Opening Items

Diversity and Enrollment

Each of us introduced ourselves and explained our interest in the work, and where we currently worked.

Todd explained how we got to this Board level subcommittee.  We are governed by open-meeting law, we will all have access to Board on Track.  We have a change to our charge from solely focusing on staff preference for enrollment in the lottery.  Todd explained the process the previous committee had taken towards pushing this legislation through Massachusetts state legislature

We read the “Norms of Courageous Conversations,” and talked in partners about which norms where most important to us, and potentially most difficult.  Each pair shared out those norms.

We began an activity designed to help us surface the “why’s” of diversity at Parker, using sticky notes to write down the reasons we think diversity is important to: students, families and teachers. 

We surfaced some questions as this activity was happening “What does success look like? What’s the deliverable product? What are hoped-for outcomes? What are barriers to having a more diverse community (students and teachers)? Why a Diversity Committee now? What’s are some important dates to understand about the lottery and teacher hiring? What is the “low-hanging fruit” we can start to address next year?”

1. We identified some agenda items for a meeting in August, which will continue to be refined:
   1. Continue activity aimed at creating some wording about our values around diversity for our students, teachers and families
   2. Report back from our summer tasks
   3. Begin to create strategic goals/objectives for the committee
2. We identified some tasks that we could do over the summer to begin this work:
   1. Laura, Barbara and Mary Ann will begin to check in with schools who use the MPDE (http://www.mpde.org/) to see if they have found the service worthwhile (more details to follow about this)
   2. Glenn—will check with a facilitator who might be able to help us design strategy around this
   3. Melanie—will begin to focus on Leominster, thinking about how we can make inroads into this community for the lottery next year.  This can be an approach we could replicate with other target communities.
   4. Joe--could begin to think about targeted outreach into Worcester, similar to Melanie’s approach to Leominster.
   5. Colin will gather information about Lawrence Academy’s approach to increasing diversity in staff and students and share it with us at an upcoming meeting