Schwartz Pushing Inclusivity

This update is from the “Way Back Machine.” Cindy Allen and I have been enjoying reading FWCD’s Founding Head of School’s reports to the then Board of Trustees. Peter Schwartz H’98 was that Head, and his musings and exhortations to that Board are engrossing examples of his wisdom and genius. 

In excerpts we’ve come across recently, the portions I have been most struck by have been Mr. Schwartz’s comments about the need for our school to diversify right from its first year. He commented on the contemporaneous work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and he applied that work to our then-new school.

Not every educator in 1963 was embracing the changes being brought by the country’s Civil Rights Movement. We can be proud that FWCD’s Founding Head of School was absolutely embracing the importance of integrating ethnic, racial and socioeconomic groups from the first days of our school. 

As he wrote in a report to the Board of Trustees in February 1962, six months before the School’s doors opened, “It should be understood that the quality student of the sort that the independent school should have interest in may be found, and should be sought, without regard for race, color, creed, economic and social position, or geographic location.” 

In the context of Mr. Schwartz’s original thinking and leading, our 2018 Inclusivity Statement feels like an update of Mr. Schwartz’s vision, not a new creation. All five of FWCD’s Heads who preceded me have agreed: We need to be a school that believes in, commits to, and embraces the essential value of being a community that includes a variety of cultures and that prioritizes a sense of belonging for all.