{"id":352012,"date":"2023-10-27T08:36:40","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T12:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/?p=352012"},"modified":"2023-12-08T11:39:57","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T16:39:57","slug":"spotlight-dei-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/2023\/10\/27\/spotlight-dei-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotlight: DEI Team"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pace\u2019s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) team is composed of eight faculty members who devote themselves to making DEI a core value of our school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Bria Samuels, a new faculty member who graduated from Pace in 2013, came back as the Director of Equity and Inclusion. She describes her position as \u201cmak[ing] sure that students and staff feel like they are a part of the community,\u201d as well as ensuring \u201cthat there\u2019s support for students in all portions of their identity.\u201d Since Ms. Samuels has responsibility over the entire school, she gave insight into the differences between the Lower School, Middle School and Upper School. In the Lower School, she focuses on their \u201cRead for Respect,\u201d selecting books with multicultural viewpoints and themes to create open minded individuals, while in the Upper School she focuses more on affinity groups. \u201cThere are affinity groups in the lower school, but they look a lot different,\u201d  Ms. Samuels explained, because \u201cas high school students, you guys are able to articulate what you want more clearly \u2026 whereas in the Lower School, they\u2019re like \u2018we just want to have time to be friends.\u2019 \u201d Ms. Samuels explained that everyone at Pace should be on their own DEI journey, and that requires \u201cbeing more willing to be uncomfortable. It requires you having the hard conversations. It requires you saying something when you see something, it requires you going to ask people if you’re not sure what\u2019s appropriate.\u201d  It is important to Ms. Samuels to recognize the faults in Pace\u2019s DEI system, especially when she attended. \u201cAt Pace, I did not feel like I could always be my most authentic self because I wasn’t from the Buckhead bubble. I wasn’t a student who had been here for an extended period of time. I didn’t really feel like a huge part of the community. \u2026 I wanted to come back to Pace because I realized that there was always going to be a \u2018me\u2019 at Pace. There was always going to be someone who may not necessarily be from this community. They’re not a lifer, they don’t live five minutes away from the school, and I want to make sure that they feel comfortable in a space like Pace.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Pace’s DEI Team poses for a photo. Photo: Pace Academy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Another member of the DEI Team, Mrs. Joanne Beauvior Brown, Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, says that her position \u201cincludes student support, faculty and staff support and professional development, as well as touching other stakeholder groups that make up our Pace community. So families, alumni, and working alongside our senior administrators to be sure that they are equipped to navigate some of the things that may come up in their respective areas of responsibility.\u201d She thinks that Pace has come very far on our DEI journey, but reminds the community that DEI \u201cis not just a program that you take off the shelf and then put it back on the shelf, and it’s also not a destination. It truly is a journey that our whole community has been on in examining how we look at belonging and how people feel when they are at Pace and identifying where those gaps may be, knowing that we’ve been very honest in where we may have fallen short and supporting every stakeholder member or community member at our school.\u201d In her position, Mrs. Brown places a lot of emphasis on a \u201cshifting of the lens of DEI from a program to truly a core value and a part of our culture at our school.\u201d Mrs. Brown thanks the faculty members who support her DEI efforts: \u201cIt really takes our teachers and our staff who are boots on the ground in the classrooms and in different spaces to do a lot of that lifting. And so seeing how they have grown in owning that work has really been what I’m most proud of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upper School English teacher Dr. Jason Brooks and Administrative Assistant to the Head of the Upper School Ms. Nikki McCrary are both US Diversity and Inclusion coordinators, and Dr. Brooks says  that his position includes selecting inclusive texts with different viewpoints and cultures for Upper School students. \u201cYou’re stuck with a dead white guy like Shakespeare; how do you then provide lenses to read Shakespeare in a way that recognizes some of those other voices  … to me, the diversity part starts with the syllabus.\u201d As someone who has worked in DEI divisions at other schools, Dr. Brooks has a special appreciation for Pace\u2019s success in this field. \u201cA lot of schools, especially in response to the summer of 2020, did a lot of performative hiring. Well, they\u2019ve hired their DEI coordinator and then they set that person free in the school to do things, but not with an actual mandate.\u201d However, Pace is separated from these other schools because \u201cwe actually have a mandate to make this one of the pillars of the Pace community, and we have eight people on this team, which is huge.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pace\u2019s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) team is composed of eight faculty members who devote themselves to making DEI a core value of our school. Ms. Bria Samuels, a new faculty member who graduated from Pace in 2013, came back as the Director of Equity and Inclusion. She describes herContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":486,"featured_media":352014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-julia-goode25paceacademy-org","post-352012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pacenews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/files\/2023\/10\/deiRGB.jpg?fit=936%2C702&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1TYqQ-1tzC","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/486"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352012"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352646,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352012\/revisions\/352646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}