Meeting Date: October 29, 2007

Members Present: Sonja Griffing, Kristin McMahon, Jo Ann Noel, Janet Tran, Miles Erdly, Arturo Gonzalez

Topic: Carson School Holiday and Celebration Philosophy
The committee members present received a copy of the District guidelines. If you would like a copy, please see Karen.

The Diversity Committee recognizes the following:

• It is to the advantage of the school and the classroom teachers if we adopted a building wide philosophy that all members support
• If we are going to do events and focus on including all the populations represented at Carson then we would need to do something every day. With 12 spoken languages in the building, truly being conscientious and knowing/celebrating what they all do can be challenging. This does not include the many different cultures represented at Carson that do not speak a second language. The group felt that it would be overwhelming to keep up with and give a quality presentation/activity to each celebration/event
• Certain customs and events can have complex issues or meanings; this does not always translate to an art activity or having a brief sharing from the student or teacher’s perspective
• There are some activities/events where at times the teacher may not realize that certain items are actually regarded as, or associated with, religious symbols
• Simply not participating in certain events doesn’t mean that we are pretending that they don’t exist, but it helps us to avoid placing value or needing to accommodate for students not participating…which brings us back to all means all

The Diversity Committee has determined the following philosophy:

• Let’s leave the holiday events for families to do outside of school in the way that they wish to recognize them
• Our teaching days are already demanding enough; let’s focus on the instruction and learning-our job and curriculum
• Although we are permitted to display certain things because they are not religious symbols, they are associated with the religious holiday (permissible items associated with Christmas include: Santa, Christmas trees, lights, etc.). The committee's decision is to support the idea that it is not to come up with an all encompassing list of what we won’t be doing, or to see how much we can do/or get away with. Instead let’s focus on what we have committed to as a building team. This means having those conversations as a grade level about activities being planned, wording/theme used on displayed projects, time of the year that certain art is done, etc. It is understood that this can be a delicate subject
• Focus on the natural aspects of the seasons (i.e. leaves/harvest in the fall, snowflakes/snowmen in the winter, etc.)
• Staff recognizes that students may initiate some conversation during open ended writing activities, show & tell, etc. However, these are student initiated rather than teacher prompted
• We are able to support the richness of customs and traditions using the district curriculum and events (REACH Read Alouds, SEED, Multicultural components in curriculum such as mathematics, school and district diversity celebrations, etc.