Our work in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) has been ongoing over the past five years. We started this work when a group of families came to us highlighting the need for our community, and since then have spent a good deal of time educating our staff and developing lessons for students in several key areas of DEIB education.

We began by offering a year of staff professional development in 2019-20 to better understand this work and dig into our goals together. We were guided in this work by the book Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Our school follows the Four Goals of Anti-Bias Education from this book which can be found here.

Once we had that foundation, we brought this work into our classrooms in the 2020-21 school year, focusing first on Goal #1 of Anti-bias Education: nurturing each child’s construction of knowledgeable, confident, individual personal and social identities. These lessons are designed to support each child and adult in appreciating their culture, skin color, religious background, family structure, and the other identity markers that make them unique. We also worked on lessons around Goal #2: promoting each child’s comfortable, empathetic interaction with people from diverse backgrounds – helping children learn to honor and celebrate those who have different identity markers than their own.

In the 2021-22 school year, we continued our work in Goals #1 and #2, focusing on celebrations and traditions from around the world with books, lessons, and community volunteers to help us share the beauty and richness of many traditions. This work continues and we are grateful to have family members visit and share their celebrations with us all.

In the 2022-23 school year, we began developing lessons around family structures and offering our staff opportunities to learn about the diverse family structures within our Greenspring community. We continue this work with our children through books and classroom materials that reflect their unique identities and family structures.

Our staff professional development and the lessons themselves were created by our DEIB Committee, a volunteer group of deeply committed, hard-working staff members invested in making sure that our community and children have the opportunity to discover and explore a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures.