08/12/2026
Good afternoon, and thank you for taking the time to listen today.
My name is Tiana Batiste-Waddell, and I am the Executive Director of the JAX Aspire Foundation, a parent and child advocacy organization established in 2022. Our core mission is to support parents and guardians as they navigate American schooling institutions and work to break down institutional and structural barriers that prevent children from achieving positive academic and behavioral outcomes.
Our advocacy recognizes that public schools, public charter schools, and private schools do more than educate children. These institutions contribute significantly to their development, safety, well-being, and future.
For that reason, the JAX Aspire Foundation strongly urges individuals, organizations, institutions, and community leaders to align themselves with the Indiana Child Safety Campaign, our grassroots movement calling upon Indiana to make the safety and well-being of children its highest priority.
Here in Elkhart County, seven public school corporations, private schools, and charter schools collectively serve thousands of children and families. With that responsibility comes tremendous influence.
Educational researcher John Hattie’s work reminds us that what happens inside schools matters. The decisions educators and school leaders make every day—including instructional practices, expectations, relationships, school climate, and responses to student behavior—can significantly influence student outcomes.
We must therefore examine what the data is telling us about the experiences of our children.
The 2026 Indiana KIDS COUNT® Data Book emphasizes the importance of examining the intersectionality of Indiana’s youth population. Its disaggregated data draws attention to disproportionate and disparate outcomes affecting historically marginalized young people, including racial and ethnic minorities, low-income youth, LGBTQ+ youth, youth with disabilities, and immigrant youth.
The report also demonstrates that Indiana’s children are increasingly diverse. In 2023, more than 1.59 million children under the age of 18 lived in Indiana, and 33.4% of Hoosier youth were a race or ethnicity other than White, non-Hispanic, compared with 22.4% of adults.
That changing demographic reality matters.
Elkhart and the surrounding county are part of increasingly diverse communities. As our communities become more diverse, our institutions must become better equipped—not less—to ensure that children are treated fairly regardless of whether they are Black, Brown, poor, LGBTQ+, disabled, immigrants, or members of another historically marginalized population.
Yet the disparities documented in our own county demand our attention.
The 2025 Elkhart County Tenured Site System Assessment, conducted with a focus on improving the county’s youth justice system, identified recommendations intended to promote greater equity and reduce the number of young people entering the justice system.
The assessment also identified significant concerns involving racial and ethnic disparities and the stewardship of agencies responsible for serving young people.
One participant reportedly observed that the same data was repeatedly being presented at meetings without being meaningfully used to establish priorities or move the work forward.
Even more troubling, stakeholders reportedly expressed frustration that insufficient action was being taken to address racial and ethnic disparities despite data showing that youth of color were being detained at higher rates than White youth. The assessment described a perception among stakeholders that there was resistance to discussing those disparities and giving them the attention they required.
And this is where the numbers become impossible to ignore.
According to the assessment, Black children represented approximately 7% of the county’s youth population yet accounted for approximately 41% of detained youth.
Seven percent of the population.
Forty-one percent of detained youth.
That is precisely what a disproportionate outcome looks like.
And it requires us to ask difficult questions.
Why do racial disparities of this magnitude persist within systems entrusted with educating, protecting, supporting, and developing our children?
Why do community members who raise concerns about these disparities so often struggle to obtain meaningful engagement from institutional leadership?
And why does discussing race and racism remain so difficult when the data itself demands that race be part of the conversation?
Our young people interact every day with systems entrusted with their education, safety, mental health, development, and futures. Schools, in particular, assume extraordinary responsibility for children while those children are in their care.
The relationships adults establish with young people matter. Expectations matter. Discipline decisions matter.
Access to opportunity matters. Whether children feel respected, valued, protected, and believed matters.
When dysfunction, unresolved bias, or inequitable practices exist among adults and institutions, children can ultimately experience the consequences.
As a parent and child advocate representing families within Elkhart Community Schools, I have personally attempted to collaborate with district leadership regarding racial disparities and concerns affecting Black children and their peers.
I initially communicated these concerns to former Superintendent Larry Huff in January and more recently raised them with Superintendent Michelle Riise in July. Despite those efforts, I do not believe the substantive concerns I raised regarding race, racial disparities, and the experiences of Black students within Elkhart Community Schools have received the direct engagement they deserve.
This cannot simply become another set of statistics that we discuss year after year.
The time has come for courage.
The time has come for transparency.
The time has come for institutions to examine their own practices, relationships, policies, disciplinary systems, cultures, and outcomes.
And the time has come to address racial bias directly when the evidence demonstrates racial disparities.
Black children are not statistics. Brown children are not statistics. Children with disabilities are not statistics. Poor children are not statistics. Immigrant children are not statistics.
They are children.
They deserve institutions willing to examine themselves with the same level of accountability that those institutions expect from the young people they serve.
Black itself is a color containing extraordinary depth and complexity. It can represent power, elegance, sophistication, formality, grief, mystery, rebellion, fear, resilience, and strength. It is not one thing. Neither are Black children.
Our children carry the full spectrum of humanity within them, and they deserve systems capable of seeing that humanity.
Until we have the courage to confront race and racism where the data demonstrates disparities—and until institutional leaders are willing to examine how bias may influence school culture, relationships, discipline, access, opportunity, and achievement—we should not expect different outcomes simply because another report has been published.
The reports have documented the disparities.
The community has raised the concerns.
The children are experiencing the outcomes.
Now the question is whether the adults and institutions with the power to change those outcomes will have the courage to act.
