SPS Today: From Cleveland to Concord

The Journey of New Dean of Equity and Inclusion James Greenwood

James Greenwood grew up in Cleveland and attended Kenyon College. He spent five years in admissions at Williston Northampton School, with a focus on multicultural recruitment. Mr. Greenwood also spent nine years as director of multicultural affairs at Northfield Mount Hermon and came to St. Paul’s School from Shady Hill, where he served as director of inclusion and multicultural practice. He earned a master’s in teaching from Brown and a master’s in education from the Klingenstein Center for Independent School Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is currently in the midst of a doctoral program in educational leadership at Boston College. Associate Director of Communications Tenley Rooney sat down with Mr. Greenwood to talk about his journey to St. Paul’s School.

More and more schools are including a position like yours on their faculty. Why?
Ultimately what they all have at their core mission is trying to build a more inclusive community, one where students from a variety of different backgrounds can find equitable success in school. Recognizing that we are an increasingly diverse country and world, we need to equip our schools with the capacity to effectively communicate across lines of difference. It’s important for our different underrepresented populations, but it’s essential for all of our students.

 Can you explain your role as dean of equity and inclusion at SPS?
Some of this year will be devoted to figuring out what would be helpful at St. Paul’s, because, in any diversity work, it needs to be tailored to the specific issues in the specific place at that specific moment in time. A lot of this will be thinking and listening. To grossly over-simplify, there’s the work that happens with the students and then the work that happens with the adults. With the students, supporting historically underrepresented and marginalized populations at the School so they can find equitable access and success in the programs here, but then, supporting the entire student body in growing in their capacity around communicating effectively across lines of difference. And there’s the adult side of it, which is also around supporting the building of a diverse faculty and staff and also working with our whole faculty around their capacities working with a diverse student body. 

What do you enjoy about this work?
What drives my work is keeping the students at the center of it. They’re still in this adolescent place, they’re still shaping their identity, and there’s still an openness to exploring new ways of being and just figuring out who it is they are. Adolescence really is all about figuring out who it is that you have been, who you want to be moving forward. There’s something exciting about being able to help guide that process.