The Seattle Girls’ School (SGS) Equity Team strives to centralize the work of diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, and anti-bias within SGS to address individual, interpersonal, and institutional concerns. Our goal is to transform culture, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to achieve a collective commitment and truly actualize our mission and values. We model transformative possibilities that increase a sense of community and challenge so that we may all grow. The Equity Team facilitates both individual accountability and the collective growth process.
Through our work, we push the community forward in an intentional way by reflecting on our past and our current needs; we develop plans in conjunction with teams within and outside our school to design a future that is innovative and based on our social and racial justice and anti-bias values. We invite stories from various constituency groups around their identity-based experiences at SGS to represent themselves and each other so we can move forward as an entity and set yearly intentional goals.
The Equity Team is composed of 6-8 staff and faculty members along with leadership team members. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is intentionally not led by one person who has to hold the work; DEI is everyone’s work at SGS. Each member commits to being on the equity team for at least two years to help build connections with one another and make concrete progress on initiatives.
Our Equity Team is currently working on the following initiatives:
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Learning from our own case studies, especially those involving racial microaggressions.
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Engaging in DEI work with the following stakeholders:
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Faculty and staff
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Students
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Families
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Board of Trustees
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Using staff and faculty self-assessment and peer/supervisor feedback to guide learning and accountability for growth and implementation
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Examining and improving hiring and retention practices
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Providing professional development in faculty/staff meetings and in-service days
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Evaluating and improving curricular and co-curricular programs for students