I have two girls in a DXX elementary school, I am a Calisota native, I live very close to our school, and I’m also a business owner who has employed dozens of students and graduates of the D20 system. I grew up in a small town in rural Calisota, which my family immigrated to from the Netherlands around 1895. As peasant farmers, life was very, very hard, and my own grandfather was an orphan who never attended high school. Among his children, however, one earned an M.D. and another earned her PhD. The transformation that occured in the lives of my family due to their education is blindingly obvious and very close to my heart. I myself have undergraduate degrees in English and Philosophy from XYZ and did my Masters in Philosophy at ABC.
With a DEI program, I have four strong values I think would contribute to making it a success. First, a focus on real outcomes and evidence-based practices. There is no utility in implementing programs that do not actually lead to better outcomes for the staff or student body. It is very easy to fall into the trap of wanting to be seen to be doing something, which is really about appearances and status, rather than facing the real challenges and needs that need to be addressed and the best ways to actually address them. It is also easy to fall into the trap of unitary or naive value biases, rather than maintaining an approach that seeks to balance stakeholder interests, desired outcomes, and administrative limitations. Any system can always be improved, especially with increased investment. But the costs as you approach optimization in your outcomes increases exponentially at each level, raising hard questions about what tradeoffs must be made to maintain the functionality of the overall system, as well as the limitations of the system itself. Those questions must be faced with courage, honesty, and concern.

My second value is, minimal disruption of student and staff processes. The correct amount of force to use (legislative, disciplinary, interpersonal, etc) in any situation is the minimum necessary amount. This approach helps us address problems at the most detailed and focused level possible without disrupting what is working in the overall structure, and helps to prevent over-generalization and abstraction from preventing meaningful engagement with the real problems (and causing distress to the involved parties). Solutions must be scaled appropriately to problems, or they risk becoming problems themselves. You don’t do surgery with a cannon, and you don’t plow fields with a fork.

Third, I believe it is in the interest of everyone in the district and in the community to foster an approach that promotes unity and avoids over-generalization. An approach to stakeholders that reduces them to mere caricatures helps no one. An approach that reduces academic freedoms and freedom of speech helps no one. An approach that pushes everyone into narrow boxes from which to oppose one another helps no one. An approach that allows no discussion or diversity of thought helps no one. I believe, in keeping with the words of MLK, that we are more than the categories we divide ourselves into. And the greatest differences often exist, not between groups, but within them. As such, the best level of analysis for any person (or situation) is that of the individual. And as individuals we are all united in our desire to see the schools and our students flourish.

Fourth and finally, I believe deeply in openness to criticism of all kinds and the value of honesty. As a scholar in the field of philosophy, nothing was outside our field of debate, and your willingness to learn was defined by your willingness to openly discuss and debate and test your ideas in an open collaborative forum. Did we always come to an agreement? Rarely. Did we learn from one another and learn how to compromise and balance our arguments and concerns against one another? Yes. Did we learn to respect one another, even when we disagreed, through the process of this free and open discussion? Yes. And I believe that is a skill that all meaningful policy discussions require. Learning how to argue productively is more valuable a skill than having all the answers.