diversity, equity, and Inclusivity

A Collective Sense of Purpose and Commitment

At Hewitt, diversity, equity, and inclusivity stand as foundational commitments that guide every aspect of teaching and learning. These institutional values inform our pedagogy, foster personal growth, and cultivate belonging. We believe that a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community is essential to educating girls and young women to be positive contributors and citizens of the world.

Hewitt empowers and expects our community members to embrace multiple points of view, to engage others with empathy and integrity, and to champion equity and justice in all areas of our lives.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusivity Programs

At Hewitt, we recognize that the work of creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community is ever evolving, never completed, often difficult, and deeply rewarding. All diversity, equity, and inclusivity initiatives at Hewitt ask the community to remain fully present, develop empathy, establish a collective purpose, and employ research-based practices for educating girls in a richly varied and globally interconnected world.

Diversity and Inclusivity Steering Committee

Chaired by our Director of Diversity and Inclusivity and comprised of faculty and staff from across divisions and departments, the Diversity and Inclusivity Committee (DISC) leads the Hewitt community in establishing a more empathetic and equitable school culture by guiding conversations about diversity and inclusivity, organizing community events, collecting and sharing stories that reveal who we are, and promoting a pedagogy of anti-bias education. The DISC is committed to facilitating ongoing conversations within the community, establishing community norms, and creating a sense of trust and vulnerability.

Activists and Allies

Book Club

The EDIIT (Equity, Diversity, Identity, Inclusion, Talk) book club is open to all faculty and staff. In addition to reading adult literature, participants engage with articles and research related to educational themes and issues relevant to our students. As part of Hewitt’s commitment to community engagement, parents are also invited to participate in targeted book discussions.

National SEED Project

Inspired by the ongoing work of the National SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), Hewitt’s SEED group comes together once a month to listen, reflect, share, learn, and build a stronger, more inclusive school culture. Together, SEED participants explore how to support the Hewitt community by deepening self-awareness, expanding the knowledge of others, analyzing the world, and becoming leaders who work to make Hewitt a more conscious, equitable, aware, and informed institution.

SEED work engages the head, heart, and soul. Participants develop ways of understanding race, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability/disability, and cultural experience.

Workshops and Conferences

Hewitt has long partnered with experts in the field of educational equity and inclusion. We maintain ongoing relationships with professional organizations like the Center for Racial Justice in Education and CARLE Institute (Critical Analysis of Race in Learning and Education), host our own SEED group, and send a cohort of faculty, staff, and students to the annual NYSAIS Diversity Conference, NAIS People of Color Conference, and Student Diversity Leadership Council.

An Inclusive Continuum

Hewitt maintains a proportional, curricular, and interactional commitment to diversity. Our enrollment demographic increasingly reflects the diversity of New York City, our classes engage vital questions of inclusion, equity, and social justice, and our intimate community ensures proximity to difference, inspiring students to form meaningful relationships with students from other schools and every walk of life.

Lower School

Starting in lower school, our K-12 program affirms the tremendous impact of diversity and inclusivity work on healthy identity development and cross-cultural relationship building. In our lower school social studies curriculum, essential questions help girls think critically about their individual identities, celebrate cultural diversity, and challenge assumptions and stereotypes.

Middle School

Throughout middle school and across disciplines, girls consider global histories and traditionally marginalized communities and develop a more historical perspective through the study of social hierarchies. Meanwhile, our English curriculum incorporates voices from a wide breadth of cultures and experiences, and the languages department incorporates the voices of writers from across the Spanish-speaking and Francophone world.

Upper School

As students enter the upper school, they consider their future place in the world and take on leadership roles. We challenge young women at Hewitt to consider multiple perspectives as they explore everything from feminism to globalization, current events to ancient civilizations.

Special programming in the upper school tackles such topics as the objectification and commercialization of women through the cosmetic and dieting industries; institutionalized racism as evidenced in the mass incarceration of people of color; the spectrum of gender identification; and the meaning of consent for women.

Student leaders and activists shape the nature of these nuanced and complex conversations and provide student-facilitated discussion groups on issues of relevance to young women today. We encourage upper school students to take a stance on matters they find important, from proposing affinity spaces to participating in marches, writing to elected officials, or attending local and national conferences, including DAIS (Diversity Awareness Initiatives for Students) and SDLC (Student Diversity Leadership Conference).

Anti-Racism Task Force

Our Anti-Racism Task Force was charged with evaluating and recommending schoolwide protocols, policies, systems, and infrastructure to ensure that Hewitt becomes an actively anti-racist school. In their letter below, Head of School Dr. Tara Christie Kinsey and Board of Trustees Co-chairs Suzanne Baillie and Juan Sabater share the Task Force's recommendations, which have been unanimously approved by Hewitt's Board and will guide our community's anti-racism work moving forward.

To learn more, we invite you to read Dr. Kinsey's June announcement of the Anti-Racism Task Force as well as Director of Equity and Community Life Loris Adams' overview of the work they completed this fall.

Dear Hewitt Community,

Back in June, we wrote to share the ways in which we were engaging in painful but honest, productive, and necessary conversations about the structural changes necessary for The Hewitt School to confront systemic racism and put the words of our diversity and inclusivity statement and our mission into action. A central element of our call to action was the formation of an Anti-Racism Task Force. We write today to share an important update on the considerable work that has been done by that Task Force, and to share the guidelines that will inform our work in the months and years ahead to make Hewitt an actively anti-racist institution.

