SSTUDENTS TUDENTS
CODE OF FOR CIVIL
By Stephanie Young ’00, Dean of Students
ast summer the Student Council spent a considerable amount of their vacation developing and drafting the Foxcroft Code of Conduct (Code). This Code is a reaffirmation of Foxcroft’s commitment to an emotionally and physically safe school environment. It sets the tone and expectation for how we treat one another in our community. And the beauty of this Code is that it was developed entirely by students.
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Work began immediately. “We met pretty much weekly, and every time we’d meet we would have ‘homework’ for the next time,” described Student Head of School Moni Corona Perera ’21. “We threw out big ideas,” offered Student Vice Head of School Bianca McNeely ’21, “[about] what we wanted students to take from reading the Code of Conduct. Then we looked at other schools’ code[s] of conduct
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After witnessing the social unrest following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the students wanted to develop a response to the Black Lives Matter movement. “We were inspired by the Courageous Conversations hosted by the Alumnae DEI Committee in partnership with Foxcroft, as well as the @Blackatfxc Instagram,” Senior Class President Julia Clark explained. “The upperclassmen
had a vision of fixing the issues we had encountered or noticed during our time, and we hoped that through collaboration with the underclassmen, we could shape a more inclusive future for Foxcroft.” Honor Council Member Betsy Altenburger ’21 added, “Someone brought up the importance of civil discourse, but we did not have policies in place to manage that. The general consensus was that we need a spoken code to facilitate discourse.”
[and] student behavior expectations to frame how we wanted to organize our own.” Ultimately, it was decided that the Code should be similar in style and structure to the Honor Code because the students were already familiar with that. Meeting regularly over Zoom, members began to flesh out the Code. “We were determined to have it included in the Student and Parent Handbook and made sure to have our final draft before the publication date,” recalled Tami Famewo ’21. Within their timeframe, the Council members created not only the Code of Conduct but also a spoken code to be said aloud — in classrooms and other campus settings — before beginning potentially charged conversations or debates, and a set of case studies to help the entire Foxcroft community practice living by the Code. An undertaking of this scope and scale is particularly impressive given the age of the people involved, as well as their varied backgrounds and points of view. “While we might have different backgrounds or
