The Cedar Rapids Community School District says state test scores and graduation rates show its African-American students are falling behind their classmates at troubling rates.

In the 2018 Iowa Assessments, about 78% of white students were proficient in each the reading and mathematics tests. However, 42.5% of black students were proficient in reading, while 39.3% were proficient in math in those same tests.

A group of district employees, families, and other community members spent the last eight months figuring out how to shrink this achievement gap and presented its findings at Monday’s school board meeting as part of the “Not Without Me!” group.

“The starting place is just acknowledging that those inequities exist, acknowledging that implicit bias exists, and facing those things,” Rachel Rockwell, a member of the group and program officer for the Safe, Equitable and Thriving Communities Fund at the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, said.

The group was led by a collaboration from the school district, NAACP of Cedar Rapids, African American Museum of Iowa, Linn County Board of Supervisors and Cedar Rapids Education Association.

It held six public forums in 2019, which it said were attended by more than 250 people.

“The goal of the group was to create an effective partnership between families, school personnel and the community to close the gaps that we’re seeing in the data,” Adam Zimmermann, executive director of middle-level education and community partnership for the school district, said.

From those conversations, the group focused in on four big themes that need to be addressed: strengthening communication, building relationships, engaging more school volunteers and increasing access to funding.

However, Rockwell and Zimmermann said building trust is at the heart of fixing those problems.

“That trust has to start first, and we have to be real about what’s going on before we’re able to come up with solutions that make sense,” Rockwell said.

The “Not Without Me!” leaders pointed to some steps the school district is already taking to address these issues, including allowing students to ride city buses for free to get to after-school activities and keeping families connected to schools through an online portal called “Infinite Campus.”

But they added there are no easy solutions to closing the gap.

“Now we have to design solutions together to make sure that we are holding each other accountable in this effort,” Zimmermann said.

To design those solutions, Zimmermann said the school district will continue the conversations with families and community members that started through these forums, as well as continuing its quarterly meetings with the NAACP.