I – The Interview
When you think of the words diversity, equity, and inclusion, what comes to your mind? Well, Mr. Joshua Goldman, a science teacher at the middle school has decided to take these very three significant words into his own hands through the acronym DEI.
With that, he turned it into a club, better known as the DEI Council. The DEI Council holds its meetings in Room 101, and currently, Mr. Goldman said it is just him running the council, and some other workers in the district come to support the club occasionally.
The DEI Council started last year. “The DEI Council is half fun and half business, we come in, share a little bit about ourselves like a story. We have a community ball that we pass around,” Mr. Goldman said. “And recently we met with Dr. Ito and we discussed cell phone use. He asked a lot of questions about cell phone use at the school. And we had this meeting and it was the students of the DEI Council and we discussed the impact of cell phone use.”
Additionally, he said, “we are training the DEI Council to be able to have conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion at our school, because it is important for students to be able to really understand these topics.”
One of the main topics Goldman frequently discusses with the DEI Council is student experience.
“There is a disconnect between students feeling like they have these ideas and sharing them, and then the administration listening to their voices,” Goldman said. “A lot of the students at the DEI Council expressed how it’s like we have these ideas and issues, we will bring up something that happened, but we don’t feel like our voices are heard. We will say something and it will go off into the atmosphere and we don’t know what is going to happen after that. And so we want to be able to connect the student voice to the other adults.”
“So in Dr. Ito’s meeting, usually it would be a student reporting something to us or saying something, and then I relay that message to Dr. Ito,” he said. “But we’d rather not have that disconnect and we want students to be able to take control of that.”
I went to a meeting in 101, on the science floor, to investigate what it is like in a DEI meeting.
II – A Day in a DEI Council Meeting
As I walked in, I learned that we have check ins to see how the members are doing. There is a little boba plush that they throw around to signify who is talking.
The boba tea plush. Photo by Sophia Sid.
The members tell about their own stories, or things they did over the weekend. Then we get into the business part of the meeting. The DEI has a huge project the club is working on. It involves recognizing lesser known holidays, each of which has its own little booth to give information about the holiday.
After thirty minutes, I asked Salome Pierre ’30 and George Wang ’29 what their favourite activities to do in the DEI Council were.
“Coming here in general,” Pierre said. “Having conversations about what we do in the DEI Council is pretty fun.”
Dodgeball was one of Wang’s favourite activities to do in the DEI Council.
One of the inquiries I was excited to ask was “Why did you join the DEI Council?” Noa Orkand ’30 had an interesting answer.
“I joined the DEI Council because the school needs more representation,” Orkand said.
At the end, the students would share something that they found, or anything that sums up the meeting for today. Photos by Sophia Sid.
“It is a fun time,” Goldman said. “We play games and it’s not always like it’s down to business, we make it fun. We have snacks, we have games, sometimes we will watch movies. Maybe it would be a movie that is related to somebody’s culture. We could have a discussion on it afterwards.”
Come join the DEI Council if you are interested in culture and diversity!