Diversity Plan Example4-

Diversity Plan My school has been working hard toward creating an environment that is more diverse and accepting. A high school colleague and myself led a professional development book study on the text Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds. This led to a lot of discussion about how we can teach history from a more culturally accurate perspective. Which given the current toxic environment is not easy to do. Our population continues to become more diverse each year and having students feel like we are accepting of their situations both now and in the past, makes students more willing to learn. Based on the article by Ehrenhalt at the site Learning for Justice.org, all students need to understand what white privilege is and how it effected many events in history and why it is important to learn all sides of a topic, and that it is ok to feel uncomfortable about it. After this book study, we also created a diversity committee that I am part of to keep the conversation open and continuing. Another area I think we have worked hard on is making sure the texts we are choosing to read with students are diverse. My former supervisor met with the town children’s librarian to help create the summer reading list for our school and the high school. She made sure the selection of texts had diverse characters, settings and plots. The reasoning of this goes back to an article by Rudine Sims Bishop called “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors” from 1990. Especially at the middle school level, engagement and motivation are key elements of students reading abilities so being able to see themselves in what they read is extremely important. One area I think our school definitely needs to work on is our ability to successfully work with our growing number of EL students. These students come to our school with varying levels of English, some completely non-English speakers. These students do receive EL support from