Equity and Inclusion

Dear Maret Community,

Today, we are sharing with you our Spring 2022 progress towards building an anti-racist culture at Maret. This letter outlines further steps we have taken to address the recommendations from the Anti-Racism Task Force’s (ARTF) Equity Report, shared in March 2021; our last progress updates were shared in June and December of 2021.

This targeted anti-racism work has been spearheaded by the Equity and Inclusion Office — as well as the Committee on Equity & Inclusion (CEI), Student Life and Programs (SLP), and other critical leadership groups at Maret — and is foundational to the ongoing equity and inclusion efforts within our school community.

Every year, faculty, students, and parents and guardians help further this critical work at Maret. This year, faculty members have pursued professional development to build more equitable classrooms, Middle School faculty have worked on a set of essential questions to build a scope and sequence of anti-racist education for Grades 5–8, and in August new faculty will again attend our week-long seminar Deepening the Discussion on Race. Interested parents have started new affinity groups to ensure all members of our community feel included and welcomed at Maret, and student voices are being increasingly amplified through new Lower School affinity spaces, student listening groups, and the Maret Upper School Equity Council (MUSE).

We are excited about the deep commitment that our school has to live our mission. Please read more about our progress below and feel free to contact us with any questions you might have.

Sincerely,

Marjo Talbott
Head of School
Co-chair, Committee on Equity & Inclusion

Courtney Cothran-Fenner
Director of Equity & Inclusion
Co-chair, Committee on Equity & Inclusion
 

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Equity Report: Spring 2022 Update

Office of Equity and Inclusion (OEI)
After a year of careful reflection and building out of our equity initiatives, we have taken the step to expand our Office of Equity & Inclusion (OEI); the Committee on Equity & Inclusion (CEI) will no longer meet. OEI will be helmed by incoming Director of Equity & Inclusion, Mich Black, who has a number of years of experience directing equity and inclusion work in a variety of independent school settings. She will be supported by longtime Maret Science Teacher and Grade Dean, Jua Fluellen, who has been instrumental in the creation of affinity groups and Day of Dialogue within the Middle School and who has been part of the leadership team of Deepening the Discussion on Race, which is attended by all new faculty. Joining them will be Nina Candia, the Assistant Director of the Upper School, and Patrick Scott, the Director of Middle School Admissions. They will meet weekly, and their schedules have been designed to allow them time to engage more deeply in E&I work together and within their roles across campus.

Martha Haakmat of Haakmat Consulting will be supporting the OEI in its design and function. Martha led an anti-racism and anti-bias training for the Board of Trustees in September, as well as a similar training for the Alumni Council in December. She is also supporting us schoolwide as we examine our systems to enhance equity across multiple aspects of our community. Last week, she spent a full day on campus with us, getting to know our school leaders and trustees as she plans her work with us for next year. We are grateful for a gift to the school that allows us to have such a comprehensive contract with Ms. Haakmat.

Anti-Racism Advisory Council (ARAC)
The Anti-Racism Advisory Council — made up of 10 students, four alumni, five parents, and six faculty members — met twice this year. It is charged with working proactively to prevent incidents of racial harm from happening through shared observations about racial equity in the community and making recommendations to CEI.

Raising Student Voices
The Equity Report strongly recommended that student voice be incorporated throughout the systems and spaces that are measuring and evaluating equity at Maret. To that end, we have created more opportunities for students to find support, build solidarity, and have a say in policy-making.

• Maret Upper School Equity Council — Students on the newly created Maret Upper School Equity Council (MUSE) met twice per month to examine equity issues within the Upper School community and to brainstorm solutions. They also met with CEI to share some of their strongest concerns and observations, which the Upper School administration has taken under serious consideration. These meetings will continue next year, and MUSE plans to expand to include more students.
   
• Student Listening Groups — Listening Groups have expanded to include not only parents and guardians but also students. The purpose of these gatherings and subsequent feedback is to understand the school experiences of students of various racial or ethnic identities. In the past, parents and guardians spoke about their children's experiences. While those perspectives are hugely helpful, we found it critical to talk directly with students about how they have experienced Maret. Parent/guardian listening groups now focus on how parents and guardians experience Maret in their various identities.
   
