Dear Urban Families:
Having worked in independent schools for more than — gulp — 25 years, I've come to think that time, not money, is the scarcest and most contested resource at a school; its allocation is distilled from competing demands and is the purest indication of an institution's priorities. So this past summer, as I prepared for my first year at Urban, I studied the daily schedule and school calendar. Amidst the alphabet soup of U's and E's and T's, I first registered the relatively late start time (a nod to sleep-deprived teenagers), the extended academic class periods, and the unusual — and to my mind, essential — commitment to community engagement and equity and inclusion work. Most conspicuously, I noted that the entire month of January was designated as the Month of Understanding, a recognition I assumed was related to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday but had never seen before on a school calendar.
Urban's "MOU," as I came to learn, has been around since 2007 and was a natural extension of the school's longstanding commitment to diversity and equity education. It was the brainchild of Tommy Goodwin, Urban's first Dean of Multicultural Life, who proposed centering the month's activities (panels, speakers, forums, performances, etc.) around a series of questions: What do we really know about each other, and what do we assume we know? How much do we understand about one another — where we are from, what we value, what we need from each other and from our school to grow into the people we all want to be?
These are timeless and timely questions. Timeless because knowledge, "understanding," will always be an antidote to bigotry, just as ignorance allows it to flourish. Certainly the world we live in today bears testimony. And timely, because Urban is not immune, is not so "woke" that we are incapable of insensitivity, or can, with ill intent or not, misunderstand or hurt those around us with our behavior and speech. There is, and there will always be, the need to better understand ourselves and one another so that — to quote our health teacher Shafia Zaloom — we might "do unto others, not only how we wish to be treated, but with how they wish to be treated."
Urban, I've come to appreciate, is an optimistic place, but it is not a naive one. Ultimately, the Month of Understanding is an exercise in pragmatic optimism. We believe that a diverse, empathic, respectful community can be cultivated, even sustained, but is only made real through an investment of time and good faith effort, humility, and the recognition that the process is ongoing.
It is in this spirit of optimism that I wish you all a very Happy New Year,