Statement on Inclusive Excellence
St. Anne’s-Belfield School believes that exemplary citizenship and visionary leadership are best nurtured in a welcoming School community based on equity, inclusivity, and the pursuit of excellence. Our School provides a well-balanced educational experience that affirms the richness and diversity of humanity, creates an expectation of belonging based on shared human dignity, and encourages a desire to learn about and from each other.
We wish our students to become strong in body, broad of mind, tender of heart, responsive in soul.Mary Hyde DuVal Founding Headmistress, 1910 – 1920
Inclusive Excellence Objectives
We, students, faculty, staff, families, and alumni, best pursue excellence when we are able to bring our authentic selves to our community.
We commit to cultivating diversity in our community.
We promote civil discourse, calling our community into ongoing discussions that advance mutual understanding and respect, believing that by knowing better we can always do better.
We understand that evolution is vital and we continuously evaluate our educational and communal standards to find ways to exceed them in order to equip citizens with the skills, competencies, and understandings necessary to engage with and positively impact our world.
Students
- Strive to improve our best practices to recruit and retain a diverse student body.
- Create orientation programs for new students to help them adjust to the culture and academic expectations of St. Anne’s-Belfield and to identify how we can best support them in their transition to the community.
- Reimagine how tuition and fees are calculated to be more inclusive of total cost of participating in core program to ensure an equitable experience for all students, regardless of family’s finances.
- Create a budget or a system for academic and social emotional support for students whose families cannot financially meet these needs.
- Evaluate and where appropriate expand mission aligned curricular and co-curricular programing that provides students with many ways in which to develop and grow — to excel and to show resilience.
Faculty and Staff
- To make St. Anne’s-Belfield a destination of choice for underrepresented/diverse teaching candidates, develop recruitment, hiring, compensation, and inclusion strategies that yield increased retention.
- Ensure a baseline competency in DEIB work for every colleague and make sure that this competency is achieved early on in employment.
- Maintain and expand our commitment to further developing our DEIB practices within the community of adults.
- Continue work to create a scope and sequence for inclusive excellence in our curricular/co-curricular programing: Curriculum, Pedagogy, Social-Emotional Learning.
Families
- Create parent education programs that support the work of inclusive excellence at St. Anne’s-Belfield.
- Leverage the school website for parent education and include resources on IE.
- Create affinity opportunities for underrepresented families and students both new and returning.
- Create orientation programs for new families to help them adjust to the culture and academic expectations of St. Anne’s-Belfield and to identify how we can best support them in their transition to the community. Reimagine the LINK program as part of this effort.
Board of Trustees
- Create a board level committee focused on the work of inclusive excellence, including monitoring of IE initiative progress.
- Make IE initiatives philanthropic priority of capital campaign.
- Support reallocation of financial aid dollars to enable wrap around student supports.
- Evaluate and revise policies and procedures to align with the mission, inclusive excellence and the needs of the community.
Our Community
- 965Total Students
- 16countries and 16 U.S. states in the student body
- 88zip codes
- 19%students of color
- 53%boys
- 47%girls
- <1%gender expansive
- 30%of students receive financial aid
St. Anne’s-Belfield School admits qualified students of any race, color, national origin, place of birth, ancestry, sex, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental or physical disability, or any status protected by applicable law, and extends to them all the privilege to participate in the educational programs generally accorded or made available to students at the School. The School does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, sex, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, mental or physical disability, or any status protected by applicable law in the administration of its admission or its educational programs.