Mission

Our mission is to promote and sustain a safe and welcoming environment at Bell so that our school reaches its full potential for every community member. We aim to raise community consciousness of how each individual’s decisions and actions impact social and racial justice. We will work to ensure that Bell has the right tools and is supported and held accountable in creating a more just and equitable school for all.

Vision

We envision a Bell with a welcoming and engaged community in which the distinctive experiences and backgrounds of all students, teachers, staff, and families are celebrated; a school where learning content, policies, resources, and environment (including teachers, staff and facilities) are genuinely inclusive and representative of the greater Chicago population and support students’ unique needs.

Goals

1. Instructional Content: Support Bell administration and teachers in enhancing instruction and curriculum by integrating a higher level of racial justice and anti-racism content, and supporting students’ unique needs.

2. Culture: Enhance and promote a school culture and community that is inclusive of and equitable for students and their families across the three programs — including BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), LGBTQIA+, nonbinary, and differently-abled students. Promote parents’ awareness of issues surrounding equity. Encourage parents’ engagement, both in this work specifically, and in the school in general.

3. Policy: Support the Bell administration in reviewing existing and developing new policies and environments that support diversity and inclusion and enhance equity at the school.

We will seek engagement from parents, students, teachers, and administration in all three of these goals.

We will ensure that our work links to:

• Bell’s Continuous Improvement Work Plan (CIWP)

• Teacher professional development initiatives

• Proposed curriculum enhancements

• Existing student and community involvement programs/groups

Organization

The Parent/Caregiver Equity Group is managed by a Core Group of about 10 to 15 parents, caregivers, and community members. On the ground, we also have subgroups focused on more specific areas of the work. 

As of Fall 2021, our current subgroups, reporting up to the Core Group, are as follows:
Operations: Outreach -- Connecting with equity groups from other schools

• Operations: Online presence -- Maintaining our website / social media presence

• Culture: Awareness Building -- Mostly focused on raising awareness among the parent population (theme of the month, book club, etc.)

• Culture: Engaging Students -- Not active yet (pandemic). Should pick up once we connect with the Teacher/Staff Equity Committee.

• Culture: Physical Environment -- Focusing on posters, art, etc., within the school. Has not been very active to this point (pandemic).

• Culture: Unifying the Three Programs -- Neighborhood, Options, Deaf/Hard of Hearing

• Culture: Welcoming Committee -- Welcoming prospective and new parents

• Culture: Neurodiversity -- NEW

• Policy -- Mostly focused within Bell, but also looking at larger CPS.

• Instructional Content / Curriculum -- Not active yet (pandemic). Should pick up once we connect with the Teacher/Staff Equity Committee.

Reach out to us at bellequity@gmail.com if you’d like to get involved in any of these. And we’re always open to ideas and suggestions for new areas of focus, or to widen the focus of an existing group.