Diversity

Recently, my journey at Saint Mike's has sent me down a new path... I am now a tour guide! It is a new exciting way to meet new students who are going to possibly be joining our campus as well as a good way to get experience with talking to students and their parents. One of the requirements of being a tour guide is attending Founders Society Meetings every month. The meeting I recently attended had an interesting topic of diversity. One of the questions we receive on tours is, "How diverse is Saint Michaels?" It is a question many tour guides have a hard time answering, so we decided to address the issue in our meeting. We had two guest speakers, both students at Saint Mikes, who are heavily involved in clubs and offices on campus such as our Center for Multicultural Affairs and Services and also Common Ground. They began our meeting by asking how we would respond to this question... which was followed by silence. Everyone was too afraid to voice their opinion, fearful that they may say something offensive. The two speakers quickly fixed this by giving us clear definitions and common myths circling around diversity, such as a room full of people with a shared marginalized identity is diverse and we all hold one identity. These are common myths that constantly misguide us when we think about diversity. We then spoke in length about all different types of diversity, many people think racial diversity is all there is to it, but other areas include: socioeconomic, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, nationality, and many more. After we clarified some questions in the room, we then went into the different resources, clubs, and offices that Saint Mikes offers to students of all different backgrounds, making our school seem a lot more diverse than I once thought. I can now say I definitely feel confident in answering a parents question about the diversity at Saint Mikes! 

***If anyone ever has any questions or needs a resource at our school about diversity, I would be happy to assist. I now know more clubs and offices than I could ever imagine and would love to explain them in more depth if needed.