Board Supports Black@GeorgeSchool

Clerk of the George School Board of Trustees Rebecca Boucher p ’09, ’17 shared this message with the George School community:

I write, on behalf of the Board of Trustees, to reinforce Sam Houser’s message of July 9, 2020. We, as a board, carry our responsibility to George School with weight and care. That includes ensuring our school lives up to its mission to provide a nurturing and robust educational environment for all our students.

We are reading the @BlackatGeorgeSchool Instagram posts (instagram.com/blackatgeorgeschool) with this interest and care. We are listening. We will strive to answer the questions raised in the feed: what can we, as a board, do to better support Black students? How can we support the administration’s efforts? How can we hear, with the urgency they deserve, the voices of George School students and alumni? We recognize that listening with humility is what we must do now. But it is not enough to only listen; we must act.

This year, our goal will be to encourage solutions. As Sam noted, we will engage in implicit bias training; support recruiting, hiring, and nurturing a diverse faculty and administration that reflect our student population; and monitor the student experience through our Inclusion Oversight and Student Life Committees.

Other opportunities for growth and change will emerge through the necessary discourse on Instagram, at the upcoming town halls, and elsewhere. The George School Board is committed to listening, to learning, and to acting. We welcome suggestions, feedback, and queries from the community at large and especially from our students. Please share them with us by email at gsbclerk@georgeschool.org.

We thank our students and alumni for their candor and their challenge to do better.