Following the December 2015 resignation of Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Dina Levi and other issues regarding diversity within the school, the Parker administration reached out to educational consultant Dr. Derrick Gay over the past summer to help the school reexamine its needs in terms of work with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“Some of the programming that was implemented during Dina’s stint here didn’t necessarily resonate with the population,” Interim Head of Upper School and Assistant Principal Ruth Jurgensen said, “so we wanted to make sure that we had a consultant who has worked with independent schools to help us take the temperature.”

Gay, a graduate of Chicago’s Whitney M. Young Magnet High School and an internationally acclaimed consultant who works primarily with independent schools, has since met separately with the administration, faculty, board of trustees, and parents five times this year, conducting workshops, lectures, and discussions. The goal of the relationship, according to Jurgensen, is to expand cultural competency throughout the school and to establish a strategic plan regarding such competency for implementation in the 2018-19 school year.

In August Gay met with 12 administrators for a two-day intensive workshop focused on ensuring consensus on a framework for the topics of diversity and inclusion. The workshop consisted of conversations and exercises centered around identity, social systems, the usage of language around diversity, what challenges the school has seen around diversity, and ways to generate Parker-specific data.  

Gay then met with all faculty and staff in November, with a focus on the importance of teaching a variety of narratives and redefining and connecting curricula.  Another workshop for all new faculty members followed soon after with similar goals and to obtain input about Parker from a fresh set of eyes.  

In March the Board of Trustees participated in an 8-hour retreat with Gay at Green Exchange in Logan Square. The work with the board was more strategic–analysis through a broader governance perspective.  The Board discussed what this work would entail in three to five years and what current admissions, enrollment, and financial aid policies look like. The Board also looked at what other schools are doing and best–and worst–practices in the education sector.

“Equity and inclusion is something so integral to society and so beneficial to students in the school, and it makes sense from a business standpoint,” 2nd Vice President of the Board Rika Yoshida said. “When students go out into the world, they’re going to have to be able to work with people from many different backgrounds. Even from a very pragmatic approach, this is something that the school has to do and has to do right.”

During his fourth visit to Parker on April 28, Gay met with grade chair parents with whom he conducted the same work, but with a focus on family experiences and concerns.

“The current approach to this type of work typically is a good guy-bad guy approach,” Co-Chair of the Parents’ Association Maggi Steib said. “That’s why this approach is so refreshing and able to reach more people because there is no good guy, and there is no bad guy.”

In all of his workshops, Gay asked groups to spell out Parker’s current growth and strength areas centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Many believe that the school provides an excellent education, a committed faculty, and a stress on diversity.  In terms of growth, however, not everyone feels included, diversity has been challenging to deal with over the last couple of years, the school is lacking both leadership and vision, and people don’t know what work in the school should entail, according to Gay.   

Gay sees similar issues at comparable independent schools. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is often conflated and all clumped together to mean “diversity,” he said, and there isn’t a compelling vision or a reason for everyone to participate and feel a part of the work. Parker also isn’t representative of Chicago in terms of race and class.  

“I would like to create a vision with Parker where people say, ‘We’re talking about cultural competency,” Gay said, “and everyone says, ‘Alright, I get it, I’m a part of this, I need this, I get something out of this.’”

In order to do this, Gay and the school are working together on a strategic plan. The strategy consists of shifting consciousness around the work to reframe “diversity” from an identity to clearly articulated goals; gaining a sense of the landscape by engaging community members in surveys and conversations; cultivating trust with community members; providing opportunities for education for students, faculty, staff, and parents; and designing a plan based on Parker-specific needs.

According to Jurgensen, the administration also wants to move to the department model for equity and inclusion efforts such that diversity coordinators would be comprised of two co-chairs that help lead, facilitate, and envision.

In terms of expanding Parker’s socioeconomic and racial diversity, Gay believes that while the two are related, increasing socioeconomic diversity will require leveraging many levers, including deepening financial aid for a Parker education to families for whom tuition is cost-prohibitive. “The problem is that you either haven’t actively sought people of color from multiple sources, you haven’t cultivated longstanding relationships with communities of color, or perhaps people of color don’t feel fully comfortable at Parker,” Gay said. “It isn’t that you don’t have a lot of racial diversity at Parker because you have implemented a solid plan and have failed–and that’s a good thing.”

Gay’s work is centered on reframing “diversity” because, he says, the word primarily–and problematically–functions as an identity.  “Diversity,” he explains, is “an identity largely understood as historically marginalized groups.”

“I don’t think this is helping us,” Gay said. “If the idea is to create an equitable society–to create schools where who you are doesn’t inform your social inclusion or your academic attainment–then I think somehow we have to reframe this in a way where all identities are included but also recognize that we live in a world where all identities are not equally valued.”

In his discussions and workshops at Parker Gay also pointed out that in order to be successful in a society full of people of different races, socioeconomic backgrounds, and configurations, one needsa sense of oneself and a sense of one’s privilege–a sense of the systems that are in place that both benefit and “minoritize.”

Gay’s work with Parker started after administration noticed a workshop he was offering called “The Double Edged Sword of Diversity.”  The hope, according to Principal Dan Frank, was that Gay could spend time individually working with different groups of adults involved with the school to help “think about ourselves and how we work together and what’s going on inside the school.” The approach is to get areas around the school on the same page and to think through with him ways to support the adult community at Parker–before working with students.

“We want every faculty and staff member to be culturally responsive, and we certainly want to provide the professional development training for cultural responsiveness, cultural competency,” Jurgensen said. “We really want to focus in on representation in curriculum, how ordinary voices are captured. What else we need to capture needs to come with the work that Derrick is doing with us.”

Gay will come back next year to continue his work with the administration, faculty, staff, and parents, and will meet with Upper School students in October.   

“I hope we are able to keep a relationship going,” Frank said. “He’s a wonderful man, he relates very well to people to allow conversations to open up rather than shut down. We’ve had a good start and to get guidance along the way is a helpful thing and to have it from the same person allows us to develop a trustful relationship.”