Welcome to our school’s Community Diversity and Inclusion web pages. These pages were created to inform all community members of past, ongoing, and future actions taken to ensure that our students and families feel safe, supported, and successful at French American and International.

We actively seek and support students from racially, culturally and socio-economically diverse families. Our family configurations are multifarious, too. We welcome single parents/guardians, gay and lesbian parents/guardians, divorced and separated parents/guardians, as well as adoptive and foster families. From the very beginning, our students rub shoulders with others who reflect an astonishing variety of attitudes, religions and political persuasions.   We believe they learn more because of this, and gain a profound understanding of the richness of human experience.

Commitment and Initiatives
At International, we believe that the best education occurs in a school made up of students, families, teachers and staff drawn from many different backgrounds and experiences. We honor the uniqueness of each individual and embrace diverse backgrounds, sexual orientations, values and points of view to build a strong, inclusive community, and to prepare students for lives in a society in which communicating across cultures and from a multiplicity of perspectives are of paramount importance. We believe that our strength and growth as individuals and as a school come in large measure from our ability to learn from and with one another, to respect our differences, and to find common ground. This commitment to a diverse school community has been re-emphasized in the most recent resolution by the Board of Trustees.

Resolution of The Board of Trustees, Community/Diversity Committee
It is hereby resolved by the board of trustees that the French American International School and International High School, in order to more fully effectuate the mission statement of the schools with regard to diversity, commit to the following:

1) Student diversity is defined for our schools as follows: a substantial mix of international students from France and other countries around the world and a substantial mix of American students from a variety of socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, religious and family backgrounds.

2) Goals & objectives: the schools commit to increase and support student diversity so that the student bodies include greater numbers of underrepresented populations, including African American, Latin American, Asian American and low-income students, and strive to ensure that none of these students attend school in isolation because of a lack of critical mass or available services.

3) To reach the goals & objectives above, the following strategies and plans are encouraged:

A) Establish a coordinator position and a diversity program which maintains a formal student support program including tutoring, counseling, family outreach, and financial assistance during the year;
B) Maintain ongoing education relating to diversity/race/class issues for students and faculty;
C) Create greater diversity among the faculty, staff and board by retaining more individuals of color and varying ethnicities;
D) Communicate school-wide diversity commitment internally and externally in a consistent manner.

The Community Diversity Alliance, composed of a group of administrative staff, faculty members and parent/guardian representatives, is dedicated to helping the school move forward with further efforts toward inclusion and diversity. The committee is open to anyone who would like to participate.

The overall role of the Alliance is to monitor the implementation and success of the school's Board resolution. Its specific commitment includes:

• to review relevant school policies, decisions, practices and other actions to ensure consistency with the school’s resolution in regards to diversity and inclusion;
• to devise a school-wide long-term diversity and inclusion action plan for the school’s operation and teaching practices;
• to seek input and/or suggestions from the school community and to refer issues of exclusion and disenfranchisement to the appropriate point-persons and sub-committees;
• to propose new diversity and inclusion initiatives to the Senior Management Team and identify the resources needed for implementation of said initiatives;
• to devise an ongoing diversity awareness program and communications strategy so that all faculty/staff, students, and parents/guardians may be motivated to participate in the school’s efforts to enhance community.

Community Diversity Alliance Committees