Commonwealth School:
Fulfilling a vision

William D. Wharton, Headmaster

Late last fall, five members of the Diversity Committee of the Back Bay’s Commonwealth School, with support from the Tides Foundation of San Francisco, traveled to Seattle for the National Association of Independent School’s Student Diversity Leadership Conference. Faculty advisor Eric Traub accompanied them, while also attending workshops at the concurrent People of Color Conference.

Seniors Ben Hirsch, Adriel Hsu-Flanders and Kate Harrington-Rosen, as well as Armand Muhigi ’08, and Symone Williams ’09, joined 1,300 students from across the country to participate in three days of activities designed to address issues surrounding seven different cultural identities: race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, economic class and nation of origin. They occasionally worked as one large group, but frequently split into smaller “family” and “affinity” groups to discuss how these issues affect their own lives, and what they can do to create change at their schools.

Inspired by the conference, these students and their fellow committee members organized for the second year in a row Commonwealth’s all-school Diversity Day. All students and faculty took part in a series of engaging, thoughtful discussions about race and class.

Diversity Day saw teams of students and faculty rotated through a series of student- and teacher-led workshops, where participants explored topics like portrayals of race in the news, the Academy Award-winning film “Crash,” Commonwealth’s curriculum, and the ethnic, economic and religious profiles of the school community. Students and teachers alike agreed that the day was one of the most moving and thought-provoking experiences they’d had at Commonwealth.

For his leadership in organizing the event, Adriel Hsu-Flanders was named a state finalist for the Princeton Prize in Race Relations, awarded by Princeton University to students “whose efforts have had a significant, positive effect on race relations in their schools or communities.”

To build on these initiatives, and again thanks to the support of the Tides Foundation, this spring Commonwealth hired its first-ever Director of Diversity, Lihuan Lai, who recently graduated from Bryn Mawr College and is herself an alumna of Commonwealth.

Lihuan will begin the job with first-hand knowledge of the challenges faced by students from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds in an independent school culture like Commonwealth’s. As a widely respected graduate, she will also be uniquely positioned to lead the kind of forthright discussions necessary to enable Commonwealth to live up to its historic commitment to equity and social justice.

Since it opened its doors in 1958, Commonwealth, an independent day school enrolling 150 students in grades 9-12, has been a rigorous, intellectually stimulating community. Charles Merrill, onetime chairman of the board at Morehouse College in Atlanta, founded the school with a vision of attracting students from diverse racial, social and economic backgrounds. With the help of one of the strongest financial aid programs among area private schools, nearly one-third of its students today receive financial aid.

Today, the school continues to challenge all of its students, and offers abundant support­­ — including frequent one-on-one conferences — to equip each of them with the skills and background needed to read with penetration, think clearly and creatively, and write with vigor and clarity in every discipline.

Commonwealth continues to educate smart, creative and highly motivated students from many different backgrounds, preparing them to thrive at the most challenging colleges, and encouraging them to become leaders — like the students of the Diversity Committee — in whatever course they pursue.

Commonwealth School will host an open house for interested families on Sunday, Oct. 14th from 3 p.m.-5 p.m. For more information about the school, call 617-266-7525 or visit its Web site at www.commschool.org.