Over the course of the last three months, the Anti-Racism Task Force has met together with school leadership in full-group and subcommittee meetings, convened and ably guided by Director of Equity and Community Life Loris Adams. The Task Force held many conversations with students, alumnae, faculty and staff, and parents and guardians to address institutionalized racism both in the world and at Hewitt, and their work culminated in a set of recommendations presented to the Hewitt Board of Trustees a few weeks ago.

We are pleased to report that the Board of Trustees unanimously approved the recommendations and on behalf of the Board, we thank the Task Force members for the extraordinary work and service that made this important moment and sign of forward progress possible. Below are the recommendations developed by the Task Force and approved by the Board of Trustees. In the coming months, school leadership will work to identify the next steps in prioritizing and implementing recommendations. We look forward to keeping you apprised of our progress as we all commit to making Hewitt a more equitable, sustainable, and joyous community.

Though getting to this moment has involved a considerable amount of work, we know that the work must continue. We look forward to working with the entire community to move these recommendations forward, as this is truly the work of the entire community: faculty, staff, students, parents, guardians, alumnae, and trustees. There is no better way to mark our 100th anniversary year than in this strong and powerful statement of support for diversity, equity, and inclusion; this is a truly monumental and historic moment for our community.

By Faith and Courage,

Suzanne Baillie, Co-Chair, Board of Trustees
Juan Sabater, Co-Chair, Board of Trustees
Tara Christie Kinsey, Head of School

Hewitt Anti-Racism Task Force Recommendations
Approved November 2020

The Anti-Racism Task Force worked as a full group and in subcommittees to develop recommendations in each of three areas--Community and Care, Pedagogy and Curriculum, and Leadership and Governance.

Pedagogy and Curriculum

Hewitt will deepen and broaden our K-12 teaching practices so that we are delivering high-quality, culturally responsive, and research-based learning experiences that align with Hewitt’s Anti-Bias Education Goals, and enable learners and educators to act, alone or with others, against prejudice and discrimination.
Hewitt will conduct a K-12 curriculum audit to assess how well the School embeds social justice and anti-racist standards into the scope and sequence of grade-level courses and schoolwide curriculum.
Building upon the inclusion of our Anti-Bias Education Goals in the 2020 Curriculum Night events, Hewitt will expand opportunities to engage parents and guardians in understanding how the Goals guide teaching and learning experiences. Those opportunities will include student voice so parents and guardians have another key perspective on the importance of an anti-racist education.
In alignment with Hewitt’s strategic vision and to develop pedagogy and curriculum that truly expands our students’ perspectives and experiences, Hewitt will focus on real-world learning opportunities outside the Hewitt campus and beyond the immediate neighborhood of the Upper East Side.

Community and Care

Hewitt will establish mandatory, consistent employee professional development (PD) dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to ensure common language and understanding in our professional community. This training will begin at employee orientation and onboarding and will be ongoing. Hewitt will survey the student body for input on the impact of this PD programming on the student experience.
Hewitt will increase the level of care for students of color and students from marginalized identities through counseling and mentorship support. We recommend that Hewitt consider programs such as K-12 affinity spaces, meetings between students of color and school leadership, cross-divisional mentorship programs, and an alumnae-student mentorship program.
In addition to the measures described above, Hewitt will develop mandatory, consistent, and ongoing programming for all students around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to ensure common language and understanding in our student community as well as concern for and sensitivity to all members of our community.
Hewitt will deepen and broaden our commitment to increasing the diversity of the student body. Hewitt will conduct an audit of the admissions process to assess how equitable and accessible it is in order to develop a process that ensures the diversity of our student body.
Hewitt will deepen and broaden our commitment to increasing the diversity of the professional community by pursuing new hiring channels and conducting an audit of the hiring and retention process. The audit will gather information in order to support the creation of more specific metrics for assessing proportional diversity in the professional community.
Hewitt will increase the level of care for employees of color and employees from marginalized identities through focused mentorship and professional development. We recommend that Hewitt consider programs such as ongoing affinity spaces and meetings with the school leadership.

Leadership and Governance

Building on the progress of the past few years, Hewitt will deepen and broaden our commitment to ensuring diverse perspectives and backgrounds, reflective of the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic makeup of our student body, among our volunteers, including but not limited to our Board of Trustees, Parents’ Association Board, Alumnae Council, and admissions volunteers and ask the Equity and Community Life Committee of the Board of Trustees to oversee these efforts.
Hewitt will require volunteers, including our Board of Trustees, Parents’ Association Board, Alumnae Council, and admissions volunteers, to complete anti-bias and anti-racist training.
It is essential that parents and guardians understand and embrace the School’s commitment to equity, inclusion, and anti-racism. At the end of the 2020-2021 academic year, Hewitt will assess the efficacy of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming for parents and guardians to inform future planning.
Hewitt’s community handbooks will include restorative justice policies, as developed by the Values Committee.
Hewitt will conduct an audit of current school traditions, symbols, and the institutional lexicon to assess alignment with the School’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Hewitt will deliver an annual state of the school report to the full community which shall include a section devoted to our progress toward becoming an anti-racist institution in order to provide data, transparency, and accountability for the School’s progress toward specific and measurable goals related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Dr. Kinsey and the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees sent this message to the Hewitt community on December 9, 2020.