T H E VA LU E OF A F F I N I T Y SPAC E S: A PL AC E TO E XHALE Ivy Alphonse-Crean ’07 is returning to her Boston roots, ready to take on a new challenge as Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Dedham Country Day School, just down the road from Park.
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s a Park student in the late 90s, the conversation around “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” was barely visible, yet the School is where she first discovered the embracing value of affinity groups. While no officially defined “affinity programming” existed at the time, music teachers Janice Allen and Betty Hillmon created a de facto affinity experience for Ivy and her peers that remains a powerful, shaping memory today. Realizing that Ivy liked to sing, these two teachers encouraged her to get involved in singing at Park, beginning with the Gospel choir. Ivy recalls, “These two Black women...they got us singing at events. Ms. Hillmon introduced me to Black Nativity,” the gospel-style retelling of the Nativity based on a play by Langston Hughes, performed annually in Boston. “That’s where I really learned to deliver as a performer, to be on stage, all while still getting my school work done. It was a huge undertaking—a ‘Nutcracker’ level of commitment.” Park’s After-School Program served as another default affinity group—a place where students with different family structures and working parents, whose life experience was more like hers, gathered. In retrospect, she deeply appreciates the value of affinity spaces for elementary and middle school-age students. “An affinity group,” she says, “is a place to exhale.”
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THE PARK SCHOOL
Exhale...because a lot of the time, she was holding her breath. In addition to her music teachers, Ivy recalls that many wonderful teachers at Park. She remembers Sue Sprague and Lucy Robb, in particular, who were very “culturally affirming.” It was harder, however, to feel a deep sense of belonging in the Park community. “My mother was a single parent, and that led to a very difficult dynamic,” she notes. Her mother encountered awkward moments like “Do I attend a parent gathering alone?” She didn’t fit the typical Park “categories.” In Ivy’s Caribbean-American family, there was a sense of decorum, and consistent with her mother’s rules, Ivy always wore dresses to school. “Jeans weren’t ‘done’ in my culture. Yet there was intense pressure to conform. Other mothers would casually mention to her that ‘jeans are on sale at the GAP now,’ as if the problem might be a question of affording to buy jeans rather than a difference in cultural expectation.” Being Black at Park in that era came bundled with other assumptions. Her family was comfortably middle class, she says, and she had cousins at Park as well, a family that was well known and relatively wealthy. Yet her cousins were frequently questioned for “Not being smart enough” to make it at Park on their merits, and racial slurs were sometimes volleyed in the context of sports and hallway chatter. “Money doesn’t always fix that.” Her uncle attended Park as well—“we were private school people—we SHOULD do well! And yet we were all questioned.” There was also the “birthday party gauntlet,” Ivy remembers “the massive parties! The pressure to have a cool gift, and the persistent wondering as to if they only invited me because they had to.” One child actually told her that was the case. “The child was rude,” Ivy says, “but truthfull. It was just another example of being ‘othered.’” Well-intended standards and expectations can have a powerful way of defining who is included, who belongs, and who does not. This well of experience, far from daunting her or dampening her belief in the potential of independent schools, has inspired her throughout her journey to engage—and help others engage—with a deep sense of belonging. Ivy left Park after Grade 5 when her family moved to Florida. There, she found the academic opportunities underwhelming, but “The performing arts opportunities
