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Equity Stance Bend-La Pine Schools

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Our community, our nation, and the world are changing quickly, and we as educators need to support our students as we embrace and navigate change together. We believe public education is the foundation of a thriving democracy, molding our collective future. In Bend-La Pine Schools, a culture of equity is our goal. (Read our definition of equity and related terms.)

Honoring Diversity

We honor the different political beliefs, social values, and lived experiences our students, families, and staff bring to our classrooms and district. Our equity stance intentionally invites different values and viewpoints, as long as they do not promote racism, hate, or discrimination. (Read more about our Non-Discrimination policy.) We strive to teach and learn about identity and experience across all levels of our organization, in every classroom from kindergarten to graduation. Students will be expected to engage in age-appropriate study of diversity, equity, and inclusion issues throughout their education in Bend-La Pine Schools. (Read more about our equity dialogue in the classroom, and our state learning standards.) The purpose is how to think and talk respectfully and productively about these issues, rather than what to think about them. (Read more about our Every Student Belongs policy, and our Controversial Topics policy.)

Examining Systems

As educators, our commitment to equity requires each of us to deeply understand the history of public education in our country and state, and to actively change systems that no longer serve our community’s needs or values. Therefore, we will continue to examine our policies to identify those that have resulted in disparities for some. As we discover those inequities in our system, we are committed to addressing and eliminating them. (Read our Equity Lens.)

Amplifying Voices

Valuing equity means that we as educators engage with humility in dialogue and reflection alongside our students, families, and colleagues. We commit to partnering with our community to co-design student-centered systems that best match our region’s needs and values, even as they change. In our innovation and decision-making processes, we will actively seek the voices and partnership of those we most often marginalize. (Read our Family Engagement policy.)

Delivering Outcomes

In Bend-La Pine Schools, equity starts with high-quality instruction. We commit to providing the absolute best teaching and learning possible to our students. This means understanding quality teaching and the ways students learn best. It also means deeply knowing each student and tailoring instruction to meet their needs. We are proud of our teachers: they are our best resource for achieving educational equity. We commit to prioritizing our time, energy, and resources to support teachers in meeting the needs of all students, focusing on the students we have underserved. (Read more about student outcomes.)

Acknowledging Impact

An authentic commitment to equity requires first that we openly acknowledge the harm our education system has caused to some members of our community more than others. We know that our schools have persistent patterns of outcome gaps for some students—in particular, our multilingual students, students with disabilities, and students in poverty. We also acknowledge that our schools have felt unsafe to some students more than others—in particular, our LGBTQIA2S+ community, and our students and families of color. When we underserve some students, we all suffer. When we value the lives of our most marginalized students via the principle of equity, we all benefit. (Read more about our student and family experiences.)

Affirming Inclusion

In Bend-La Pine Schools, we believe that in order to affirm the value of all students, we must demonstrate that the lives of our Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other students of color, matter. Our focus on equity is not solely about race: we actively apply the concept of equity across all identities our system has traditionally underserved. (Read more about our Equity Policy.) At the same time, we believe that the social change occurring in our community and our nation requires that we openly name race as an urgent contemporary issue. Despite our discomfort and across our differences, we must struggle with this issue together and learn to talk productively about matters related to race and ethnicity.

We expect our teachers, leaders, and support staff to uphold our organization’s commitment to equity. We recognize the ongoing social change faced by our region and country will bring uncertainty, disagreement, and mistakes as we learn and grow. We commit to tackling these challenges with dignity and grace, even when it is difficult. We firmly believe in the power of public education to support our community in embracing and navigating collective change together.