Our commitment to being an actively anti-racist school
Acera recognizes that systemic racism affects all levels of society, including our school. We take a proactive role in making a more equitable and just world.
We welcome the national re-awakening around race, power, and privilege, and we welcome the Black Lives Matter movement as a transformative historical moment. We embrace our powerful role as educators in being part of this social change. We are committed to standing on the side of what is right.
We weave elements of anti-racism and anti-bias into our practice, and the current groundswell of support for a just society provides us the impetus and opportunity to do more. As with everything we do, we will do this in a collaborative rather than a top-down manner; we are always open to engaging with and learning from both our school community and the world around us.
We look forward to creating enhanced opportunities for our students, faculty, and staff to engage in anti-racist education in a way that is consistent with and supportive of the needs of all students. To cultivate a nurturing environment for our students, we must be aware of individual differences, cultural differences, and the weight of historical and systemic structures.
We will continue to grow and examine our practices of how we seek out, listen to, and amplify the voices of marginalized people in our teaching. This includes supporting one another to identify and reframe beliefs and behaviors that stem from implicit bias. In doing so, we will assist students in developing the critical thinking skills that will help them build the just society to which we all aspire.
A student leverages art for activism — within their cyanotype art piece. Within the “Shifting Social Spaces” elective, designed and led by Acera’s Architect/ Visual Spatial Teacher Estee HIll, students created a mural “fence” which is about 6′ tall, with several panels, each by a different student. The hope? That these pieces set the stage for some publicly displayed art, down the road!
