Dear EVCS Family,

I am pleased to announce that our school has been accepted into the Chancellor’s Diversity in Admissions pilot program. In next year’s admissions cycle, priority will be given to students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch or students who are learning English for 50% of our Pre-K and Kindergarten seats. Students who attend EVCS for Pre-K will still be given priority for K seats, and sibling status will continue to be honored as a top admissions priority.

If you came to School-Wide Morning Meeting a couple of weeks ago you heard me talk about one of our core values: kindness. Another principle that is essential in our school culture and central to all we do, is inclusion. Our mission statement reads: “It is our priority to provide an environment where all children and all families are valued, welcomed, cared for and supported.” Yet over the last several years our school has become significantly less diverse. There is a growing trend in District 1, which has used a system of “pure choice” in the admissions protocol, of clustering according to race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Our demographics at EVCS have become increasingly dissimilar to other District 1 schools and the neighborhood we serve, and many in our community have become uncomfortable with this. I am hopeful that the Diversity in Admissions pilot program will represent a significant step in the right direction to correct this trend. We’ll be joined in this pilot by our District 1 friends the Children’s Workshop School, the Earth School and the Neighborhood School. You can read a bit more about the pilot program in today’sNYTimes and Chalkbeat.

I’m looking forward to working shoulder to shoulder with our amazing school community to usher in this exciting and important initiative.

As ever,

Bradley