Savor K-County: Judson Everitt

I’ve always been interested in finding out why people want to visit Kosciusko County. Hearing those reasons helps us discover what we’re doing well and what we maybe need to do a better job of promoting. When they decide to call it home and that decision wasn’t tied to orthopedics, my interest is piqued, especially when it’s a faculty member at a major university in Chicago with no familial ties to Kosciusko County.

I first met Judson Everitt when I was on the right side 🙂 of the school start time debate at Warsaw Community Schools. I enjoy my conversations with him and always walk away feeling a little smarter. As someone who has become more vested in education and everything that goes on behind the scenes to keep it running, I’ve always valued his input. Whether you agree with him or not, I believe you will find a similar value from my interview with him.

Bio:
Judson Everitt is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago where he has been on the faculty since 2009. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University Bloomington along with a doctoral minor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. In his research, he examines a variety of topics related to education. He has performed studies on professional training in both teacher education and medical education, and he also studies the impact that various education policies have on teachers’ work and students’ transitions through formal schooling. He is the author of two books and multiple articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. At Loyola, he teaches undergraduate courses in the sociology of education and introduction to sociology, as well as graduate courses in organizational sociology, research methods, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Dr. Everitt and his wife, Jill, moved to Warsaw in the summer of 2017 after living in the Chicagoland area for eight years. They have three kids ages 9, 7, and 3 years old. Two of their children – Jackson and Charlotte – attend Washington Elementary School, and their youngest – Stella – will begin preschool at the Greater Warsaw Cooperative Preschool this year. Both Judson and Jill are faithful IU alumni, and the whole family loves cheering on the Hoosiers as well as the Loyola Ramblers. Both originally from Indiana, Judson grew up downstate in Scottsburg and Jill grew up in the Fort Wayne area.

How does a faculty member at Loyola end up living in Warsaw, Indiana? What was it about the community that made it a place you wanted to call home? What has surprised you the most about it?

“We first started thinking about moving back to Indiana, ironically, when it became pretty clear that I was likely to be at Loyola for the duration of my career. I absolutely love Loyola and love working there. But Jill and I are both from Indiana originally, and the thought of being able to raise our kids in Indiana was just very appealing to us. Especially when baby #3 was coming along, we really wanted to be closer to family. Much of our extended family is in Fort Wayne, so we wanted to get as close as possible to Fort Wayne without moving all the way to Fort Wayne, which would just be too far from Chicago for me to commute 2-3 days per week. So we started looking at communities along US 30 that would get us close to Fort Wayne while still keeping us between 1-2 hours from Chicago. When you start looking at communities that fit those criteria, Warsaw really stands out. You have a strong local economy with the orthopedic industry and other local commerce that attracts restaurants and entertainment. You have strong public schools, you have access to multiple lakes, you have other outdoor activities available, and it puts us closer to family. For all of those reasons, the question for us became why not move to Warsaw rather than why move to Warsaw?

I would say we’ve been very pleasantly surprised with the public schools, especially our kids’ elementary school and preschool. The teachers, principal, and staff at Washington are absolutely sensational. The level of sophistication with which they understand and execute instructional practice, project-based learning, and STEM education is just out of this world. The organizational culture that these educators produce creates a wonderful environment for students as well. I have done a lot of observational research in a lot of schools in various parts of the country over the last 20 years, and I can tell you that the community of Warsaw has a rare gem in Washington Elementary. I’m sure the other schools are great too, it’s just with Washington we’ve had the most first-hand experience ourselves.”

School start times have been a hot topic for Warsaw Community Schools and school systems around the country. While your thoughts on it are public knowledge, can you tell us a little bit more about why you decided to speak up?

“The most immediate motivation to speak up was that the potential changes to the schedule would’ve been bad for our own kids. One of the new schedule options that the district was considering was to flip the old start time schedule that we used to have so that the middle and high school could start around 9am. But that would have meant elementary schools would be starting well before 8am, closer to 7:30am in fact. We knew that if that happened, it would without a doubt be disruptive to our kids’ ability to sleep.

We were concerned with how this would affect all of our children for a couple of reasons. First, our kids are good sleepers and it’s good for them. All three of them routinely get upwards of 10-11 hours of sleep per night. Our two oldest don’t typically wake up until 7-7:30am or later, even with an 8:30pm bedtime. If our district would have flipped the schedule, we would have had to force them both awake every single day. There would have been no way they could get the sleep they needed.

The second reason we were concerned is that the timing of any schedule change would have coincided with their years in primary grades (K-3). Because of what I do for a living, I know very well the decades of social science research that shows how critically important those early years are for the overall quality of kids’ transition into formal schooling. If kids get off to a good start in school both academically and socially, it sets them up nicely for subsequent success. If they don’t get off to a good start, it can be very difficult for kids to course correct, and their troubles can persist into later years. Without sufficient sleep, it would have been really hard for our kids to perform at their best either cognitively or behaviorally at a time in their lives when it is essential that they be able to perform at their best both cognitively and behaviorally.

