Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Newsletter

DEI@Park

Welcome to DEI@Park, the official newsletter for the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion!

My name is Hayes Davis, and I joined the Park community this past summer as the new Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. At my first 1:1 meeting with Assiatou Diallo, Park’s DEI Fellow, Assiatou asked if we could start a newsletter from our office, not knowing that I had the very same idea; we were both thankful for the synchronicity of our thinking, and have worked hard to put together this first of three issues that we will share this year.

Why a DEI newsletter?

I taught Upper School English in independent schools for 24 years, and for the last half of my teaching career I was also a diversity practitioner. In my work as a coordinator, assistant director, and director, I have consistently sensed that to most people who do not work in a DEI office, the day-to-day work of practitioners is a bit of a mystery. When she suggested the newsletter, Assiatou mentioned a similar feeling, and we agreed that DEI@Park would be a great way to pull back the figurative curtain on our work.

What will be in the newsletter?

We will share programming highlights from the myriad DEI-related initiatives at Park, an essay series that offers insights and practical suggestions through poetry, and brief updates from our divisional coordinators. From the Partners at Park program to our 1st-12th Grade affinity groups to our Middle School Affinity, Alliance, and Advocacy program to history and heritage month assemblies to follow-up on challenging student interactions, our office is busy! Assiatou and I are assisted in this work by a team of NINE terrific divisional coordinators and a great administrative assistant; their presence in the community separates Park from a lot of other independent schools. Some institutions entrust this work to a single person or a team of 3-4 people, but part of what attracted me to Park was the network of support behind the Director position, and the notion that diversity, equity, and inclusion work is the responsibility of everyone in the community. We hope you’ll enjoy DEI@Park, and please reach out to us with any questions along the way!

25 Years of Partners at Park!

Last night, partners gathered with their families for the annual Partners Thanksgiving.We were thrilled to recognize Upper School Principal Traci Wright, who started the Partners Program, along with Lower School PE Teacher Stradine Harris and Kindergarten Teacher June Bennett, who have been steadfast supporters of Partner at Park over the years. This year we are also celebrating 25 years of Partners at Park! 

This highly successful program is a mentoring and diversity initiative that promotes multicultural education, leadership, and community building throughout the school. The program pairs Lower School students from diverse backgrounds with Middle or Upper School buddies. Students meet individually with their buddies on a weekly basis and participate as a group in a variety of social activities throughout the year. You can read more about the program HERE and see photos from Partners Thanksgiving by clicking the link HERE.

Divisional Updates

Lower School

The first month of school is filled with explicit and implicit practices and programming that promote inclusivity and community in the classroom. Through Responsive Classroom practices, students learn how to say each other’s name as they practice greeting each other. Diverse book collections create wonderful windows and mirrors for students during storytime and independent reading. The Partners Program — which launched on Saturday, September 20 and had its first breakfast gathering on Thursday, October 9 — helps students from underrepresented populations connect with Upper School students. Affinity lunches began meeting in early-mid October, and those groups will meet once a month for the rest of the year. Our first Common Bonds — an afterschool activity period intended to help Lower School students get to know each other —  happened on Thursday, October 16, and that program will also continue on a monthly basis. Hayes joined Lower School Counselor Amy Ancona as she launched this year’s version of F.U.E.L. (Feelings, Understanding, Empathy, and Learning) with students from Grades 1-5.

Middle School

At the start of the year, teachers build inclusive classroom culture based on respect of each child’s name and choice to share their pronouns. From the first day of school, classroom activities promote inclusion, the use of inclusive language, and the celebration of differences. During Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, Spanish classes engage in research projects to explore the contributions of Hispanic/Latinx Americans, while impactful figures are featured on the social studies door and DEI bulletin board. In 8th Grade, the Fair Housing unit in math connects housing costs with family employment and salaries in Baltimore, while the study of exponential equations incorporates a justice-focused approach to financial literacy. Additionally, the English curriculum across grade levels provides an opportunity to broaden perspectives and develop empathy through literature. These initiatives and others aim to create a classroom space where all students can bring their full, authentic selves. The AAA fair provided an opportunity for Middle School students to sign up for an Affinity, Alliance, or Advocacy group.

Upper School

In the Upper School, all students are enrolled in mandatory DEI/Wellness classes that are taught by Upper School faculty and DEI coordinators. The curriculum for this course was developed by the Director of DEI, Upper School faculty, and students to help students critically think about the world and their experiences, promote better understanding and respect for diverse backgrounds, address bias, and foster a sense of belonging for everyone in the Park community. Additionally, there are a number of affinity groups in the Upper School where students can form safe spaces among others with whom they share a common identity. On October 8, the Latinx Affinity group hosted a powerful assembly for Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month where they shared parts of their cultural heritage through family stories. The faculty also received a resource guide with adult and student resources on how to honor Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month.

Click here for photos from the 2025 Partners Thanksgiving — and Celebration of 25 Years of the Partners at Park program!

Professional Development Corner

Professional Development for teachers is one of the most important responsibilities of a DEI program. Our office will offer a faculty meeting workshop in each division four times during the school year. After meeting with our Lower, Middle, and Upper School Principals over the summer, Hayes worked with the divisional coordinators to develop a scope and sequence for how we would help teachers grow this year, and planned each workshop alongside those coordinators. Below is a list of PD sessions we have done with each division since late August, and upcoming engagements.

• Lower School
  • The Power of our Language in Transition Meetings
  • The Power of our Language in the Classroom (12/3)
• Middle School
  • Understanding our Identity
  • Identity & Our Students
• Upper School
  • Teaching a DEI section
  • Intervening when We Hear Challenging Language

From the Desk of the Director of DEI

Those Winter Sundays: An Essay

1.1 Perspective Getting: a lesson from Robert Hayden

Welcome to Those Winter Sundays. The English teachers among us may be aghast —“He put the title of a poem in ITALICS instead of QUOTES!!!” I did, but not because I was talking about the poem (yet). I am respectfully borrowing the title of Robert Hayden’s most famous poem, “Those Winter Sundays” for the title of this new blog about Diversity lessons embedded in Poetry because the poem offers a foundational lesson in recognizing humanity through understanding perspective. 

My name is Hayes Davis, and I am the new Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Park. Aside from my day job as a diversity practitioner, I also have a career as a published poet. In 2016 Poetry Mutual Press released my first collection, Let Our Eyes Linger, and in 2022 I won a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award. An English teacher by trade (I spent 20+ years in the classroom before transitioning to administration), I like to think of literature as an ongoing study of the human condition, and I like to think of my poetry as an entry in that “journal,” if you will. This blog will examine poems that I admire and that also speak to important element(s) of diversity work. Let’s start with one of my favorites, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden.

I have taught “Those Winter Sundays” many times, and doing so has deepened my admiration of the poem, particularly for the great lessons in reflection and perspective that it offers. In the opening stanza, Hayden’s speaker (“speaker” refers to the narrative voice of a poem) recollects the Sunday mornings referenced in the title, focusing on the actions of a father who wakes before the rest of the family and attends to the details of domestic life in spite of his own physical discomfort. The second stanza tells us that the father waited to call the family until the house had warmed, but also introduces the tension of the speaker’s relationship with that father. After the speaker rises and greets the father indifferently, the poem ends with a surprising turn when the speaker asks and repeats a rhetorical question: “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?” That rhetorical question and its repetition suggest that the speaker has, through his recollection and reflection, learned a great lesson about those “austere and lonely offices,” in other words, the father’s actions that Hayden’s younger self didn’t fully appreciate. That lesson in shifting our own perspective can help us to more fully consider the human experience from eyes outside of our own, helping us move through the world with even more empathy than we might otherwise feel. Let’s dig into a close reading of the poem to learn more.

Robert Hayden was raised by foster parents in Detroit, Michigan, so the person he calls “father” in the poem was not actually a blood relative. Nevertheless, the first stanza of the poem tells us that: 

“Sundays too, my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold.

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.”

The second word of the poem “too” suggests that the speaker’s father rose early every other day of the week as well; Hayden layers that detail with the father dressing in the cold, dark dawn and building a fire with tired hands, sacrifices made for the sake of the other people in the house, familiar territory for anyone who has cared for a household. Hayden’s poetic craft is on full display in these opening lines: I love the assonance–repeated vowel sounds–of “cracked hands that ached” and the alliteration–repeated consonant sounds–of “weekday weather” and “banked fires blaze.” The last sentence of the stanza attests to the fact that Hayden’s adult speaker now recognizes how thankless his father’s domestic labor was, and the sentence feels like a pause in the narrative before the poem’s perspective shifts to the younger version of the speaker:

“I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,”

Hayden’s second stanza ratchets up the poem’s tension, beginning with the gerunds that end the first line. Instead of describing the warmth with gentle words like spreading or flowing, the poet focuses our ears on the onomatopoeic cracking of the cold as it “splinter[s] and break[s].” The speaker’s reluctance to rise, and his fear of the house’s chronic angers make me wonder—when I read this poem with my educator eyes—how the speaker might have shown up in class? Would he be a quiet child, perhaps get labeled “reticent to answer questions” or “doesn’t engage with peers”? Would he be an angry student, lashing out at the smallest offense? Or would he present as regulated while harboring deep hurt? How would teachers try to engage him, respond to how he showed up in class? In the moment of the poem, that young voice gives the father a perfunctory reply, and at the end of that final stanza,  

“Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Hayden‘s adult speaker looks back on his life with an emotion that I read as regret. Listen as he repeats his question, examining himself and his adolescent response to the man who made sure his shoes were shined. In doing so, he offers a lesson that overlaps with the most important principle in diversity work, “perspective getting.” Geoffrey Cohen introduces that term in his book Belonging, and notes that the path to getting someone’s perspective is asking them questions that help you know them better. 

In 2006, I sat next to a new teaching colleague on a flight to Dallas for the National Association of Independent Schools People of Color Conference. While our backgrounds couldn’t be more different, through our questions and honest sharing we discovered windows and mirrors in our cultural experiences that formed the foundation of our continuing friendship. As Geoffrey Cohen asserts, “Asking others to share their perspective not only leads to much more accuracy of understanding between people but [also] creates a bonding force, which engenders still deeper and richer readings of one another (Cohen, Belonging p200). Hayden’s speaker is engaging in a different kind of questioning that is no less important to our ability to understand perspective. He revisits his experience reflectively, rethinking his actions in the moment in a way that helps him understand his caregiver’s point of view and perhaps help him be open to future growth. 

At its best, DEI work is rooted in the recognition of humanity, and the ability to recognize humanity is rooted in the ability and willingness to understand other people’s perspectives and the flaws in ours. If diversity work is everyone’s work—Park’s website identifies it as such, and all of the successful practitioners I have ever known label it that way—we owe it to each other to learn more about our human offices.

For another poet’s take on this poem, please listen to Pádraig Ó Tuama’s terrific reading in this episode of Poetry Unbound.