Community and Equity Strategic Plan

Our Vision

St. Mark’s strives to create a community where each and every member feels fully understood, accepted for all aspects of who they are, and that they truly belong.

Introduction

St. Mark’s School provides an exemplary education in an intentionally small residential setting defined and enriched by our Episcopal values. Those values include an emphasis on self-reflection, continual communal examination, and respect for all. If we are to embody these values, we must empower our students to embrace and express their individual identities fully and without fear of bias—because it’s the best way to prepare students to succeed in our global world, because it enhances students’ social and critical thinking skills, and because it’s the right thing to do.

As a school community, we have not yet lived up to this promise. The racial reckoning of 2020 reverberated strongly within the St. Mark’s community, with many students and alumni of color describing deeply negative experiences at the school. Over the past two years, we undertook a concerted, institution-wide effort to strengthen our community and equity programming and develop a strategic plan that will advance the goal of achieving a truly inclusive community.

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The Way Forward

In recent years, we have begun the challenging, essential work of reimagining who we are as a School community. St. Mark’s encourages creativity, self-expression, service, and active engagement with the world. We will foster these strengths in our community members by working collectively to understand how people of diverse backgrounds, races, and cultures experience the world.

We have outlined six strategic goals that will help us to create the community we envision. Each encompasses a range of activities that we will accomplish in the coming years. This type of transformation is never easy, but we are confident that together we can make St. Mark’s a place where everyone feels fully accepted for who they are and has equal access to the best of what the school offers.

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Guiding our Work

Guiding Our Work

These strategic goals are guided by our collective responsibility to establish an authentically inclusive community that prepares students for lifelong success. The goals set forth in this document were established by the St. Mark’s Antiracism Task Force and the Board of Trustees’ Community & Equity Committee.

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Evaluating Our Progress

For each strategic goal, we are listing a series of action steps and an associated timeline. We hope these charts will help clarify where we began this work, where we are now, and our objectives for the future.

We will monitor our progress toward completing these action steps and achieving our strategic goals and provide an annual update on our progress. Additionally, we will continue to fine-tune activities associated with the goals as needed—for example, by adding new action steps that reflect the community’s evolving needs and concerns.

Priority 1 - Increase the diversity of our faculty, staff, and administrators.

Increase the diversity of our faculty, staff, and administrators. Staff members and educators from different backgrounds offer unique and valuable perspectives, no matter their role or what they teach. They forge strong bonds of mentorship with students. They also help foster deeper interpersonal and intercultural understanding by shaping a community that better reflects the increasing diversity of our country and world.

We are taking specific steps to both increase the diversity of our faculty and staff and ensure they are fully supported as individuals and professionals. St. Mark’s has committed to a diversity hiring plan that includes specific strategies for enhancing our recruiting and hiring processes. A critical step that will further enhance these efforts is hiring an associate dean of faculty for equity and inclusion—a new role that focuses heavily on faculty recruitment, hiring, and retention—to enhance support for faculty members of all identities.

Priority 2 - Broaden professional development activities focused on community and equity for faculty, staff, and administrators.

In many ways, students at a boarding school live in a world created by the adults around them. A robust professional development program will help ensure that the adults in our community are well-versed in issues of equity and better prepared to meet our students where they are and educate them in ways that are healthy, culturally responsive, and inclusive. Learning to appreciate their own identities and perspectives as adults and educators is a critical step in understanding the lived realities of their colleagues and students—helping them become more knowledgeable, empathetic, and effective as teachers and mentors.

These opportunities will benefit community members individually and collectively. Each faculty member will work with their department head to set individual goals that support the broader DEI goals of their department. For example, in August 2021, all faculty set a professional growth goal in the area of antiracism and met at the mid-year point with their department head and the dean of faculty to review their progress.

Additionally, in late 2022, we launched the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) for all faculty, staff, and administrators. The IDI is used to assess and promote intercultural competence, which the organization defines as “the capability to shift cultural perspective and appropriately adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonalities.” Following the assessment, the IDI provides participants with an individualized action plan to enhance their cultural competence.

Priority 3 - Increase the diversity of our student body.

In order for our students to be admitted and accepted at St. Mark’s, we must perform intentional outreach and form new bonds with diverse communities, both nationally and globally. This represents an opportunity to both increase awareness of the School and to inspire new families to join our community. Creating a diverse class—racially, culturally, and demographically—helps foster a community that reflects the vibrancy of the outside world, and ensures that St. Mark’s is authentically welcoming to talented students no matter their financial circumstances.

However, it’s not enough to get students in the door: We also need to provide wraparound support during their time on campus. This includes math, reading, and writing support to ensure students operate from a consistent baseline regardless of academic background, as well as programming that supports the transition for families with first-generation boarding school students. In addition, we must provide the support students need to engage fully in out-of-class activities such as student organizations, athletics, and field trips—many of which involve expenses beyond the cost of attendance.

Priority 4 - Enhance support for students of all identities.

