Note from the Head of School WHEN I WAS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, I sometimes wished that my family would just talk about music or sports at the dinner table instead of debating civil rights, the economy, and the war in Vietnam. By the time I was in high school, however, I reveled in these roundtables with my four siblings and my parents, both of whom were progressive educators. Outside the house, I debated my principal about Title IX and interracial dating and challenged my church rector about the lack of women’s voices in our services. After I started as an educator, I became an outspoken faculty member on myriad social justice issues. The students, parents, and faculty at UHS are also keenly interested in issues of social justice, and one of our new strategic design platforms states that “we are a community that embodies a fundamental belief that collaboration among people with diverse backgrounds and life experiences is essential to deep learning.” This commitment demands honest reflection, even from those who have been in the middle of this conversation for decades.
our strength and growth come in large
Our strategic work got me thinking about something I read long ago for a graduate course on educational autobiography. In the forward to her book White Teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley writes: “This notion of collecting the goods on myself turns out to be strangely exciting.” I have always been committed to “collecting the goods on myself,” but it’s time for me to hold up a new mirror for some serious probing of what it means to be a white female school
measure from how we
head in 2017 and to examine the calculus of diversity and inclusivity in today’s landscape.
learn from and with
pluralism since it opened its doors in 1975, UHS has always had a public purpose, launch-
one another, how we
to hold up a new mirror—and that’s exactly what we’re doing. The staff is using in-service
honor our differences, and how we find common ground.
As a community, University High School is in a similar place: A champion of diversity and ing Summerbridge less than three years after we opened our doors. But UHS, too, needs training, professional conferences, and faculty meetings to explore how we can be a more diversity-responsive school. To read more about our work, challenges, and progress, please turn to the story “All In on Diversity” on page 18. UHS has long strived to ensure that the student body and faculty are drawn from a broad range of cultures, races, sexual orientations, and linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We believe that our strength and growth come in large measure from how we learn from and with one another, how we honor our differences, and how we find common ground. But we also have to make sure that all of our backgrounds and perspectives are fully represented in our curriculum and in our classroom and community discussions. Part of our work this year is grappling with the messiness of diversity. It is not a binary proposition of male-female, black-white, straight-gay, left-right. Today, we must be prepared to embrace more expansive, more fluid meanings for gender, race, sexuality, and political inclination. Before the school year is out, we will capture our aspirations and resolve on these critically important issues—honoring and preserving the heavy lifting done personally and collectively this year. We will prepare a position statement to share with the community that will assist us in building a school culture in which all identities, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences are reflected and celebrated. I hope you’ll read over our position statement when it’s finished and maybe even talk about it at your house. I know I’ll be bringing it to the dinner table at mine.
Julia Russell Eells
MARK JOHANN
We believe that