Board President’s Reflections
6/29/21—Last week close to 900 girls’ school educators and advocates came together to learn at the 2021 NCGS Virtual Conference. We came from our classrooms and our living rooms. We Zoomed in when we were going from here to there and logged in from carefully chosen distraction-free destinations. We came with children in tow and with parents down the hall. We came with the volume turned up and our headphones on. We came from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, the UK, and all regions of the US.
We came together to pursue a community of belonging.
Indeed, the ambition of this year’s conference was made clear to all of us thanks to its pithy theme, Girls’ Schools: Building Communities of Belonging. Girls’ schools are distinguished in many ways, but perhaps none more so than our insistence on belonging. After all, belonging helps to answer the why of our very existence. Our collective history is replete with people practicing belonging behaviors. In some cases, the behaviors took the form of bold acts of leadership by school founders who simultaneously highlighted exclusionary practices while presenting counter visuals for what school could look like for girls. At other times, the belonging behavior is considerably less public, but no less important: the everyday gentle nudging of a girl towards a field she never would have considered on her own or the election of a girl to the full totality of positions available at a school designed to promote and celebrate girls’ leadership.
Regardless of your school’s founding date, its reason for being inevitably had something to do with creating a community of belonging.
Given that, girls’ school educators have a heightened obligation to engage in necessary and life-affirming belonging behaviors. Last summer, students of color and Black students, along with the LGBTQIA+ schoolmates in some cases, asked for more from their girls’ schools. They were a part of a broader, far-reaching movement, but in many communities the girls’ school voices were first and were among the strongest. It is left to us, girls’ school educators, to make sure that those voices, once heard, are never unheard again.
Vision of a better day is necessary as we find ourselves grasping for belonging during a time of continued tension and discord. When I had the chance to share the NCGS Board of Trustees’ newly approved Vision Statement as part of the welcoming remarks at last week’s conference, I closed with a simple notion: “Difference and division are two very separate concepts. While difference strengthens us, division weakens the foundation of our charge.”
It is worth considering the distance between difference and division—the call for belonging within a period of polarization. Polarization is very convenient as it eschews complexity; it seeks comfort in like-mindedness by embracing friendly companions and the temporary comfort they may bring. Over the past year, one could easily find platforms for polarization in administrative offices, faculty break rooms, and even throughout professional conferences as well as on the sidelines of games, at private Zoom cocktail parties or in a media that increasingly—and dangerously—plays repeat on the song lists of their assembled loyal listeners.
That is why for NCGS to be NCGS we have to be better than our times. To do so, we need to help each other, or as we say in the NCGS Principles: “We (need to) uplift learning communities committed to diversity, equity, justice, and belonging.”
Uplifting learning communities is not about managing a moment or the people within it, but rather it is about going headfirst into the complex and uplifting work of truth seeking. As Adam Grant says in his new (and wonderfully helpful) book Think Again, “Complexity doesn’t make for great sound bites, but it does seed great conversations.” Let’s leave sound bites to others and instead continue our June 2021 conversations about building communities of belonging at girls’ schools everywhere.
Paul Burke, President of the NCGS Board of Trustees and Head of The Nightingale-Bamford School