• Lower School Affinity Groups — This spring, the Lower School began an affinity group pilot program. We have seen the positive effects of affinity spaces in our Middle and Upper Schools and wanted to extend this opportunity to build community to our Lower School students. Affinity group spaces were offered to students in third and fourth grades. Each group met twice—once in April and once in May. Groups were created in response to requests from the students and the availability of experienced teachers to lead and facilitate the groups. We hope to expand the number of affinity groups in the future to include white students, students new to Maret, and others. Moving forward, we will make adjustments based on student, family, and faculty feedback.

Parent/Guardian Listening Groups
In early April, we continued our annual Parent/Guardian Listening Groups. Similar to our Student and Faculty Listening Groups, the purpose of these sessions is to hear feedback from our parent/guardian community in order to identify emerging trends in the experiences of people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. We held listening groups for parents and guardians who identify as Latinx, Asian, Greater Middle Eastern, Black, Jewish, White, and Multiracial. We use the feedback to improve our strategies for greater inclusion of our parents and guardians.

Parent Communications
We are examining communication practices in our three divisions and schoolwide to appropriately address events in the news and keep families better informed about our institutional E&I initiatives, as well as what is happening in the curriculum, in classrooms, and in our programming across school life.

Restorative Practices (RP)
Restorative Practices is the two-part system of meeting protocols that we are using to help us build authentic community (through Community-Building Circles) and repair racial harm (through Responsive Circles). This work involves self-reflection, as well as strategies to repair relationships.

• Community Building Circles — Our RP Team has been expanding Community Building Circles in our faculty and student meeting spaces across the school this year. The Team is also ready to lead Responsive Circles when these are requested. Over time, all members of the faculty will be trained to facilitate community building circles so that they become a part of the fabric of our school culture.
   
• System for Reporting Harm — Maret is committed to systematically preventing racial harm and repairing any harm that does occur. To that end, we have drafted a system for reporting that begins a process for understanding what happened. Incoming Director of Equity & Inclusion, Mich Black, has had extensive experience in Restorative Practices, along with educating all community constituents about its ethos and its logistics. She will be a fantastic leader as this work evolves and rolls out, hopefully, in the fall semester of 2022.
   
• We will also be sending more faculty to be trained this summer in RP, both brand new facilitators and also returning facilitators who will take an advanced level of training for reporting harm.

Faculty Listening Survey
Faculty have also been asked to share their experiences based on the racial/ethnic aspects of their identities. This allows school leaders to see trends emerging for specific identity groups among our faculty and to address issues to make Maret a more inclusive work environment.

Equity and Inclusion Training
Deepening our anti-racist work includes professional development for all faculty and school leaders.

• Throughout this spring, the OEI gave presentations on “Holding Space for Challenging Conversations with Students” to faculty within each teaching division: Lower School, Middle School, and Upper School. These conversations help faculty develop the skills to disrupt harmful comments by avoiding our knee-jerk responses and developing strategies for engaging students in unlearning and relearning, ultimately coming to new understanding about how to treat each other.
   
• All teaching faculty take part in Equity Learning Groups. They have spent the spring in conversations about how to measure student engagement in ways that build more anti-racist classrooms. These conversations are, again, starting points that will extend into the 2022-23 school year.
   
• Our faculty are encouraged to pursue professional development with a focus on equity and inclusion, and they have continuous support in doing so. Some of the sessions they attended this school year included:
  • Racial Equity Facilitator Training
  • The History of Anti-Black Racism Series
  • NSTA: What is Social Justice Teaching in the Science Classroom Series
     
• In December, Maret will attend the National Association for Independent Schools (NAIS) Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC) and People of Color Conference (PoCC). The conferences will be in-person in San Antonio, Texas.

