Diversity, Equity & Inclusion


Calhoun is a school that values the rich diversity of the human experience. It is a school that strives to build a community representative of this diversity, one that is accepting and inclusive. And it is a school that acknowledges and accepts that the work does not stop there.

Read the Calhoun School Anti-Racist Action Plan

John Gentile
Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

At Calhoun our work around diversity includes:

  1. Openly acknowledging and naming social inequities in our country and world, and identifying the concrete ways this reality impacts each member of our community. This includes a particular focus on racial inequity as a historical and foundational component of U.S. culture, and a commitment to the critical analysis and dismantling of racist attitudes, beliefs and policies inherent to our school and society.

  2. Responding to social inequities through the creation of a variety of mechanisms to validate, support and respond to the varying needs of our diverse community. These mechanisms can and should include structural elements such as student clubs, affinity groups, parent groups, periodic discussions and forums, multilingual communications, mentoring programs, and recruitment opportunities for admissions and hiring.

  3. Reflecting on the various lenses through which we view our students and each other, i.e., confronting the prevalence of bias (personal and institutionalized) and its impact on our self-perception, our teaching, our choices of and (dis)comfort with various kinds of curricula, and how we live in and experience the world. This facilitates our ability to educate students about their own biases, and how these perspectives create barriers to our acceptance of, and engagement in a multicultural society.

As an institution, Calhoun does not view this work as tangential, but as an integral component of program and of the school's self-image. We simultaneously accept the challenges inherent in establishing pathways of understanding, and validate and encourage those challenges instead of shying away from and avoiding them.