This Year's Work in Diversity Equity, Inclusion and Belonging

This Year's Work

in Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging: Building the Beloved Community

Ms. Kenny talks with 1st graders about creating a Beloved Community.

By Priya Kenny | Lower and Middle School Co-Director of DEIB

During this admissions season,

I was delighted to help our wonderful admissions team in interviewing families who have students that would like to attend St. Andrew’s. At the end of every interview, families have the opportunity to ask their own questions. They are mostly logistical in nature: “What is the schedule like?”; “What is the average tenure of a teacher?”; “What kind of food will my child be eating?”. I’m usually ready for these questions and have notes prepared (and during this Zoom-heavy year I’ll also confess to scrambling to check the website for a few). One family had several questions on our work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), and as we wrapped up they delivered one last question that had me flummoxed:

“When will this work be complete?”

Silence. And then more silence. And then some more which got a little bit awkward. I finally sputtered out with, “Never, it’s never complete, I don’t have a checklist of when we have arrived”

Priya Kenny teaching faculty about the identity molecule.

Our Year in DEIB Work

While the family seemed satisfied, my answer has bothered me ever since.

Practically, I doubt this work will be complete in my lifetime, either in our society or at St. Andrew’s, because we are in, and of, our greater society and while we like to think of our campus as an island of grace and understanding, the problems and inequities that exist beyond our grounds are not shed at our gates.

But of course, I am not the first person to grapple with this question of what the conclusion of this work would look like. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a trained pastor, called the end “reconciliation.”

“The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. ... It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.” who work in Episcopal Institutions (and, indeed, was our chapel theme for the 2020 -2021 school year).

In a document released this year, the church said,:

“Jesus laid out the fundamentals for any who would follow him when he said, “The first [commandment] of all is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:29-31). The Beloved Community is the body within which we promote the fruits of the spirit and grow to recognize our kinship as people who love God and love the image of God that we find in our neighbors, in ourselves, and in creation.”

It is also a concept we reach to in our own and new diversity statement, which reads:

“St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is committed to building a beloved community of learning that embraces diversity,

At St. Andrew’s, of course not everyone is Episcopalian and we strive to provide a welcoming and nurturing environment for people of all faiths, or none. But we do draw on our Episcopal identity to set our course, and I think these principles can be understood and honored by all. Our DEIB program seeks to support our children who do not look like, speak like, or have the same faith of many of their classmates. And because St. Andrew’s tries to grow the whole person in our students, not just the academic mind, our program also seeks to prepare all our students to have the language and understanding to interact with the wild tapestry of individuals they will encounter in their adult lives, to personally treat them with dignity, and to insist that others treat all persons with dignity, including themselves.

With that in mind, here are some of the accomplishments of the DEIB program this year: ■ We created dedicated chapel programming for K - 8 that increases visibility of underrepresented and marginalized identities to help our students have a better understanding of families and individuals not common in many of their daily lives. ■ We increased the visibility and cohesiveness of FOCUS (Families of Cultural Understanding), our group for all families that wish to take a more active role in reconciling the differences and barriers between different kinds of peoples in our community. ■ We designed and taught DEIB lessons to Lower School classes using the Learning for Justice curriculum standards.

FOCUS chair, Monica May, and her daughter Alexis May talking about Hispanic Heritage Month on Zoom.

"Our Favorite Day of the Year" was one read-aloud that Ms. Kenny recorded for chapel.

■ We helped implement a WARAG (White Anti-Racist Affinity Group) for white members of our community who wished to be more proactive in their lives about racial reconciliation. ■ We developed an onboarding model for new faculty members that especially affirms and supports faculty of color to address retention rates. ■ We hosted DEIB and allyship development trainings for faculty, staff and parents. ■ We expanded and elaborated our affinity group programming.

These are just some of the initiatives that we have made progress on this school year. As always, this work can’t be boiled down to this checklist and the progress on these initiatives will always be ”in progress”.

To go back to MLK, if and when there is full reconciliation of all God’s children and the redemption of all our hearts, I do think I could close up shop and move on, maybe go back to teaching Middle School Science (my former job). Until then, St. Andrew’s will continue preparing our students for a moral life in a troubled world, and to proactively work on helping all our community members shed the scar tissue that impedes our ability to recognize our common kinship and to see and love the image of God in our neighbors, ourselves, and in creation.

The work of our department continues to grow from the silos that it started from with the goal being that every part of our St. Andrew’s community will be viewed through this lens.