On stage before a cheering crowd, President Donald Trump began his second term in office with a flurry of executive orders. Among them was a slew of actions that combined made up a full-scale assault on DEI initiatives. Executive orders disbanded DEI officers throughout the US government, banned what the administration described as “illegal” DEI programs at all federal agencies and contractors, and ordered the federal government “to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities,” launching a fierce opposition to existence of DEI policies in private workplaces.
In a move that may directly affect LMSD, the Department of Education issued a letter to schools on February 14, arguing that DEI programs “deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school” and signaling that the federal government may seek to deny funding to institutions that maintain these programs. As we enter into a moment of national backlash against DEI policies in public schools, it’s worth considering: what really is DEI, and how has LMSD approached DEI work?
DEI is a common shorthand for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It can be thought of as a set of values that organizations use to create policies that promote equality. At LM, DEI is often expanded to DEIB—Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. In keeping with those four values, the school board, district administrators, and even independent groups of students have been working for decades to promote racial and cultural equality in LMSD.
But LM has a long way to go to reach the school board’s racial equity goals; According to school district data collected in 2016 by the nonprofit investigative journalism website ProPublica, white LM students are 2.4 times as likely to be enrolled in at least one AP class than Black students, and Black students are 9.2 times more likely to be suspended than white students. Despite making up only thirteen percent of LM’s student body, Black students alone make up nearly half (49 percent) of all of LM’s out-of-school suspensions, a rate 7.2 times higher than white students. The numbers are similar at Harriton, where Black students are 6.9 times more likely to be suspended than white students.
LMSD’s DEI commitments are laid out in the district’s strategic plan and in Policy 101 (Equity), which outlines how LM tries to combat educational inequalities. In the district’s equity policy, the School Board stated their intent for “The Superintendent and/or designee(s)” to use district data to “assess which students and/or student groups are experiencing the least success, determine why, and target resources and efforts to address identified needs and improve overall educational outcomes.”
The board’s goal is to eliminate achievement and opportunity gaps, such as differences in academic outcomes between groups of students, measured through things like test scores, GPAs, and graduation rates. For example, 95.8 percent of white students received scores of proficient or advanced on the English Keystone exams in 2024, compared to 68 percent of Black students. More dramatically, 92.7 percent of white students received scores of proficient or advanced on the Math Keystones in 2024, but only 25 percent of Black students did.
LMSD has taken several approaches to narrow these disparities in recent years. In 2022, the district appointed DEI director Shawanna James-Coles to spearhead efforts and launched a DEI Continuous Improvement Research Study to better understand how LMSD should approach DEI work. The study, conducted by Education Northwest revealed in depth data about racial equality and the role of DEI work within LMSD.
Out of 3,485 middle and highschool students surveyed, only nineteen percent of students of color thought that diverse identities were represented in their assignments in class. Nearly double as many students of color feel that their teachers have low expectations of them when compared to white students. In the study’s conclusion, the authors reflected on the information they had gathered in survey responses collected from staff, writing that “Educators said they would like to see LMSD build more capacity to support DEI efforts across the district” The study continued that LMSD “new organizational infrastructure dedicated to supporting culturally responsive practices, not limited to teacher leaders tasked with supporting the work” But implementing that infrastructure may soon become an uphill battle as Trump’s Department of Education lays out policies that oppose the implementation of DEI programs in public schools. As spelled out in the department’s February 14 “Dear Colleague” letter sent to educators nationwide, the department of education now views DEI efforts as “[an] embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia.”
But despite its recent entrance into the national limelight, DEI work under different names has existed for decades. Since 1997, LMSD community members have run CARE, the Committee to Address Race in Education. As one of LMSDs longest running systems for addressing racial inequality, CARE is made up of interested families, students, and staff, and all meetings are open to LMSD’s general public. CARE was formed to create relationships between the school and community members to address issues of racial inequality, and to “communicate about issues of race that have implications for education, advise the school district on issues of policy and practice, report about programs that benefit all racial/ethnic groups, and educate all stakeholders,” according to CARE’s page on the LMSD website. CARE aims to “support the needs of African-American students and help them achieve to their fullest potential” and “raise the consciousness of the LM community about racism and its effect on our students.” They meet roughly once a month (CARE’s next meeting is this February 26 from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in the LMHS Library).
But while CARE has been a consistent presence in LM over the past decades, LM has also experimented with other approaches to achieving racial equality: most recently, CREI, the Council for Racial Equity and Inclusion. CREI was a student-run group founded in mid-July of 2020 after a student-organized town hall on racism in the district prompted community-wide discussion on racial inequality in LMSD. As first reported by Katie Fang ’23 in The Merionite’s December 2020 issue, LM students from the Class of 2021 founded CREI with “the mission of fostering a diverse, inclusive, and equitable environment in all aspects of LM.” Specifically, CREI focused on LM’s extracurriculars, encouraging students to take steps to make their clubs and extracurriculars more inclusive of students of color.
CREI’s founders created a “Diversifying Your Club Toolkit” that laid out three steps that clubs needed to take towards diversifying their club environments: “Getting students of color interested in attending meeting,” “Retaining the engagement of the students in these clubs by ensuring that the club culture is welcoming and inviting,” and “Having the diversity of the club reflected in its leaders.” According to previous Merionite reporting, CREI’s leaders met with 22 clubs over the course of August 2020 and formed an official LM club at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year. CREI was at its most active during its first year, but maintained a presence in the building during the 2021-22 school year. However, after the abrupt cancellation of CREI’s summer kickoff event in June of 2022, CREI entered a period of inactivity and hasn’t been present at LM since.
As federal opposition to DEI ramps up, school districts across the country are struggling with how to respond. Amidst the mounting pushback to DEI efforts, LMSD’s staff, administration, and students ourselves are faced with a choice: roll back efforts for inclusion, or find new ways forward.
