and that families understand the universal values and ideals that Levine Academy strives to inculcate and promote in its students. Strengths and Accomplishments: • The Board’s current Strategic Plan, adopted in the spring of 2019, included as one of its four main pillars the topic of “Inclusivity.” The other pillars are Early Childhood Excellence, K8 Academic Excellence, and Financial Sustainability. • Our Admissions Office has completely revised its procedures in order to fully embrace an inclusive approach to all aspects of the admissions process. • The Levine Administration has all participated in a full range of seminar discussions and lessons in the past year on topics related to bias, discrimination, harassment, and equ ity. • Several Levine Admin leaders travelled across North America during 2019-2020 in order to learn from day schools who have reputations for having evolved significantly along the continuumof DEI progress. • Curricular steps were taken during the 2020/2021 school year to diversify the curriculum, by adding Spanish and contemporary Jewish elective topics, plus revised its 8 th grade Hebrew program in such a way as to teach the complexities and complications in present-day Israeli society and politics. • The Admin Team acted on its recent learning by revising its Community Handbook, in such a way as to fully define and spell out topics of bias, discrimination, and harassment.
Ongoing Challenges:
• Considering Levine covers preschool through grade 8, many of our parents have to be “schooled” and fully processed, very sensitively so, on these topics of bias, discrimination, bullying and harassment - for example, we will need to work harder at communicating when student behavior rises to the level of bully ing and also when it doesn’t rise to the level of bullying. • Being fully a school of diversity and inclusion will mean that our Judaic program teaching must refrain from language that can be construed as indoctrination and instead must embrace different voices and perspectives without trying to inculcate a specific creed. • One of the more powerful elements of diversity is accomplished through faculty and staff hiring, yet this becomes challenging because those knowledgeable about Jewish traditions or have backgrounds in Hebrew teaching narrows the employment field considerably.
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker