From the Director of Equity and Inclusion

Dear Friends,

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) are truly fundamental to an empathetic, caring community and the fulfillment of Atrium’s educational mission:

Atrium School’s joyful community honors and empowers each learner’s innate excellence. Through explorations of complex problems and the celebration of wonder, our PreK - Grade 8 students grow a sense of self rooted in curiosity and the continual pursuit of learning. Students are challenged to deepen their confidence, discover passions, and demonstrate integrity within and beyond the school.

At the heart of Excellence with Joy and our commitment to advancing our comprehensive DEIJ efforts is a call to better action. For us, this means our action is based on a collaborative and reflective surfacing of fundamental assumptions that gives full consideration to many problem-solving alternatives. As we journey together, our action uses a wide lens to examine complex issues – similar to practices we encourage with our students – and this generational work involves all of us. Better action at Atrium includes educators who share practice, engage in racial identity work, and embrace digging into the uncomfortable, so that we might build the capacity of our community to stay productively in even the most challenging equity-focused conversations. Better action for us means constantly exploring and reshaping our emerging or most closely-held ideas about one another and our own learning and teaching.

So, this is an exciting time at Atrium! We continue to commit to our community’s Essential Understandings of DEIJ Key Terms, co-created in 2022 in a broadly inclusive community process. The essence of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice is borne out in the power of students regularly seeing themselves reflected in classroom texts looking good – their wellness and wholeness centered – and the beauty of growing in allyship with identities different from our own. Our commitment also manifests in the intentional ways we apply our shared language and understandings toward measurable outcomes and the world we envision.

As we move forward on our better action journey, transforming the ways we and our systems operate, we invite you to explore these web pages to follow the ongoing work. We know the DEIJ journey at Atrium requires patience, persistence, and deep understanding. We enthusiastically invite your partnership!

Warmly,

Jenée Uttaro
Director of Equity and Inclusion