 

Nov 12 2021

Dear Maret Community,

When the Anti-Racism Task Force (ARTF) shared the Equity Report with you last March, we made a commitment to regularly communicate our progress towards building an anti-racist culture at Maret. Our first update was in June. This letter outlines a number of further steps we have taken to address the recommendations made in the Report over the past five months.

Maret is fortunate to have a strong team to lead us in this journey, including the long-standing Committee on Equity & Inclusion (CEI). In July, Lower School Librarian Liz Kleinrock, a seasoned anti-bias educator, joined the newly constituted Office of Equity & Inclusion. In addition, sixteen faculty members took extensive training in Restorative Practices over the summer and are already leading Community Building Circles throughout the School.

We are also thrilled to announce that we have just received an amazing gift from a Maret family of $250,000 to establish The Fund for Equity and Inclusion to be used over the next five years to support faculty professional development; student, faculty, and parent affinity and working groups; and other equity and inclusion initiatives and programs.

The steps we are sharing with you today are just a part of our ongoing work. The new faculty attended our very important Deepening the Discussion About Race in August, there are a number of affinity groups across the Middle and Upper Schools, the Organization Chart has been redone and is posted in multiple places, we have expanded the scope of religious and cultural holidays recognized on our school calendar, and our department chairs and faculty continue to evaluate our curriculum to ensure that it is inclusive. We are excited about the deep commitment that our School has to live our Mission.

We will continue to update our Equity & Inclusion page on the website with the initiatives that help ensure that all of our community members feel included and welcomed in our School.

Please read more about our progress below and feel free to contact us with any questions you might have.

Sincerely,

Marjo Talbott
Head of School
Co-chair, Committee on Equity & Inclusion

Courtney Cothran-Fenner
Director of Equity & Inclusion
Co-chair, Committee on Equity & Inclusion

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Equity Report: Fall 2021 Update

Committee on Equity & Inclusion (CEI)
In response to the Equity Report recommendations, this faculty leadership team, which was originally constituted in 2009, has expanded in size to 11 members and increased its meeting frequency so that it can address matters of equity, particularly racial inequity, in a more immediate fashion.

Forming the Anti-Racism Advisory Council, which was a recommendation of the Equity Report, has been an important priority. Moving forward, CEI will review observations from the Anti-Racism Advisory Council to help shape school policy and practices on racial equity.

Meet the Committee on Equity & Inclusion:

Courtney Cothran-Fenner, Director of Equity & Inclusion, Co-chair of CEI
Marjo Talbott, Head of School, Co-chair of CEI
Nina Candia, Assistant Director of Upper School
Jaime Estrada, World Languages Department Chair
Liz Kleinrock, Lower School Librarian
Dana Krein, Upper School Humanities Teacher
Jung Lee, Lower School Homeroom Teacher
Krystle Merchant, Director of Community Engagement & Partnerships
Dominic Redd, Director of Middle School
Patrick Scott, Director of Middle School Admission & Social Media
Steven Tejada, Director of Upper School

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Anti-Racism Advisory Council (ARAC)
The new Anti-Racism Advisory Council will be made up of 9-10 students, 4 alumni, 3-4 parents, and 6 faculty members. It is charged with working proactively to prevent incidents of racial harm from happening through shared observations about racial equity in the community and making recommendations to CEI. The first meeting of ARAC will be December.

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Student Equity Teams
The Equity Report strongly recommended that student voice be incorporated throughout the systems and spaces that are measuring and evaluating equity at Maret. Student equity teams are now being formed in the Middle and Upper Schools. These teams will examine equity in their respective divisions, bringing breadth, depth, and nuance to our understanding of student life and Maret’s culture. Students from these teams will also be selected to sit on the Anti-Racism Advisory Council.

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Restorative Practices (RP)
Restorative Practices is the two-part system of meeting protocols that we are using to help us build authentic community (through Community Building Circles) and repair racial harm (through Responsive Circles). This work involves self-reflection, as well as strategies to repair relationships.

At the end of last school year, Middle School students, Upper School students, and faculty chose faculty members they entrusted to be a part of the first RP Team at Maret. Over the summer and into the early fall, these 16 faculty members completed a two-day training with the International Institute of Restorative Practices (IIRP). Their training will continue throughout the year.

