Anti-Racism Initiatives

All academic departments will continue to revise their curricula to ensure that coursework and department policies and actions reflect the school’s commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. The school will measure progress toward this goal with an audit of each discipline’s content and diversity of voices at the end of the 2020–21 school year.

 

A committee of faculty and administrators will review graduation requirements and propose the changes necessary to ensure that all students graduate with an appropriate level of cultural competency and critical understanding of social justice. The faculty will vote on any changes to graduation requirements during the 2020–21 school year with the hope that any new requirements may be implemented for the 2021–22 school year.

The school will conduct an inclusivity climate assessment. This summer, the dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion will propose a process for this assessment that will involve a third-party facilitator. The assessment will take place in either 2020–21 or 2021–22 depending on the availability of the desired facilitator and school operations in 2020–21 given the lingering effects of the pandemic.

 

Student orientation and prefect and resident assistant training will include more training around DEI issues. The curriculum for the first year and sophomore year seminars will focus more directly on these issues. The school will further review our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training for faculty and students in the dormitories and review how students are encouraged to pursue and are chosen for leadership positions at the school.

 

The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is working to form an alumni group to support our students of color.

The Office of Admission will review the school’s admission process and address barriers to application and access to a Loomis Chaffee education. This work includes consideration of implementing a test-optional policy in the application process.

 

The school will continue to commit the resources needed to offer a robust financial aid program, one that allows us to enroll students from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds and to provide those students with a complete student experience. Financial aid will remain a top fundraising priority for the school.

All faculty and advisors are required to read Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and either White Fragility or Waking Up White in the summer of 2020.

The Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching will provide ongoing professional development to our faculty around issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Kravis Center will have additional personnel as they take on this responsibility and will include DEI discussions in new faculty orientation as well as in ongoing faculty development.

The school will implement a required SEED training protocol for all administrative and teaching faculty. SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) participants “explore their own education in relation to race, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual identity, abilities, and age, and how these factors currently impact their school, classrooms, community, or workplace. They consider how they can use their classrooms, communities, or workplaces to create a more equitable environment for all.” The school will develop a plan to rotate all faculty through SEED training over the course of four years and will begin the first rotation in 2020–21.

 

The Head’s Administrative Team will undertake further training around DEI issues in summer 2020. The Head’s Administrative Team is reading Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an AntiRacist and John Palfrey’s Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. The team is also planning several guided discussions on these issues in summer 2020.
 

The school will improve the process for the recruitment and retention of administrators, faculty, and staff of color. The Dean of Faculty Office and Human Resources will develop new recruitment and hiring strategies as well as DEI training programs for new faculty and staff and will establish a set of metrics to measure progress toward these goals.

The school will develop a protocol for students and employees to report incidents of racism and/or bias. This protocol will be shared with all community members and will include ways for the school to evaluate and respond to all incidents reported. The protocol will be put in place beginning in the 2020–21 school year. Data collected through this protocol will help us monitor the school and workplace climates.

 

The school will develop a protocol to ensure that with all of our construction projects, we seek and receive bids from minority contractors and that we award contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses.
 

Reporting race and ethnicity data is voluntary. A committee was formed in 2019–20 to examine data collection methods and the categories of race and ethnicity to be tracked. This committee will complete its work in 2020–21 and make any changes to the school’s data collection protocols for the 2021–22 school year.

 

The school will publish an annual report on diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice at Loomis Chaffee. That report will include a dashboard of critical indicators, including race and ethnicity data for our students, faculty, staff, administrators, and Trustees as well as some historical data to provide a better sense of how the diversity of our community has changed over time. The report also will include a summary of current DEI initiatives, progress toward previously established goals, and goals for the future. The report will be published before the beginning of each school year and shared with the entire Loomis Chaffee community. 

During the summer of 2020, all administrative offices will conduct an audit of DEI efforts in their respective work and will set goals for DEI work in the 2020–21 school year. 

In the summer of 2020, the Board of Trustees established a new committee on diversity, equity, and inclusion at the school to be chaired by Trustee Erik Cliette ’84. The committee will monitor the progress in meeting the school’s DEI goals as well as review reports regarding the handling of any issues regarding racism.

The school will establish a committee to analyze how if and bias may be influencing our disciplinary process and outcomes over the past few years. Committee membership will include BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) alumni as well as current faculty and students. The committee will report directly to the head of school and the Board of Trustees. The committee plans to conduct its work during the 2020–21 school year and issue a final report by May 2021.