Following these experiences for our Admin Team, Levine decided to work more assiduously at growing awareness among all of its employees on the many DEI topics. Toward that end, during the 2020/2021 school year – the pandemic year – Levine still moved ahead and engaged with Campus Outreach in order to line up several professional development seminars with the Director of Campus Outreach, Katie Koestner. Katie Koestner has been serving schools and colleges for well over twenty years on all matters related to DEI topics, and her focus with the Levine Faculty and Administration was the topics of bias, harassment, and equity. Our first action-plan follow-up to these most recent DEI professional development experiences is the full review of our Parent Handbook — we are now going to call it a Community Handbook which will include a more expanded section on topics of harassment, bias, and discrimination. The values we wish to promote, alongside the behaviors we wish to minimize or eliminate, would be spelled out in this Handbook, and it would be applicable to all constituents: students, parents, faculty, and administrators. Levine’s overall philosophy and our standard instructional approach are informed by our membership in No Place for Hate, the professional development work we have done with the ADL, and our commitment to the ideals and methods of Conscious Discipline and Responsibility-Centered Discipline. The teaching of differences and the promotion of inclusivity has become a regular classroom feature at Levine. Our school counselors have developed a pro-active approach in their regular visits to the classrooms each week by prioritizing the teaching of differences and inclusivity, in age-appropriate ways, throughout the school year. Levine is also actively addressing its openness to being inclusive in its recruitment processes for faculty and staff positions. We of course know that qualified candidates for its staff and faculty positions will emerge from a diversity of backgrounds and profiles, and our recruitment practices are conducted with this realization in mind. Also, for the purposes of establishing and maintaining an environment where all voices are heard among the faculty, in 2019 we created a Safe Channel Communication route, whereby any employee may express any concern to the HR Director, and any employee who pursues this route has the right to remain anonymous. The work toward a more inclusive school, one where anyone who understands the school’s Mission would feel welcome, will be ongoing. Levine prides itself on its seven middot (or values) of Responsibility, Justice, Integrity, Caring, Citizenship, Respect, and Holiness. Levine is a school that not only reaches out to the full spectrumof Jewish affiliations and the unaffiliated, but it is a school that will welcome any and all applicants, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. Alon gside a student’s school record, the admissions process, which is fully conducted by a faculty-led committee, will consider families to be a good fit if that family understands and embraces our school’s Mission. It is important to note that our admissions process does not require applicants to declare a Jewish denomination or even a Jewish lineage, but it does offer families an opportunity to demonstrate that their child- applicant would be “Mission - Appropriate,”
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