We’re trying to develop a community that listens and seeks out ways we can enrich our lives by including many voices.”

Dr. Phaizon Wood, Buckley Trustee

Building and supporting a diverse community – diverse in all its forms - is a top priority for our school.  We want to be a community that reflects the world around us; a community that not only respects diversity but desires it, whether that diversity is racial, economic, gender, religious or any other form.  Through this, we will provide our students with the sensitivity and communication skills necessary to live in today’s wonderfully varied and global world.

Diversity efforts at Buckley are collaborative and include both organic and planned programs.  Our Committee on Diversity is comprised of members from the school administration, parents, board members, faculty and staff, and Parents’ Association leaders – and we often call upon students and alumni to illuminate our discussions.  The Director of Multiculturalism and Inclusion, Joelina Machera, is a resource for our entire community. But much of real work happens on in our classrooms and by our students, through our curriculum and school events, and in student clubs, such as the Lower School’s Culture Club or the Upper School’s Student Diversity Leadership Club.

Goals

• raise awareness of diversity and the issues that surround it; 
• help our students develop skills for living in a diverse community;
• ensure that the diversity of our students, our Los Angeles community, and our world is honored and celebrated in classrooms, curricula and in our many extra-curricular programs
• provide diversity training to all  Buckley faculty and administrators
• recruit and support a diverse student and faculty body

Recent and Relevant

• On October 20 Buckley Middle and Upper School students and faculty took part in Spirit Day, when young people across the U.S. wore purple to show lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth that there is a huge community that supports them. Spirit Day honored the teenagers who took their lives recently in response to anti-gay bullying.
• The Sakai Flamenco of the Music Center On Tour program performed and presented at a Lower School assembly during Hispanic Heritage Month.
• The student-led Diversity Coffeehouse celebrated difference through performing arts.  Buckley hosted our own students as well as students from area schools.
• A Diversity Club for Middle School students was launched last year to open discussion on issues regarding inclusion and difference.  (The Upper School Diversity Club is in its fourth year.)
• Student affinity groups were established in the 2009-2010 school year for Asian-American students and for African-American female students, joining the existing African American Male Mentorship program.
• Buckley co-sponsored, with three other schools, a speaking engagement with Terrance Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine.  The event was for parents and Upper School students.
• Parent trainings were conducted on issues of inclusion and student interaction.