Commitment to Diversity

For a while, I had noticed there was a lack of racial diversity in my school's faculty. In my time at my school I have had very few teachers who were People of Color. After a discussion with my friend and a peer on Dateline, we decided to investigate the issue further. We interviewed many teachers and administrators across the upper school to gain insight into what the school is doing well in and needs improvement in, in terms of diversity in faculty. We also tried to understand the hiring process and shed light on the role of IDI in. that, and how that may have led to a lack of diversity. I hope this article will show that the school still has much to do in terms of diversifying. 

After learning that my school was planning to implement affinity groups and that it was controversial among students, I decided to write an article. I hoped it could inform the community about the school's efforts and be an important story for the paper, as it seemed like affinity groups were going to be a major addition to the school.

A few months after my initial story on affinity groups at my school, I decided to do a follow-up story on how they had been progressing. I knew it had been a long process to roll them out and I felt it was important to continue shedding light on the school's efforts towards Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

I spent two weeks in the summer of 2022 at the School of the New York Times, where I learned journalism skills and practices from professional journalists who work at the New York Times and elsewhere. For my final project, I was sent to Jackson Heights, a diverse neighborhood in Queens, and was required to write a story about something related to the neighborhood. After a lot of time exploring the neighborhood and talking to people to find a story, I eventually interviewed people at a local Burmese hairdresser. I soon realized that the hairdresser attracted mainly Asian, specifically Burmese, customers. So I decided to visit other hair salons to see what the experience there was like. After many interviews on the fly (and many interview rejections) I eventually compiled several interviews and discovered many hair salons attracted certain ethnicities and communities.