When the system fails, don’t blame the families

Every so often, someone says the quiet part out loud.

Recently, in response to our public actions in the Roaring Fork School District, I received an unsolicited email from a community member expressing a viewpoint many still quietly hold: that Latino students struggle because their parents “don’t care.” That somehow, generational poverty, language barriers, systemic underinvestment, and cultural marginalization can all be brushed aside by blaming families for the very outcomes they are being failed by.

Let me be absolutely clear: this kind of thinking is not just ignorant — it’s racist.

And it’s not new. For years, those of us who have worked in education and those of us who have done K–12 advocacy have heard these same stereotypes repeated — sometimes behind closed doors, sometimes out in the open — by teachers, principals, superintendents, and even school board members. That’s deeply concerning. Because if the people in charge of educating our children carry these harmful misconceptions, they will never be able to truly support our students or partner with our families in meaningful ways.

I know this issue personally. I grew up in Mexico and went to primary school through 5th grade in a small town in Jalisco. My parents weren’t passive or disengaged — they were community leaders. My father helped build additional classrooms with other families. My mother regularly spoke with my teachers and principal — so much so that after some difficult conversations, I was forced to repeat 5th grade. Parents in our rural school partnered with teachers to fundraise for arts programs like music and dance. Others volunteered to supervise lunch and recess. We didn’t have much, but we were involved.

But something changed when we moved to the U.S.

In Basalt, my parents didn’t know how to volunteer. They didn’t feel welcomed. They couldn’t communicate easily with school staff or leadership. The school had no plan to include them, and no interest in figuring it out. It wasn’t that my parents stopped caring — it was that the system didn’t know how to engage them, and made no real effort to try.

In over 10 years of working in public education — from Denver to Texas to Florida — I’ve heard this story again and again. Latino parents want to be involved. But the schools they enter are too often unprepared, uninterested, or uncomfortable working across language and culture.

So when people write letters or emails or make remarks blaming Latino parents for test scores and dropout rates, I have to wonder: are they truly concerned about outcomes, or are they just trying to protect a system that’s failing and looking for someone else to blame?

When a district in which more than half the student population is Latino continues to show massive racial achievement gaps, we should be demanding answers from leadership — not scapegoating families who are doing everything they can to survive, provide, and support their children in a system that too often ignores or excludes them.

Latino families in our valley are taxpayers. They work in our hospitals, build our homes, keep our businesses running, and feed our communities. Whether they pay taxes through property ownership or through rent and purchases, their contributions help fund our schools — and they have every right to demand better outcomes for their children.

To say these families are “irresponsible” or “uninvolved” is not only untrue — it’s a convenient excuse. It shifts blame away from a system that continues to underserve students of color and puts it on those with the least power to change it.

That is what our advocacy is about: confronting the real causes of inequity and demanding better from the systems that exist to serve all of us — not just some.

Accountability isn’t harassment. Demanding that public institutions serve the entire public — all of the public — isn’t “antagonistic.” It’s what justice requires. And if your first instinct when you hear that Latino children are being left behind is to point fingers at their parents instead of the institutions failing them, then you are defending inequality, not solving it.

We are not going away. We will keep fighting for better schools, fairer systems, and a future where every student — no matter their background — has the opportunity to succeed. And we will continue to call out the racism, coded or explicit, that tries to stand in the way.

Because progress doesn’t come from being polite. It comes from telling the truth — and refusing to back down.

Alex Sánchez is the president and CEO of Voces Unidas, advocacy organizations working in the Western Slope. He attended Basalt schools as an English language learner.