Join us for a collaborative independent school workshop with parents, educators & alum ensuring safer learning environments for our pK-12 scholars.

Increasingly Independent schools are being met with strong opposition to instituting a culturally responsive and anti-racist curriculum. How can parents, educators, and alum partner with schools to keep Black and Brown scholars academically, socially, and emotionally safe in the classroom?

The goal of this workshop is to prepare families with networks and strategies to continue to advocate for, protect, and advance culturally responsive and anti-racist curriculum and culture in our independent school communities.

You will be inspired and supported by our workshop lead collaborators made up of parents, educators, diversity practitioners, therapists, and independent school alum!

We'll workshop on:

History -the need to reexamine and lived experience with 'white centered' curriculum

Harm - the need for belonging over bias and the role your parents|guardians play in advocating and supporting the indy school experience

Reconciliation - the need for empathetic anti-racist truth and today's strategies for Black & Brown parents|guardians|students about critiquing, disrupting, and partnering for an equitable and inclusive curriculum that causes no harm

We are delighted to open the workshop in conversation with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, leading to decenter whiteness in the Classics. A Dominican by birth and New Yorker by upbringing, he is an alum of Prep for Prep and the Collegiate School and holds degrees from Princeton, Oxford, and Stanford. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015)

We are equally thrilled to have Lead Collaborators to inspire and guide our breakouts:

Gabriella Alleyene - Independent School Alum + Founder of Kaleidoscope Teens

Elon Collins - Independent School Alum + Author, Afrodite: Black Girls Guide to PWI's

Dr. Rashidah Bowen-White - Psychologist + Independent School Consultant

Shelby Stokes - Interdisciplinary Educator, Riverdale Country School

Anika Walker-Johnson - Educator + Independent School Diversity Practitioner

Kimberlyn Davis - Parent Leader, Ashley Hall School + Exec. Dir. Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation

Dr. Starita Ansari - Educator + Founder of The New 3R's

Carolyn Newton - Academic Program Coordinator, Ashley Hall School

Gina Parker Collins - Parent Leader, Riverdale Country School + RIISE Founder

Check back for more on Dan-el and our Lead Collaborators.

Thanks for collaborating with us, and let's keep winning!

*Thank you to our RIISE Member Schools for thier continued support and commitment.