We are in mid fall, I am in my fifth month, and we are in full swing. For many of us, that means a great school year is underway, with all the magic that Sequoyah brings. I have witnessed kids learning about native plants, megathrust quakes, and scatter plots, making delicious tamales, preparing Talking Leaves, and more. But for many in our beloved community, the start of the year has also included a turn to heartbreak and feelings of fear, worry and pain, and all of us are distraught by the loss of life and the tragedy of the Israel-Hamas War.
In the junior high, heartbreak has hit because we are realizing that both online and in person, students are using racist epithets and other bigoted words against each other. Let me be clear: anti-Black, anti-gay, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, sexist, body-shaming, transphobic, and other hateful language, even when used in jest, is a violation of our community norms. We treat incidents of this nature with the utmost seriousness while holding with equal seriousness that our fundamental goal is to educate our students through our values. Our hope is also to help each student thrive. Yet we know children here and across the country are, without protections, learning about their identities, in the glare of weaponized banter, amplified by social media. Bigotry has no place at Sequoyah. Our kids need support.
Someone shared with me at a recent gathering that last week’s partial lunar eclipse, as a destabilizing force, can offer a portal to understanding. This is a portal moment for us; we are being called together to reaffirm who we are and who we want to be in a world where brutality – and beauty and love and curiosity – are all around us. What will we seek, and what will we amplify?
Are we a community that will turn towards each other to learn more about what some are experiencing, and away from the pull of blame, fracture, and disunion? Will we lean in to do the caring work that’s needed, given the complexity of our experiences, and all that has come before us? Are we strong enough, despite our two campuses, our differences, our histories, fears, and weaknesses, to keep building love, hope, compassion, and community?
I believe we are. If you have chosen Sequoyah for your family, you believe we are, too.
We express our hope for the future by our investment in the potential of young people to lead. Each fall, we ask students to select one of our eight Habits of Mind to highlight for the coming year. Each works in tandem with Sequoyah’s mission to challenge the mind, nurture the heart, and celebrate human dignity. The reveal of this year’s choice happened during October’s K-8 All-School Meeting; high school Student Government Co-Presidents Amy Guzman and Foster LippSmith announced collaboration was chosen by the entire student body. In the days since then it has been a delight to see how our students – even many of our youngest – know “when and how to lead, follow, and work together” as active listeners and meaningful collaborators.
John Dewey, who understood both diversity and collaboration as essential to a strong learning environment, wrote that “education is a social process, education is growth, education is not preparation for life but is life itself.” We at Sequoyah often talk about who we are and how special this place is, how progressive education allows for all of us to grow. For some of you, what I write may seem surprising and antithetical to your experience of the school. You may not have been thinking about any of these issues, and you may, because it’s human, want to turn away from them now. But if we take Dewey’s understanding to heart, we know that pains of the world are around us every day, just as the possibility of another way is, too, and our job is always to choose which path to take.
At Sequoyah, we have been building the tools for community connection all along. For example:
- This fall, our high school students invited us to learn about how they want to make the world better at our 5th annual Creative Connections networking event hosted by the Social Innovation Program.
- The high school is honoring the Tongva Tribe, the first settlers of this region, through community-based art and workshops, and will pass the work onto the K-8 soon.
- Some are gearing up for the fall high school production of Pride and Prejudice, an adaptation that ramps up the intrigue, will make us laugh, and shows us the thrill of the ensemble.
- On November 21, K-8 grandparents and special friends will arrive on campus to celebrate togetherness.
- In classrooms, our faculty are always listening to students to help them make sense of their worlds, whether they want to understand how spiders drag their lines or know more about conflict in the Middle East.
- We adults we keep learning, too. On our professional development day recently, hosted by the Museum of Tolerance and organized by the Co-Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Marisol Perez, faculty, and administrators explored how identity, difference, and understanding of justice can help us lead the kids to greater agency.
Each of these moments take a tremendous amount of coordination, teamwork, and communication across differences.
And now for an invitation. I’m heartened by our students’ decision to choose collaboration as this year’s Habit of Mind. It signifies a desire to engage with one another and to see the opportunity in listening, learning, and working together. At a recent junior high parent/guardian meeting, I noted administrators are revising the student and parent/guardian handbooks both for K-8 and high school. I now realize as a new community member, I need your help.
If you are a parent or guardian who wants to work together and/or has conflict mediation, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice and belonging experience, please reach out to me. With the help of our DEI Leadership and the Board DEI Committee, we will put together a Head’s/Family partnership: a K-12 task force of meaningful working size with a diversity of experiences and expertise to meet through the next couple of months to envision how we hold each other accountable to foster dialogue and learning. Students will join us. While our first step will be to review our policies and practices that assure that we don’t tolerate harmful bias, student discipline is not the only answer. We will also work to create possibilities for young people to develop through empathy, curiosity, and a desire for greater justice.
This is all of our work, so let us rise to it. As activist and organizer adrienne maree brown wrote, “Each of us is precious. We, together, must break every cycle that makes us forget this.” Together, we can keep building the Sequoyah we were founded to be.
With hopes for strong coalitions moving forward,
Rebecca Hong
Head of School