Everyone should feel like they belong in our community and are fully supported for who they are. However, we have heard loud and clear that our students are not receiving the support they need—whether they are students of color, including Black, Asian, Asian-American, or Latinx; members of the LGBTQIA+ community; or Jewish, Muslim, or practitioners of another non-Christian faith tradition. We must do more to ensure every student’s perspective is respected as an authentic dimension of our community. We must also ensure resources are in place that are targeted to all types of social identities, including counseling, orientation, and more.

An ongoing strategy that has had great success at St. Mark’s is our Pathways program. Pathways are student affinity groups; they play an important role in helping students build meaningful peer relationships, respectfully discuss complex issues related to their identities and experiences, and find their footing early in their St. Mark’s career.

Priority 5 - Integrate principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion throughout the curriculum.

Becoming a more inclusive community involves more than supporting students outside the classroom; it’s an important part of how we teach and which topics we focus on in our courses. Historically, curricula in American schools have underemphasized the contributions of thinkers, authors, activists, and leaders of color.

We will continue to examine our curriculum to ensure we are teaching material that’s accurate, engaging, and informed by our best understanding of how that subject matter intersects with issues of identity and diversity. For example, our Global Citizenship program encourages students to engage with peers and communities around the world to build perspective-taking skills and cross-cultural understanding. This emphasis on prioritizing intercultural competence within the curriculum is a hallmark of a St. Mark’s education.

Priority 6 - Engage and learn from parents, alumni, and other members of the St. Mark’s community.

Conclusion

The steps outlined in this document represent the beginning of a process that we will continue to refine and strengthen. Transformative change requires a substantive investment of time, energy, and resources. That’s why we’re devoting the necessary attention to these issues over a period of years rather than introducing surface-level changes that will fail to dramatically improve conditions for our community members in the long term.

We fully anticipate that there will be moments of discomfort and challenge as we undergo this work. This is not only expected but encouraged: We must collectively escape our comfort zone to create a new vision for our school and community. We hope you will continue to engage with these ideas as you develop your own toolbox of skills and strategies for understanding equity and inclusion, and we hope you will help to hold our community accountable throughout this process.

We welcome your questions and recommendations as we work together to build the community we desire and that our students deserve.

In support of our objective, St. Mark’s School:

will continue to give special importance to the inclusion within our student body, our faculty, and our staff of persons from all groups within our society—particularly those that have experienced prejudice and disadvantage.
will provide all members of the school with a range of appropriate opportunities to develop skills for living in a diverse community and integrate diversity initiatives throughout the school program.
will empower all members of the St. Mark’s community to share their differences as well as their common experiences to enhance their education.

St. Mark's promotes awareness around cultural difference and provides affinity opportunities for students whose social or identity needs are not reflected in the dominant culture at St. Mark’s through Community and Equity Affairs.

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Defining Our Vision

The language we use matters. Here are some important terms and what we at St. Mark’s mean when we use them.

Equity – Equity refers to a form of proactive justice that recognizes that equal treatment does not guarantee equal opportunity. For example, the school is committed to ensuring that all students—regardless of financial ability—experience the best of St. Mark’s.

Inclusion – Inclusion is the process of ensuring that everyone in a community feels welcomed, respected, and supported for all aspects of who they are. A diverse community is one with members who have a breadth of identities and experiences; an inclusive community is one where those differences are celebrated and where everyone feels comfortable being themselves.

Antiracism – Antiracism is the policy or practice of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance. An antiracist institution or person not only actively opposes racism, prejudice, and discrimination but also seeks to identify instances of discrimination and racism in their community.

People of color – People of color is an inclusive term that encompasses all non-white racial and ethnic groups and that emphasizes the shared—but distinct—experiences they may encounter of individual and systemic racism within the United States.

BIPOC – BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. This term places special emphasis on the unique experiences of Black and Indigenous individuals and communities within the United States.

Our Commitment to Diversity

St. Mark’s School seeks to reflect the increasingly diverse world in which our students presently live and will live in the future. We intend to provide our students with a superior education in a community of students, parents, faculty, and staff that represents a variety of racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds.

We strive to ensure respect for all regardless of sex, gender, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation, ability, family structure, or economic background.

In support of our objective, St. Mark’s School:

will continue to give special importance to the inclusion of all people persons from all groups within our society within our student body, our faculty, and our staff —particularly those who have experienced prejudice and disadvantage.
will provide all members of the school with a range of appropriate opportunities to develop skills for living in a diverse community and integrate diversity initiatives throughout the school program.
will empower all members of the St. Mark’s community to share their differences as well as their common experiences to enhance their education.

St. Mark's promotes awareness around cultural difference and provides affinity opportunities for students whose social or identity needs are not reflected in the dominant culture at St. Mark’s through Community and Equity Affairs.

Contact Us

To contact us about the C&E Strategic Plan, please email cestrategic@stmarksschool.org.

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