Well, that was just our kids. We were also worried that other kids the same age would have the very same problems, and in many cases their problems would be even worse. We live less than five minutes from Washington and our kids don’t ride the bus in the morning. For kids who ride the bus, many of them would have to be at the bus stop at or before 6am, which is just too early for both sleep and safety reasons. Now, I know some parents have kids that age who consistently bounce out of bed during the 6 o’clock hour. Our youngest does too. But it’s one thing to wake up around 6am. It’s another thing to wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, get your things, and get to the bus stop at or before 6am. Young kids all over Kosciusko County would have had their sleep negatively affected, and abundant research shows that insufficient sleep for kids this age is bad for their cognitive performance, bad for their behavior, and bad for their health. With all of these things at stake, I didn’t feel like there was any way I couldn’t speak up.

That, and my wife made me (joking… mostly joking).

I do want to emphasize as much as possible that I completely agree with Start School Later advocates, as well as the various medical associations that have made recommendations about this, that middle and high schools should not start prior to 8:30am. And even though I think Warsaw Community Schools did a very thorough, thoughtful, and conscientious job of shifting the schedule so that our middle and high schoolers can start later than they used to, I think they still start too early. I just believe with equal conviction that we can’t create later starts for teens in a way that also forces younger kids to begin their school day just as early as a lot of teens have had to. If we do, then we’re not fixing the problem, we’re just trading it for another one. I think what WCS came up with two years ago (shifting all starts back 15-minutes) was a meaningful compromise given the many logistical constraints, and I’m grateful for all the work that the WCS administration and the WCS School Board put into such a complex matter.”

Critical race theory – care to chime in?

“Well, as many of your readers likely know, there have been a number of efforts recently in several states to legislate bans on the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools. There has been a lot of talk about it locally, but to my knowledge there has not yet been any effort to intervene in the curriculum of our local schools. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of noise out there about it right now.

Many opponents of CRT, whether they know it or not, are distorting the very meaning of racism itself, let alone the meaning of CRT. It is not a racist act, nor does it communicate to anyone that they themselves are racist, to teach about racism of a prior era and how it has lingering, often unintended effects on people today. In other words, CRT does not say that all Whites living today are explicit racists who are to be blamed for things that happened in the past. It is also demonstrably false to say that teaching about various forms of institutional racism somehow pits racial and ethnic groups against each other or sows seeds of racial tension. Quite the opposite is true, as it allows us to take ownership over the uglier parts of our collective history so that current and future generations don’t make the same mistakes as our ancestors. CRT also equips us all – people of all racial and ethnic identities – to be more mindful of our implicit biases and how they affect the ways we interact with folks in everyday situations.

But this recent fixation on CRT in public schools among CRT opponents is very strange for other reasons. There is very little evidence that CRT itself is being taught in any systematic, widespread manner in K-12 education. The vast majority of freshmen who show up to my classes at Loyola have never taken a sociology class and have almost no idea what sociology is. They certainly have not had much, if any, exposure to – or anything resembling indoctrination into – any theoretical traditions in race scholarship. This raises the question: exactly what do CRT opponents want to ban from the current curriculum? Many of the states working on this type of legislation have used the fabricated specter of CRT as justification for sweeping prohibitions against teaching much of anything related to racial discrimination past or present, an unfortunate attempt to whitewash the history and social studies we teach in our schools.

The good news here in Warsaw is that key leaders in our community have responded to the recent outcry about CRT. I was very pleased to see the letter from the leadership of Zimmer Biomet to local officials asking them to discontinue any efforts at imposing some kind of “CRT ban” in our local schools. The leaders at Zimmer Biomet understand that such a ban – or even public talk among community leaders of imposing one – will hurt Zimmer Biomet’s ability to recruit and retain the personnel they need to work and live in Warsaw. Zimmer Biomet is right to be concerned.

I strongly encourage anyone interested in learning more about this to start here. I’ve also included some references at the end for some excellent pieces of work on the interconnections between race and education.”

You recently started a business advising students and their parents on what to expect from the time they start looking for a college through to the actual college experience. Can you offer us some more detail on those services? How does this complement or add to what the typical guidance counselor would be offering in high school?

“About a year after we moved to Warsaw, I started Transitions to College Consulting. I wanted to do this to complement the work I do at Loyola. In addition to being a professor, I also serve as my department’s undergraduate program director. In that role, I do a lot of advising for our majors and minors in sociology on everything from course selection, completing degree requirements, going to graduate or professional school, and career options. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that a majority of students are learning-it-as-they-go when it comes to figuring out how to operate successfully in higher education. Sometimes this works. Often, though, it can get students into predicaments. I cannot tell you how many students my colleagues and I have had to help scramble to solve some problems that can delay the completion of their degree. I often come out of meetings with students in these situations thinking to myself, “if only I could have talked to them a couple of years ago.”

