Over the course of the 2024-2025 school year, Dustin Ward from It Is TIme engaged our community in many conversations as part of an equity assessment. On Wednesday, May 28, we hosted Dustin Ward to hear his share out of the data he collected.
As a school, we have long sought to hire an outside expert facilitator who could facilitate our own thinking and triaging around DEI and show us aspects of our practice of equity we might be overlooking. Where are we succeeding and where could we be doing better? Our Strategic Plan laid out the need to do this early on in our five year plan to help us continue to plan strategically. Here we are at the end of year 2, and this night with Dustin Ward marked the completion of our work with him and the beginning of our synthesis of his reflections.
In total, Dustin hosted 4 days of interviews online or in person, speaking to about 100 people (21 educators, 53 students, 26 parents/alums); we hosted 50-60 people at the community conversation night in March at our State of the School; and lastly, at least 88 people filled out an anonymous survey (88 filled out part 1 and 59 filled out part 2, with some potential overlaps).
One parent said: “I am so glad this work is happening. This evening felt like the conclusion to an important phase. At this moment, DEI work has become more visible, and more excavation is being shared with the community. I’m glad it was identified that we could seek more interconnection with communities in our area.”
Board members, faculty, and staff were able to have time with Dustin that Wednesday night and then Friday May 30. Faculty were able to debrief together during our June Work Days. Here are a few faculty questions from that session:
How can we be bolder about our identity and louder about what we’re doing well?
What does academic rigor mean to us here at FSP?
What would allow us to be more of who we want to be?
What internal work do we need to do here before we can continue to diversify?
What can we do to better support a student and family body with more diverse lived experience?
Of the new potential expenditures, what is the top priority?
What additional administrative role would best support our students?
If these are our community’s perceptions echoed back to us, how can we continue to design and ask questions?
This summer, our next phase as an administrative team will be to digest Dustin's findings in light of faculty response and board response, and then create action steps that are integrated into our strategic plan (linked here) to then share back with faculty, board, and families.
Dustin’s closing message during our final wrap-up lunch was: “Don’t think in absolutes. There is the reality of duality: two things can live simultaneously within one another. This is an opportunity to refresh your conversations. As a school, you are in a really good position to have a number of good conversations next and set up an action plan over the next six months.”
Thank you to the Obadiah Brown Benevolent Fund for the granting support of this year long Equity assessment work.