Why making Black kids belong is the private school’s job

The question I get asked most as the founder of Private School Village isn’t about tuition, admission, or financial aid.

It’s this: “Are Black and Brown students safe in predominantly white schools?”

Especially now, in the wake of the heartbreaking death of Nolan Wells, that question carries even more weight. The images that surfaced in the aftermath awakened something painfully familiar for many Black and Brown families: the feeling of being the only one, of selecting spaces where belonging is uncertain, and isolation is often invisible.

But as understandable as the question is, I believe it’s the wrong one.

If I played along, my answer would be simple: yes—about as safe as any child in any American school.

No educational model—public, charter, parochial, independent, or homeschool—can promise that a child will never encounter bias, exclusion, or harm. There are no perfect schools.

Let me be transparent: I’m a private school graduate, a former independent school administrator and trustee, and now the parent of two children in independent schools. I also lead a nonprofit organization that has spent the last eight years serving Black and Brown families in hundreds of independent schools across Greater Los Angeles and newly expanding in Northern California, Philadelphia, Charlotte, and more.

I have bias. I’d rather name it, and while I know private schools can be transformative, they can be deeply painful. Like every American institution, they carry both possibility and history.

The real question isn’t whether our children are safe. The real question is: What happens after they are enrolled?

For generations, Black and Brown families accepted an unwritten bargain. We pursued schools with exceptional academics, smaller classes, expansive opportunities, and influential networks. In return, we quietly accepted a second job: preparing our children for everything those schools weren’t built to provide or sustain.

We became the keepers of racial identity after school, on weekends, at church, in barber shops and beauty salons, around dinner tables, social and civic organizations and programs, and in conversations grandparents knew we’d eventually have to have.

That work mattered. It still does.

But I’ve come to believe we’ve asked families to solve an institutional problem on their own in a way that compounds the issue.

Schools are not simply places where students learn algebra or literature. They are where identity develops. Where friendships form. Where children answer one of the most important questions they’ll ever ask: Do I belong here?

That question has never existed apart from history, and the solution can’t be sustained by one parent here and there school by school, and it can’t be compartmentalized to outside of school.

Many independent schools expanded during the decades following Brown v. Board of Education, when Black families were still actively excluded from many of these institutions. Enrollment has since changed but culture and systems take much longer.

That history doesn’t disappear because admissions brochures become more diverse to reflect who is now admitted. It shows up in whose stories are centered, who teaches our children, who carries the burden of explaining race, who integrates solutions with school systems that are sustainable, and who is left feeling like the only one in the room.

The encouraging news is that something is changing. For the first time in my career, I see schools asking a different question. Not simply, “How do we recruit more diverse families?” But, “What conditions allow every child to thrive once they’re here?”

I see parents changing, too. They’re asking not only whether their child can get in, but whether their child will truly belong and how they can help ensure that.

That’s the conversation we’ve needed all along.

Belonging isn’t a soft issue. It isn’t separate from academic excellence. It’s the condition that makes excellence sustainable.

So what happens after enrollment?

If you’re a parent or a student: this movement needs you. Private School Village exists so no family has to figure this out solo—through affinity groups, through parent associations, one conversation and one relationship at a time. Whatever your school’s landscape looks like right now, we are better together than any one of us trying to carry this alone.

If you’re a school administrator, partner with us, and double down on support for the group that has been the most consistently and explicitly targeted in this country’s private school history—and still is today. Black families were the ones private schools were built to exclude as enrollment boomed after Brown v. Board. Black students and families are still the ones targeted in real time—not just in the historical record, but daily, in ways big and small, because of race.

That’s not to say other students and families don’t also struggle to find belonging in these spaces. They do, and that struggle deserves real attention too. But we can’t hand every group the same solution for different experiences. The complexities of race in America mean some students carry a heavier, more specific burden—and any school serious about belonging has to be honest about that, not flatten it into a one-size-fits-all initiative.

If we want Black and Brown students to thrive—not just survive—we have to stop treating belonging as something families build after the school day ends. It has to become part of what schools themselves are designed to do. And it starts with all of us deciding to build it together, on purpose.

Lisa Johnson is the Founder & Executive Director of Private School Village.