toward student ranking points.
McAllen’s decision to implement the courses follows months of petitioning and palavering by representatives of the Grande Narrative, a group started by McAllen ISD alumni after the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
The group has a long list of priorities related to inclusivity on campus. Though their agenda goes far beyond implementing two new electives, Trustee Sam Saldivar Jr. said the district heard them out and tried to be responsive, even meeting with them about the new classes.
“It is a collaborative effort of the administration working with individuals in the community. Former students, faculty from other programs in the country — and we just started having a dialogue,” he said. “We began to explore the possibility of expanding the programs that we currently offer. And so we took that as an opportunity to look at what the state allows and what information the state has through the various TEKS, and how we can enhance the existing programs to provide a breadth of knowledge and understanding to our students today.”
In some ways, Saldivar said, those electives are an example of a concrete, constructive step taken in the wake of national civil unrest and racial tension over the summer.
“Each one of those meetings was very enlightening for everyone participating. So I saw it as a real positive outcome compared to what they were witnessing in the media and the news and what was actually happening in other communities,” he said.
Natalie Glasper, one of the Grande Narrative’s organizers, said she sees the new courses as a win for the group and a win for the district’s students.
“I think it definitely takes a step toward what we’ve been working for, because it’s giving students the option to learn something more diversified,” she said. “Obviously our goal would be that it would just be integrated into the curriculum, but this is definitely a step in the right direction because it’s giving students opportunities that we didn’t have.”
Glasper says the group and its members intend to expand their footprint on the Texas education scene.
“We have a goal to expand to other cities around the Valley, and hopefully get to a state level at some point because there’s only so much McAllen can do for us,” she said. “Even though they’ve been supportive, a lot of it is handled at the state level, so we’re hoping to expand from here.”