Our RP Team has been leading Community Building Circles in our faculty and student meeting spaces, and we will expand the use of these circles across the school this year. The Team is also ready to lead Responsive Circles, when these are requested. Later this year, all members of the faculty will be trained to facilitate community building circles.

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System for Reporting Harm
Maret is committed to systematically preventing racial harm and repairing any harm that does occur. To that end, we have drafted a system for reporting racial harm that begins a process for understanding what happened. The system for reporting will go through a comprehensive review process by multiple constituents with multiple lenses at Maret, including School leadership teams, the Anti-Racism Advisory Council, and student equity teams.

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Equity and Inclusion Training
Deepening our anti-racist work includes professional development for all faculty and school leaders.

• Martha Haakmat of Haakmat Consulting led an anti-racism and anti-bias training for the Board of Trustees in September. They will lead a similar training for the Alumni Council in December.
• The Wells Collective is delivering engagement and learning opportunities for Maret faculty on topics that lead to equitable and anti-racist schools and that speak to specific recommendations from the Equity Report.
  1. August 25—Vocabulary and Personal Inventory
  2. November 17—History of Schools
  3. February 2—Co-Creating Anti-Racist Classrooms
  4. March 30—Facilitating Critical Dialogue
  5. Date TBD—Planning and Accountability for Equity and Justice Work
• Leaders of our faculty working group, A White Anti-Racist Educator (AWARE), attended a week-long iGroup workshop with the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools (SF-CESS) this summer. There, they completed intense work used to shape and revitalize their anti-racist work as faculty at Maret.
• The Development Team participated in two workshops led by EAB that addressed equity and inclusion in fundraising and events.
• Director of Admission Annie Farquhar took part in the three-day National DIversity Practitioners Institute sponsored by the Glasgow Group, and the entire Admission Office attended an all-day Anti-Bias Symposium run by the Enrollment Management Association.
• The Office of Equity & Inclusion gave presentations on name microaggressions to all faculty and Middle and Upper School students in an effort to address incidents of misnaming in our community, especially of students and faculty of color. Programming is being planned for Lower School students as well. Groups across campus are now working on practicing the suggested strategies to eliminate misnaming. In addition, Director of Technology Jean-Philippe Fontaine and Assistant Head for Student Life Lynn Levinson are spearheading an effort to collect the correct pronunciations of all faculty and student names, which will be added to our directories so that the community has an accurate, easily accessible reference.
• The Office of Equity & Inclusion, the Director of Alumni Giving and Programs Dana Tignor, and others took part in the Racial Literacy Institute’s Training for Equity Facilitators to strengthen their skills in leading discussions on racial equity and antiracist practices.
• In December, Maret’s Office of Equity & Inclusion will lead an anti-bias workshop for all admission interviewers and admission committee members.
• Also in December, five faculty members will attend the National Association for Independent Schools (NAIS) People of Color Conference (PoCC), and five students will attend the NAIS Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC).

Through our listening groups, survey, and @blackatmaret, we heard the call for immediate and real action; in conjunction with SF-CESS, we have identified the areas where work needs to take place. Many of the plans we have going forward will take time to allow for proper training and protocols to ensure we do this work right and in a manner that is lasting. Actions on other recommendations will begin in the next few weeks while some changes are underway already. Making these plans optimal and bias-free will be an ongoing and continuous process, as we are constantly fighting the biases we all bring to the common space of Maret.

Read the Full Report

In addition to the standing Committee on Equity and Inclusion and the Board of Trustees' Committee on Education and Equity, the School convened a joint Board and faculty Anti-Racism Task Force (ARTF) in June 2020. The Task Force worked through February 2021, sharing a report with the Faculty and Board in February and with the wider community in March. 

