SWAMPSCOTT — The school district is preparing to adopt its first five-year Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Plan aimed at creating a welcoming, safe, culturally-sensitive and aware learning and working environment at the town’s schools.
“This is presented as a five-year plan, but we all know it is not just five years worth of work,” said Dr. Jean Bacon, director of teaching and learning, at the School Committee meeting on Wednesday. “We envision ongoing work that we will be doing as the district for many, many years to come.”
About a year ago, the district decided that it was not ready to hire a DEI director, said Superintendent of Schools Pamela Angelakis.
“DEI — diversity, equity, inclusion — has become a big buzzword,” Angelakis said. “We didn’t even know the direction we were going in.”
Instead, with the help of a consultant from the Essex County Community Learning Collaborative, Bacon and Chris Norkun, assistant principal of Swampscott High School, looked at the direction the district wanted to go in and what it wanted to accomplish in its next five years. The district’s leadership team went through some DEI-related, professional-development training, and a DEI-leadership team was formed with an additional hiring of six new teachers to be a part of it.
The DEI-leadership-team’s work resulted in the first comprehensive plan that will be incorporated into the district’s strategy, Angelakis said. The plan identifies four priority areas, which include curriculum review and revision, professional development, policies and procedures and district and school culture.
“We are looking at those four areas in terms of improving our practices to support diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging,” said Bacon.
Curriculum and methods of teaching predetermine the school environment for all students, families and staff, the presentation said, and should promote diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Culturally-responsive curriculum can encourage engagement, achievement, rigor and critical consciousness.
Professional development should be addressing staff’s mindsets and attitudes about identity, bias and social structures to make classrooms, other spaces at schools and the entire school community safe for working and learning.
In the plan, the district pledges to make decisions through the DEIB lens and monitor the development of everyone’s sense of belonging.
To measure progress, the DEIB leadership team formulated goals for each of the priority areas, and every year the district will make an action plan of specific steps to keep moving toward the five-year goal, Bacon said.
Such action steps for the 2021-22 school year include creating standards and processes to ensure a culturally-responsive curriculum, reviewing new curriculum materials for the upcoming year, developing a plan to provide DEIB professional development to all staff, and identifying any existing inequities and dysfunctionalities in the district, among others.
The plan has a timeline and assigns responsibility of carrying out those steps to specific people or committees. Everyone working on DEIB will receive updates on the progress as the district moves through the plan, Bacon said.
According to Angelakis, the plan has already been shared with the entire district’s staff.
“We are not letting this sit,” Angelakis said. “We all made a commitment in the summer and we stuck with it; and that is something I am really, really proud of with the leadership team.”
Next, the school district is planning to engage the community, Swampscott families, Boston parents of METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc.) students and the School Committee in discussions of the plan before it is officially adopted.
