Head's Blog

A New Roads education liberates the full human potential of all our young people by fostering a climate and culture rooted in authentic diversity. 

New Roads invites all of our young people to show up as exactly who they are, secure in the knowledge they will be seen, heard, and valued, that their gifts will be nurtured, and they will never be boxed into a one-size-fits-all definition of success. Affirmation of their authentic selves opens doors to close connections with faculty and peers, deep engagement in their learning, and expression of their unique voices.

It is proven that an authentically diverse learning environment - encompassing race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender expression and sexuality, neurodiversity, and diversity of abilities - stimulates intellectual rigor and creative vitality. Just as importantly, it promotes a climate and culture of radical acceptance, compassion, and empathy where young people grow and evolve through encountering perspectives different from their own and develop “an expanding curiosity about the world and its people” - the ingredient that our world desperately needs now. They learn to extend a big embrace to the full spectrum of humanity.

New Roads was founded as an institution to transform young people’s lives and transform society.  Our young people discover who they are and their unique voices and talents. We ask them how they can use those talents not only for their own liberation and self-determination, but how they can be used in service of the common good. 

The world needs New Roads. Humanity urgently needs A “New Road”.

Warmly,
Luthern

I am writing to share with you that Mario Johonson, currently Director of Student Life, Equity, Access, and Inclusion, will be moving full-time into a newly created position--Director of Student Wellbeing--effective July 1, 2021. 

This new position marks a major milestone in the evolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion work at New Roads. As was noted in the 1995 article in the Los Angeles Times, New Roads was from its inception intended to “be a model of what independent schools can be, cutting across lines of class and race.”  New Roads has remained true to that vision, having invested over 100 million dollars to offer an authentically diverse student body an intellectually and socially rich educational experience. However, we now know that is not enough to fulfill our mission. Since New Roads has always been unashamedly idealistic, it assumed in the past that just being an authentically diverse community would allow us to transcend our unconscious conditioning about social identifiers--ability, age, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status/class, and learning differences--that informed our daily lived experience inside and outside of New Roads. Therefore, New Roads did not choose to intentionally institutionalize its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

For the last several years, Mario Johonson, a former philosophy teacher who has been at New Roads from its earliest years, has been developing an institutional approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion that reflects New Roads core values--love, respect, compassion, and kindness--and our fundamental assumptions about learning, rooted in neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology. Mario’s effort has been institution-wide,  and already he has worked with our Board of Trustees, administration, faculty and staff. As with all else at New Roads, we experimented, succeeded, and had the courage to risk making mistakes, which are essential to the learning process, as we sought to operationalize this initiative institutionally and to build the infrastructure to support it. This work is hard and has challenged us—a true sign of growth. 

Through this process, we learned that we must intentionally employ the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion to examine our culture and climate in order to sustain and cultivate a learning community that promotes a foundation for individual and collective wellbeing and liberates each student’s full human potential. Failing to address prejudice in all its forms threatens the physiological, emotional, and mental wellbeing of all of our young people and the wellbeing of our country. The current trial over George Floyd’s death and the recent deaths of Asian American Pacific Islanders remind us of the tragic truth of this assertion. This is another public health crisis. As Isabel Wilkerson comments in Caste, “Societal inequity is killing people.”

Starting with the principle that institutional diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-oppression efforts are foundational to promoting individual and collective wellbeing, the K-12 Director of Student Wellbeing (DSW) will serve as the chief advisor to the Head of School on student wellbeing, climate, culture, traditions, and practices in order to preserve and cultivate an integrative habitat, inside and outside of the classroom, where all young people can thrive. The DSW will propose, initiate, lead, implement, and assess long- and short-term strategic institutional initiatives that build the capacity of New Roads to fulfill its commitment to developing a foundation for wellbeing among its authentically diverse student body and optimal conditions for preparing for college, career, civic engagement, and personal fulfillment. The DSW will pay particular attention to disrupting and mitigating the implicit bias and oppression that negatively impact underrepresented students’ physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and academic wellbeing through providing action steps to the New Roads community that are informed by research on learning, neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, systems thinking, racial stages of development, and stages of childhood development. The DSW will teach our community that through our words and actions we all contribute to a culture and climate that promotes health as well as human evolution critical to our collective survival and flourishing or malignant illness for all of us. To this end, the DSW will articulate the institutional approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion, both inside and outside of the classroom, that is most efficacious and in line with New Roads’ mission, core values, commitments, and educational approach.  

As an initial step, Mario will be sharing our institutional plan to focus on cultural competence and culturally responsive teaching. To this end, all of our administration, faculty, and staff will be reading Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students so that we can in an efficacious manner, grounded in research, build our capacity to advance our institutional level of cultural competence in service of our students and our mission. We will be appointing Diversity Practitioners from the faculty and staff who will receive formal training to support him in carrying out New Roads’ plan.

With embodied knowledge of New Roads’ mission, history, culture, and ethos, his open heart, and his brilliant philosophical mind, I am confident that Mario is the person to lead the school in ensuring that all of our young people experience an ever more authentically embracing culture in which they can liberate their full potential and can develop as socially conscious independent thinkers who “disrupt systems that produce inequality and build a more just future.”

Warmly,

Luthern

The implementation of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education was resisted by many. For African-Americans, Brown v. Board signified an opportunity to have access to a quality education; some people fought this decision, in part, because they assumed an inverse correlation between academic rigor and integration. Over the last 25 years, New Roads’ experience and contemporary research have proven this notion wrong; in fact, students at schools that lack diversity can fall into groupthink and false beliefs about reality. New Roads has discovered that real academic rigor occurs in an environment in which authentic diversity is leveraged, every student because of their diversity brings an essential part in the pursuit of "truth." Defined by New Roads, academic rigor is seeking creatively and critically to understand the interconnected nature of reality - the interdependence of the diversity of human talents, knowledge, the human condition, and our collective destiny. In this framework, academic rigor demands the authentic perspectives of diverse people moving beyond attention-grabbing, algorithmic views to holistic, nuanced understandings. This is the foundation for liberating creativity and effectively adapting to and ethically improving upon our environment for the common good. This can’t be done without ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse children living and learning together. It is time to finally embrace Brown. Read more.