DEI
ON CAMPUS
DEI Spotlight
This Year’s Journey
Mercy’s DEI Committee was established last year with the aim to raise awareness of and promote the necessary values of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that are rooted in Catholic Social Thought through continued collaboration and dialogue with our Mercy Burlingame community and partnerships.
Pictured above are the 2020-2021 DEI Co-Chairs and Committee. Joining them next year as DEI Board Co-Chairs are Vashti Sinigayan ‘99 and Emily Gonzalez-Jauregui ‘15.
In Fall 2020, an optional faculty and staff book club was created to provide Mercy educators with a space to hold DEI centered conversations. The books studied this year were “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi and “So You Want to Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo. Learning opportunities were designed for faculty and staff as well as students. This included partnering with Be the Change Consulting, a women of color-founded, -owned, and -led organization, to begin the process of becoming more anti-racist as an organization. Additionally, the DEI Committee collaborated with the Sojourn Project alongside Mercy’s Social Studies, Religion, and English Departments to deepen students’ understanding of the Freedom Struggle for Civil Rights and voter suppression. Guest speakers included Joanne Bland, who participated in the Selma to Montgomery March in 1963 and witnessed the violence of “Bloody Sunday” and Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. In Spring 2021, the DEI Committee was restructured to reflect key school areas through the following five work teams: Marketing, Student Life, Academic Integration, Faculty, Staff, Leadership Support and Professional Development, and Process, Quality, and Improvement (otherwise known as PQI which tracks the DEI Committee’s progress on their short- and long-term goals). Here are some recent work team accomplishments:
DEI
• The Marketing work team created
Junior Ariana Montiel ‘22 choreographed this beautiful and powerful dance piece “Dear Black Girl” centered around her own embodied experience about loving herself as a young woman of color. Visit our DEI webpage to view this amazing performance.
New on DEI’s Summer Reading List for all faculty and staff: “BIASED: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See” by Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt
8 MERCY HIGH SCHOOL, BURLINGAME
a webpage featuring the DEI Committee’s work, including a public feedback form and examples of student work that testify to students’ visions of a more inclusive world and their deepened understanding of their role as agents of change. Please check it out at: https://www. mercyhsb.com/about/diversityequity-inclusion
• The Student Life work team
cultivated intentional listening spaces to continue meaningful exchanges with Mercy’s BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students to share their personal experiences and offer constructive feedback for how Mercy High School can better ally, support, and address the needs of the student body to foster the most diverse, equitable, and inclusive community it can.
• The Faculty, Staff, Leadership
Support, and Professional Development work team incorporated teacher and student spotlights at several faculty and staff meetings where teachers and students explained how they were integrating Mercy’s DEI mission and goals into the classroom and extracurricular spaces.
• The Academic Integration work
team continued their partnership with the Sojourn Project in collaboration with Mercy’s Social Studies, Religion, and English Departments to help students deepen their understanding of the history of school segregation,
as well as provide additional educational opportunities for Mercy’s faculty and staff. Spring semester brought guest speakers such as Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine.
