Professional Children’s School has an ongoing commitment to develop a community where all of its members feel safe, supported, and celebrated and where we all acknowledge our common responsibility to cultivate and affirm such a commitment within ourselves and among others. We embrace the critical importance of diversity and pledge to actively confront prejudice and bias both within our own school community and throughout the broader communities within which we live and from which we and our families originate.

PCS affirms our unequivocal solidarity with and support for all members of our Asian and Asian American communities. We stand in solidarity against the racist, xenophobic and blatantly violent behavior toward all members of these communities and we stand together to educate ourselves and our students to both the current behavior and historical contexts of anti-Asian racism in our country and around the world. In this period of particularly virulent and hateful rhetoric, we stand together in exploring ways to support members of the Asian and Asian-American communities, at PCS, nationally, and internationally.

We celebrate all members of our Asian and Asian-American communities. We pledge to find the means by which to raise awareness, to provide personal support for, and to examine mechanisms through which we can effectively respond to such a rise in hate crimes and bigotry against these communities. In providing a safe space for our Asian and Asian-American community members to share their experience, we can support them through this challenging period and we can all become more fully aware of both the circumstances and the means necessary to act against such circumstances going forward. Our solidarity, support and education can be the basis for bolstering our own community values and be but one means by which our support for all members of the PCS Asian and Asian-American communities can be clearly shared and unequivocally affirmed.

Statement of Purpose and Support

To all members of the PCS community:

Recognizing the harm and the hurt that has occurred, we are deeply sorry for and apologize to any member of the PCS community who has experienced racist action or inaction during their time at PCS and we are committed to create a pathway for those hurt to relate their story, with a promise to respond, to act and to be held accountable; we are committed to increasing the diversity of our community; we pledge to increase the breadth of our curricular focus including a protocol for an anti-racist  and intentionally inclusive curricular assessment and to provide annual anti-racist and anti-bias training to our faculty and staff; we pledge to introduce opportunities for support and understanding for impacted people in our community as well as a forum for members of our BIPOC community to relate their stories and their history as well as to affirm and salute our work toward promoting a more welcoming and inclusive environment.

This is the beginning of a necessary and ongoing journey, not just to be responsible for the past but for the future as well. Those who are members of this community pledge to fully dedicate themselves to be a part of this commitment, this promise, and this vision going forward.

To date, as we move forward in cementing these promises and to realizing these goals, Professional Children’s School has undertaken the following action steps, fully aware that there is much more to do and pledging to do more going forward:

We have developed a Diversity and Equity Statement, which carries the endorsement of the faculty, staff, and administration as well as that of the PCS Board of Trustees.

We  have   in   place   a  Diversity   and Equity  Committee  of   faculty,  staff and administrators  under whose aegis  we  will  continue  to   develop and implement a specific plan of action regarding our commitment to the Black Lives Matter initiative, including a review of and increased incorporation of resources representative of the BIPOC community and a pledge to focus on anti-racist and intentionally inclusive materials; this plan will be shared with the broad community as we work to develop an in-depth series of action steps.

We have scheduled a professional development seminar for the faculty in October 2020  to both further awareness of and sensitivity toward the Black Lives Matter initiative as well as to realize the steps necessary to create, develop and implement an anti-racist community and to incorporate such a commitment across the curriculum and the life of the School.

We are committed to a full review of our curriculum at PCS with special attention to the issue of creating and implementing an anti-racist, intentionally inclusive program of study and which, in and of itself, presents a broad representation of the BIPOC community in our source and supportive materials.

We acknowledge our commitment to promote awareness and to be appropriately responsive to the postings of the @BlackatPCS Instagram account as one venue through which the BIPOC community can share their past and ongoing experiences at PCS and as a  source of such feedback from which PCS can learn, change, and adapt.

We are committed to secure an appropriate venue or mechanism during the fall semester of 2020 through which  those hurt or negatively impacted during their time at PCS can relate their story, with a promise to respond, to act and to be held accountable.

We will continue to be proactive in our hiring practices so as to diversify our faculty and staff so that our professional community better represents the broader, global community of which we are a part.

Professional Children’s School is committed to fostering and maintaining a climate of inclusion and belonging within our community. Acknowledging that language is one of the most penetrating means for invoking a feeling of welcome or exclusion for both individuals and groups, it is of paramount importance that words and expressions created with the intention of delivering harm to or diminishing the spirit or worthiness of another person or group are not condoned or permitted in our space. This includes, but is not limited to, terms that have been historically used to target individuals based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. While some of these words may appear in historical documents or source material for use in classes, they will not be permitted to be used verbally or in writing in our academic, common, or public spaces, by students, faculty, staff, administrators, or visitors to our school. Whenever possible, when these words appear in class materials, teachers and other adults will inform students in advance. Instances of the use of such language will be addressed as deemed appropriate by school leadership in consultation with the Faculty and Staff Diversity and Equity Committee.