Contact: Dena Salerno

Greenwood‘s faculty and staff began the past school year with diversity training by trainers from the Bloomsburg-University Task Force on Racial Equity. In the fall, the same trainers provided diversity training for the board of trustees. We established a Diversity Advisory Committee of community resource people. One of them, Dr. Sharon Solloway, Early Childhood and Elementary Education, Bloomsburg University, has donated her time to working with our faculty to develop resources and trainings in diversity.

In January we had a community covered dish dinner in which families brought food (and recipes) from their traditions or ethnic backgrounds and we used the evening to kick off a read-a-thon focusing on multicultural books. Our end-of-the-year art show was a gallery of symbols created by each student, with photos and designs, as visual depictions of their families. In May we traveled (grades 2 through 8) to Ellis Island. In between these all-school events there were a wide variety of classroom projects, from simple introductions in morning meeting of queries focusing on how it might feel to be called a (racial, ethnic, ageist, classist) name to plays on the orphan train of the early 1900s and women who were active in social causes. The all-school musical in the spring was a student-created project whose story line was how a school community handled a situation where some groups were excluded.

The big learning for our faculty and staff occurred in faculty meetings, discussions with parents, searching explorations of Friends testimonies, and conflict with some members of our community who found it difficult to embrace our view of diversity. We identified, for example, early in the year, that for teachers there are four hot-button issues that they find difficult to deal with in class discussions: physical differences, body types, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status (class). We continue to search for and talk about ways we can be more comfortable being proactive in working with children. Our board of trustees wrestled with diversity in much the same way as our faculty. Not all trustees are comfortable with an open approach to talking about sexual orientation, for example. However, with much prayerful work, the board adopted a diversity initiative statement in January 2006 and we will publish it in our materials for this new school year.

Millville Monthly Meeting’s Committee on Education has been a great resource for us in this search for clearness in the way to proceed, as has been the school’s advisory council, and many families.

In response to what we learned about ourselves and our community, we are making strong efforts to frame the work of diversity and multicultural education in Friends testimonies.