Our Wildwood, Volume 53

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FEATURE Celebrating 25 Years of K-12

Wildwood’s DEIB Scope and Sequence integrate DEIB lessons at both personal and systemic levels.

dimensions of identity were included,” she said. What followed was the Multicultural Leadership Team (MLT) in 2008 and the Curriculum Scope and Sequence in 2011. “The team met every month for people to share their work and vision and collaborate across the two campuses. People were rotated in and out of the MLT so you had a greater number of staff who were highly skilled in the DEI work to be able to support parents and children in classes and at an interpersonal level, but also at a systemic level, which ultimately became a cultural level, impacting the school community in powerful and sweeping ways.” Those included everything from making sure diverse author texts and perspectives impacted class dynamics and group collaborations in the classroom to achieving goals set around demographic shifts and growths. “The school did important work,” Rasheda said. “That wouldn’t have happened without Landis’ leadership and partnership, as well as the educators who made the MLT so meaningful and the students who participated in our programs.” That work has continued through the efforts of current Director of Equity and Inclusion Karen Dye. Since joining Wildwood in 2019, Karen has tightened and refined Wildwood’s DEIB Scope and Sequence, created more spaces and opportunities for both faculty and family involvement, and revived the Multicultural Symposium (see page 8).

creating a year-long professional development series for K-12 teachers. “What I love about Wildwood is that we definitely evolve. We’re always looking at best practice and new research,” Sarah said. “And yet the ethos of Wildwood and the way it respects children and childhood will never change, even when approaches to learning might change.” While multiculturalism informed the creation of the K-6 school and the Diversity Committee was formed in 1988 (renamed the Committee on Equity and Justice in 2004), DEIB efforts became more systematized at the middle and upper school when Rasheda Carroll (P. ’31) joined the school as the first official diversity practitioner in 2001. Rasheda now serves as assistant head of school at Westland School. “I came in when Hope Boyd was the head of school, one of the few African-American heads of school at the time. I remember her saying at the time that there was need for an education program, to move it out of the values to practice, and I realized we had to work on skill development. So, we started developing systems.” When Landis became head of school, he asked Rasheda to expand those systems across K-12, as part of his charge from the board to unify the community. “Everyone was doing their own work, individually in their classrooms, and we made the program a unified, integrated effort, while also making sure that all DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION, AND BELONGING

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