School Culture Initiatives
RACE, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
With the support of a committee of staff members and outside organizations, I initiated schoolwide race and equity discussions among staff and students. This has included full-day staff development as well as schoolwide conversations through advisories. The work started off with Black History Month but has now grown beyond that. The biggest shift has been embedding consistent structures into our school day for both staff and students to delve into race, equity, and inclusion. In order to see progress, we needed to carve out time to make this a priority! For staff, we have embedded ongoing professional development throughout the school year with the support of an outside consultant as well as our very own staff members leading caucuses on various topics related to this work. That has led to actual changes such as the creation of MelaNATION, a group focused on celebrating, educating, and empowering black female students and a design think group to brainstorm around Staff of Color Recruitment, Retention, and Development. For students, we have monthly school-wide conversations through advisories on topics such as Culture and Music through the lens of protest and unity or national anthems. We have also developed more of an education component to heritage months. For example, Black History Month has been revamped from being just a one-day assembly to a month-long celebration with food and music festivities, educational workshops, and race thought conversations. As I continue to push this work among staff and students, I am also constantly pushing this work in myself through attending professional development and participating as a member of the District-Charter Collaborative Racial Equity Academy.
MESA's ROCK the VOTE
_%20Teacher%20Walkthro.jpg)
I co-organized our two-part "Rock the Vote" series, where we paused our regular virtual classes to inspire and educate students about voting. This developed of a need to educate our students about the voting process and the elections, something students have told us they wished they knew. Since the pandemic has provided us with some flexibility with the schedule, we did not want to miss the opportunity to directly educate students about the elections. This started off with a small group of teachers who were passionate about getting our juniors and seniors registered or pre-registered to vote, so we partnered with an organization called Soft Power Vote for a mini-workshop. That grew into a two-part workshop, one pre-election to teach workshops such as "Election 101 & Election 'Night' 2020" and "Why Vote?" and one post-elections where we featured workshops such as "So...the Election is Over. What Now?" and "Do Something About It!" During the second series of workshops, we collaborated with YVote, which offers youth-facilitated sessions around civic engagement. This has inspired students to want to facilitate some sessions in the future. The end result: 87% of students said they learned something new, 91% left inspired in some way, and 17% would like to be involved in planning or leading workshops next time.
MESA UNIVERSITY: SCHOOL OF DIVERSITY
I co-created “MESA University: School of Diversity” Student Workshop 3-part series, addressing themes of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, intersectionality, and privilege. This is the first time we carved out a significant amount of time to educate students on these topics after spending a few years engaging in DEI and anti-racism work predominantly with staff. What better time than now than during a pandemic where our school of community, predominantly all students of color, has been directly impacted by COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and additional racial inequity issues such as Anti-Asian rhetoric and attacks. The perspective of students was something that remained at the forefront of the development of this workshop series. In the beginning phase we conducted a survey of all 500 students to gauge the understanding of topics such as gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. Immediately from the survey responses we found both interest and gaps in learning. For example, we realized that there was a gap in understanding distinguishing between race and ethnicity -- which adults struggle with too -- and that we never really addressed gender or sexuality.
In the first part of our series, we provided foundational knowledge of these strands -- why is Latinx considered an ethnicity and not a race; proper gender pronouns to use; the spectrum of sexuality identities. After our first series, we received an overwhelmingly positive response: 92.1% of students found these conversations to be authentic and 95.1% of students feel these are conversations we should continue to have at MESA. For the second part of our School of Diversity sessions where we will focus on intersectionality and privileges in these strands, we have students voluntarily creating a lesson plan around an area of interest to be shared school wide to elevate student voices in the school climate. For the last part of our series, we plan to unpack the evolution of social movements such as the Civil Rights movement to the Black Lives Matter Movement, the #MeToo Movement, and the various LGBTQ movements. We hope to have students engage in a social action project in advisory to directly apply the knowledge they have gained through this School of Diversity series.
ADVISORY
An important aspect of my role is my interaction with students. I serve as an advisor to 10 students from 9th grade onwards as a part of our advisory program. Over these past four years, I have developed meaningful relationships not only with the students, but with their parents as well. I work alongside the parents to help my advisees in all aspects of their development: academic, social, emotional. As an advisor, I have developed family traditions such as a yearly advisory trip, celebrating every advisee’s birthday with a mini food party and signing a group card. I go above and beyond to regularly check-in with my advisees, whether it is through quick conversations in the morning about how their day is starting or more formal check-ins about their grades. I also communicate with their families on a biweekly basis, at the very least. Now that they are seniors, it has become about celebrating their successes as they get accepted into colleges, celebrating the last of our family traditions, and having heart-to-heart conversations about the world outside of high school while continuing to be one of the biggest cheerleaders in their lives!
Check out student testimonials below:
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
As an integral member of the Black History Month Committee, I helped to revamp Black History Month to include more than a one day assembly. Our Black History Month but the celebration is now a month-long one with food and music festivities, educational workshops, and race thought conversations. For example, for the past two years, we have started off the month with an African Diaspora Food tasting, featuring samples of food and music from various parts of the diaspora including American Southern/Creole Food, Caribbean food, and West African food. For many of our students, it was their first time trying foods from these regions. For our educational component, we had a day of black culture workshops on Black Entertainment, Head Wrapping 101, Music Making, Natural Hair Care and Blacks in Sports that are organized by Black staff and students. As a conversational component, we discussed Black activism in Brooklyn this year while last year we discussed the issues students are experiencing as students in MESA in relation to their personal identity. We ended the month with our traditional Black History Month Assembly. However, each year our assembly changes shape. With this year’s theme of “Shades of Blackness,” there was an important educational component as well as a fun, celebratory component in the form of our first-ever BHM Fashion Show featuring many staff and students rocking black fashion that falls in traditional, modern, throwback, or excellence attire.
Check out 2022's Informational Video Montage
on Black Joy from MESA's Black Community
PI DAY
As a result of being the Assistant Principal of Math & Science and being a self-proclaimed STEM nerd, I decided to take Pi Day to new levels. I helped enhance Pi Day by building more momentum around the nerdy, joyous occasion. For example with the math department, we have organized a week-long celebration by integrating Pi Day activities in advisories and math classes. From creating Pi Day chains to representing the digits of Pi to the Pi Day Scavenger Hunt, we have increased the hype and buzz around Pi Day. We have even organized a Pi Day staff baking competition where teachers must bake items that represent Pi in some way. The largest event is our Pi Day Assembly, where students cheer each other on as their peers recite as many digits of Pi as possible. The winners get a personalized Pi Day King/Queen sash as well get to pie a teacher in the face!