Task Force Co-Chairs
Ian Cameron	President of the Board of Trustees
Courtney Cothran-Fenner	Director of Equity and Inclusion
Task Force Members
Nina Candia	Assistant Director of US
Susan Epps	Assistant Head
David Hall	Trustee
Allie Levey	Director of College Counseling
Krystle Merchant	Director of Community Engagement
Clif Morgan	MPA Executive Committee
Lex Sant	Trustee
Sylvia White	Trustee
Ex-Officio
Marjo Talbott	Head of School

Task Force Consultants

Greg Peters and Camilla Greene, of the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools (SF-CESS), are well-known consultants who work with many schools to combat racism, prejudice, and hatred. Roughly a decade ago, they, along with Eliza Alexander and Holly Hinderlie, helped Maret create and facilitate Deepening the Discussion about Race, our week-long annual faculty training. 

Student Voice

Overwhelmingly, student voice needs to be incorporated throughout a number of our systems and especially in the spaces that are measuring and evaluating equity at Maret. This will include representation on the Anti-Racism Advisory Council, meetings with the Committee on Equity & Inclusion, and a regular feedback cycle between the student body (beyond Student Council) and the school administration.

Committee for Equity & Inclusion

This leadership team (known as CEI) has actually been in place at Maret for several years. However, with the recommendations from the equity audit, this team of leaders will expand in size, increase its meeting frequency in order to keep urgent issues even more at the forefront, and review recommendations from the Anti-Racism Advisory Council in order to shape school policy on racial equity.

System for Reporting Racial Harm

This is how people in our community can report an instance of racial harm. This could lead to a restorative practice protocol.

Restorative Practices

This system (a series of small meeting protocols led by faculty facilitators trained in Restorative Practices) will be our way of doing deeper reparative emotional work with students and faculty who are involved in an incident of racial harm. Part of this work involves self-reflection, as well as “making it right.” This does not replace consequences but works in conjunction with consequences.

Systems Needing Anti-Racism Structures

This is a re-examination of our processes in order to make them racially equitable; these systems include the make-up of our leadership, our hiring practices, our evaluation of students, and our relationship-building between faculty and students. This also includes embedding even deeper anti-racist work into our Wellness curriculum, where our identity and equity education currently lives.

Ongoing Professional Development for Faculty

Faculty and, in particular, school leadership should deepen their anti-racist work. School leadership should also make their own work a transparent model for the rest of the faculty. We will regularly update our wider community about the anti-racist steps we are taking in terms of our professional development.

A Racial Reckoning

This would be a large-scale project to codify Maret’s racial narrative and to make it known. This project would: (1) encompass the history of the land upon which Maret sits; (2) acknowledge the Indigenous people and all those who have lived on the land, as well as the seminal leaders of Woodley home and the School; (3) research the legacy of their identities and the narratives over time from across the breadth of our community; (4) identify changes in school demographics, achievements, and evolution of policies; and (5) publicly acknowledge and take responsibility for racial harm. We have begun working with faculty and students of the Woodley Historical Society to begin to process how we would complete this.

Anti-Racism Advisory Council

This is a body of individuals in our community (students, faculty, families, and alumni) who will work to proactively prevent incidents of racial harm from happening through shared observations about racial equity in the community.

Read the Full Report

Anti-Racist Expectations for Faculty

We must create a set of baseline expectations for faculty as anti-racist representatives of Maret. This would include such elements as hiring, advising, teaching, collaboration, and evaluation. This would be part of a comprehensive program to prevent racial harm.

Anti-Racist Curriculum for Families

The school should develop a framework for teaching anti-racist practices to the parent, guardian, and caregiver community so that they will be aligned. This would be another component of the program to prevent racial harm.

Across-Difference Affinity

In conjunction with individual racial identity work and racial identity work within affinity groups, there should be increased opportunities for across- difference work between affinity groups. This would also be a component of the program to prevent racial harm.

Black Student Leadership

A direct quotation from the consulting firm is that “Maret should disproportionately elevate Black student voices and leadership in areas that matter most, as this equity audit is in response to the reality of @blackatmaret.” This would be a part of our ongoing anti-racist leadership development, which includes student leadership.

Read the Full Report