Dear Families,

I'm writing to you as around the Bay Area and nationwide, protests denounce the discrimination and brutality directed at Asian-American and Pacific Islander families, which predate but were inflamed during the pandemic, and were intensified by senseless murders last week in Georgia. Racist violence directed at AAPI citizens, and particularly the insidious targeting of elderly individuals, amplifies our national reckoning about injustice, intolerance, and division in America.

At ACDS, we stand in solidarity with our Asian-American and Pacific Islander families, condemning all those who perpetrate race-based hate. Our support is both personal and a manifestation of important work underway at ACDS; since 2015, our entire staff has been engaged in ongoing professional development focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

For the past six years, the ACDS staff has met for DEI trainings monthly (and currently, we meet in teams every two weeks) to examine our curriculum, instructional methods, school events, admissions practices, communications and more. We strive in this initiative to identify how we can do a better job supporting families, students, and staff who enrich our school community with differences, whether through their cultural heritage, race and ethnicity, learning differences, physical disabilities, and more.

DEI is a natural extension of ACDS culture; we are intrinsically a warm, welcoming, inclusive and nonjudgmental school community. DEI is also a priority for our Board of Trustees, who've devoted two meetings to diversity training this year and will engage in continuing DEI education led by an expert consultant.

DEI as an ACDS priority reflects our intentional effort to support you in preparing your children for leadership roles in their future pursuits, to help them understand that hate and discrimination are intolerable, to teach cooperation and collaboration, and to celebrate that in our differences we find our greatest resource and strength as Americans. With your support, we hope to empower ACDS students to believe all of their peers -- regardless of their ancestry, what they look like, where they worship, what they believe, or who they love -- have a rightful place in America's prosperous and proud future.

This month, as our DEI work integrates the narrative of AAPI discrimination, I want to send the message to our families of Asian-American and Pacific Island heritage that I shared yesterday during my monthly video meeting with parents:

On behalf of the ACDS administration and Board of Trustees, I promise you that Asian hate -- and any threat to the welfare of our students and staff -- will not get past the ACDS curb. We stand in solidarity with you and your loved ones, we promise to protect your children, and we embrace you with open arms as part of the ACDS family.

To our AAPI families and indeed to everyone in this school community, should you or your children experience any interaction on this campus that could be construed as discriminatory, please alert your teachers or administrators immediately. And I call on all ACDS families to circle around your Asian-American and Pacific Islander friends and classmates, and join your staff and trustees in rejecting the small-minded ignorance and hatred driving AAPI abuse that has no place in our nation, state, or school community.

Sincerely,