Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

During Family and Alumni Weekend in 2019, Mercersburg hosted its first Black student alumni reception to celebrate 55 years of Black student integration and 30 years of the Black Student Union; the weekend was supported by the school but coordinated and executed by our Black alumni, led by Tonya Rutherford ’90. At the event, our alumni suggested that we begin efforts to raise funds to establish a scholarship honoring Tom Leslie ’66, the school’s first Black graduate. 

The inaugural recipient of the Tom Leslie ’66 Memorial Scholarship will enroll at the school in fall 2021. With ongoing support from our community, we will grow this scholarship fund to expand our commitment in the coming years. If you are interested in supporting this scholarship, please contact the Office of Advancement and Alumni Relations.

The school is committed to building opportunities for courageous conversations by selecting annual themes around which programming, community reading, and curriculum are designed. The concept was introduced to the community in 2017. Themes have included: Immigration (2018-2019); Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (2019-2020); and Making a Difference (2020-2021). Learn more about Courageous Conversations.

The school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, established under the leadership of former faculty member Selas Douglas, the school’s first director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, identified faculty and staff training as our highest priority. To that end, as the school entered into our accreditation process, we selected this as the singular focus of the Sustaining Excellence accreditation protocol, which prompts a school to identify a strategic initiative, conduct a research project on the implementation of the initiative, and present its findings to other schools. 

In recent years, we have made a commitment to the diversification of our faculty and staff. We will continue to seek dynamic educators from diverse backgrounds to join our community, and we will call on our community networks to help us with this critically important commitment. In addition, the Board of Regents has announced a commitment to creating a board that is more reflective of the community they represent. We have much work to do on both of these fronts.

The school has announced a commitment to partnering with our Black alumni in building an alumni mentoring program for our Black identifying students. Developing a protocol to this concept that prioritizes the safe engagement between alumni and students will take time. In the meantime, we launched affinity webinars this fall for students to engage with alumni specific to race to provide safe places for honest dialogue for our students, while also leveraging the benefits that relationships with alumni can foster. This is especially important as we recognize that our faculty demographic is not yet reflective of our student body.

The school has already identified areas of opportunity for our curriculum to evolve to be more reflective of a diverse and changing world. One such area is the work of our history department. In spring 2020, a history class on race was presented to the Academic Office; that course was approved as an elective and is now one of our first official courses propelling us in our initiative to move Beyond the AP. Advanced Studies in Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. is being offered for the first time this academic year.