So I decided to make myself available to students beyond Loyola and offer them and their families advice about the whole process. I help high schoolers find colleges and universities that might be a good fit for them; I help them with the application process and help them write strong admissions essays; I help their parents understand the financial aid process; I help them decide between multiple admissions offers. In addition to this, however, I also offer students help in understanding what will be expected of them in college, and how the environment of higher education works. This includes introducing them to different degree programs and majors that many high schoolers are not familiar with, helping them understand the differences in credit hour requirements for different majors, and helping them see how all their potential credit hours can be made to fit in four years. I try to do as much as I can to put them on solid footing upon arrival to college so that they aren’t learning this all on their own after the clock has started on their time to graduate.

My services complement what school guidance counselors do with students. I am not in competition with them. High school guidance counselors just have way too much asked of them anymore. The national average ratio of students to counselors is close to 500:1. That’s the average! So it’s just really difficult for counselors to provide students the same level of individualized advice, tailored to students’ unique needs and interests, in the same way I can. For example, for each of my clients, I write up a document that I call a “school target list portfolio,” in which I provide extensive details about each college I recommend they apply to with specific information on why the school fits their interests and how it compares to the other schools on the list. These documents normally end up being 20-25 pages in length, all tailored to the individual student. Guidance counselors are very rarely able to provide that level of detailed, personalized advising. That’s not because they are incapable of doing it, they’re just swamped and don’t have the time.”

If you could offer one piece of advice to parents and their students when it comes to choosing the right college, what would it be?

“Assume nothing.

For parents who are college graduates, do not assume that things work the same way they did when you went to college. They don’t. Higher education has changed dramatically in a variety of ways over the last 25 years, and more change is on the way.

For all parents, do not assume that if your child doesn’t get into a Top 50 university, college isn’t for them. There are a lot of terrific colleges and universities out there, vast numbers of which most people have never even heard of before.

Also, do not assume that your kids will figure out college once they get there or assume that figuring it out on their own won’t incur a price for them. Honest mistakes can lead to delays in completing their degree. We have terrific students at Loyola. The vast majority of them are smart, hardworking, competent, and conscientious. And yet 30% of them don’t finish in four years.

Finally, do not assume the kids are alright. College is exciting and wonderful in many ways, but it’s also really, really stressful for many students. Anxiety has now overtaken depression as the most common mental health problem among college students (though depression also remains a serious problem). It is everywhere and it takes a serious toll for many students. I spend much more time putting students in touch with case managers and mental health services than I ever did ten years ago. Even though they’re out of the house, even though they insist they know exactly what they’re doing, even though they roll their eyes when you try to help, even though they are legally adults, your kids still need you and need your support throughout college and beyond.”

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit”

Your book, “The Sociology of Education: A Systematic Analysis,” was recently published. Can you tell us about that and why you decided to write it?

“I was invited to help update the book for this most recent edition. This book has been a staple of the curriculum in higher education for the sociology of education for decades. This is largely due to the many years of hard work by Jeanne Ballantine, the first author and senior scholar on the project. A few years ago, a friend of mine who I went to graduate school with, Jenny Stuber, joined Jeanne as coauthor of the 8th edition. They then asked me to join them for a 9th edition. We began work on that a few years ago and the book just came out in print this summer. All three of us earned our doctoral degrees from IU Sociology, which has a long tradition of faculty with expertise in the sociology of education.

Though its primary use will be in college courses, the book is just a really good resource for people interested in matters concerning education. For parents, teachers, administrators, school board members, and students alike, all kinds of issues come up that can affect people’s local schools and it’s useful in those moments to have some answers to the question: what does social science research say about this (not unlike Warsaw’s school start times experience)? In fact, one update to this text that I wrote is a discussion of the Start School Later movement and what the existing research says about the relationships between start times, sleep, and various outcomes for students of all ages. But there are many topics covered in the book that are timely and relevant, like the teacher work stoppages across the country between 2017-2020, recent research on charter schools, and school reopening plans during the pandemic. We also present a great deal of the most recently available data from the National Center for Education Statistics on a wide range of issues in clear, accessible language.

It’s probably not the type of book that someone sits down and reads cover to cover, but it is something useful to pull off the shelf to look something up when questions arise. It is published by Routledge of the Taylor & Francis Group, and is available for purchase on July 30th.”

Additional Resources:

Ewing, Eve L. 2018. Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lewis, Amanda E. and John B. Diamond. 2015. Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools. New York, NY: Oxford University Press,

Rafalow, Matthew H. 2020. Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.