Our Commitment to Justice, Equity, Inclusivity and Belonging

June 2022 Update

On 9 June 2020, CJA published a statement honoring Black lives in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In that statement, we promised to review our diversity, equity and inclusion practices, and we committed to publishing a summary of our review and any new commitments by 15 October 2020. We also committed to sharing an annual update about our growth toward becoming a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community each June. Please find an update on our progress through May 2022 below:

• As a work of the Catholic Church, we remain committed to walking in solidarity with our students, alumni, families and colleagues as we strive to repair the social sin of racism. We commit to engaging in respectful dialogue and anti-bias, anti-racist training that recognizes and affirms our commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion as essential elements of our mission as a Jesuit Catholic institution.

  • There are many secular notions about what Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) work ought to look like. Some of these secular perspectives implicitly or explicitly champion a political ideology. We do not believe that is what we are called to do at CJA. Instead, we believe we are called to lean into our Jesuit and Catholic mission and identity. Catholic social teaching – summarized well in these articles by Rev. Chris Devron, S.J., and Rev. William Byron, S.J. – is our guide.

  • The Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus (the Midwest Province) is responsible for guaranteeing the Jesuit Catholic mission and identity of Chicago Jesuit Academy through a formal sponsorship agreement. Every six to seven years, the Midwest Province works with each of their schools to complete a sponsorship review. In the 2022-2023 school year, CJA will undergo our sponsorship review with the Midwest Province, which will include a formal visitation by representatives from our fellow Jesuit schools as well as a delegate from the Midwest Province. This delegation will assess our work by using the Jesuit Schools Network’s (JSN’s) Our Way of Proceeding: Standards and Benchmarks for Jesuit Schools in the 21st Century and JSN’s revised Domain 5, “Faith That Lives Justice”, which includes diversity, equity and inclusion work in the mission and identity of all Jesuit schools. In reviewing these standards, we believe the following three passages have special resonance with our way of proceeding at Chicago Jesuit Academy:

    • Today our prime educational objective must be to form men [and women] for others; men [and women] who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ – for the God-human who lived and died for all the world; men [and women] who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men [and women] completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce. (Pedro Arrupe, Valencia, Spain, 1973)

    • A Jesuit school community understands and develops a core Ignatian worldview that presupposes the goodness in all people and recognizes the Catholic principle that every person is charged with the Divine, created in the image and likeness of God…

    • 13.2 The school program includes anti-racism/anti-bias training for board, faculty and staff, and students. All school personnel work to eradicate barriers between and among people such as misogyny, homophobia, and gender and socio-economic stereotyping and discrimination.

• We continue to strive to live our mission statement, which was updated during the 2020-2021 school year in partnership with our alumni, our parents, our faculty, our staff and our board:

  • Mission: Chicago Jesuit Academy is a loving and academically rigorous tuition-free Catholic elementary school for students and families from resilient communities impacted by historical disinvestment. We accompany our students and alumni from enrollment through the start of their careers as they develop their gifts and grow as men and women for others.

  • Means: Located in Austin on Chicago’s West Side, CJA admits students to all grades in our lower and middle school without regard for their race, ethnicity or religion, and CJA enrolls 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-grade students without regard for their past levels of academic achievement. We use small class sizes, extended school days and an 11-month school year to give personal care to our students and help them develop as whole persons. We accompany our alumni on their unique paths to meaningful employment and support them throughout high school, their post-secondary education and the start of their careers, always welcoming them back as leaders at CJA and in the broader community. CJA students, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, volunteers and benefactors listen to and learn from one another and make disciplined sacrifices to accomplish our shared mission. We partner with other schools and the broader community to create access to better educational resources, confront systemic racism and remove obstacles to educational equity. We call one another to find God in all things and be men and women for others who are open to growth, loving, religious, intellectually competent and committed to doing justice.

• We remain committed to making significant additional investments in our community so that CJA will be of greater service to children and families in our community.

  • In response to requests from the parents of our alumni and our current students, we have accelerated the opening of our new girls’ program by one year by enrolling our first cohort of 3rd- and 4th-grade girls in June 2022 for the 2022-2023 school year. We remain on pace to complete a 50,000-sq.-ft. addition to our campus by summer 2023, which will enable us to double our enrollment and expand the reach of our College & Career Persistence Programs to 18 elementary schools throughout Chicago within the next five years through our High School Bridge program. To support this growth, we have increased our initial capital campaign goal from $30 million to $40 million as we work to secure both the building and long-term scholarship funds we need for our students.

  • In partnership with our general contractor, Walsh Construction, we continue to strive to use our campus expansion to create job opportunities for our alumni and other members of our community who are pursuing careers in the construction trades. With 85% of the project bought out as of 1 June 2022, 29.9% of the contracted work went to Minority Owned Businesses (MBE) and 6.0% went to Women-Owned Businesses (WBE).

• We remain committed to adding more Black and Hispanic voices to CJA’s board of directors, committees and executive team. We are spending more time, dollars and other institutional resources to make greater progress toward this goal.

  • During the 2020-2021 school year, CJA’s board of directors was 82% white, 12% Black and 6% Hispanic. In 2021-2022, CJA’s board of directors was 70% white, 20% Black and 10% Hispanic. In 2022-2023, CJA’s board of directors will be 60% white, 25% Black, 10% Hispanic and 5% Indian (a Jesuit director from India). Across the same time, the female/male gender balance of the board of directors has remained constant at 35%/65%. We added a CJA alumnus to both CJA’s finance committee and college-persistence committee in 2021 and named an alumnus to the board of directors in 2022.

  • During the 2020-2021 school year, CJA’s executive team was 71% white, 14% Black and 14% Multiracial. In 2021-2022, CJA’s executive team was 57% white, 14% Black and 29% Multiracial. In 2022-2023, CJA’s executive team will be 67% white and 33% Multiracial. Across the same time, the female/male gender balance of the executive team has changed from 57%/43% (2020-2022) to 50%/50% for the 2022-2023 school year.

• We remain committed to sharing the stories of our students, alumni and families in ways that emphasize their strength, resilience and courage. For an example, please see our 2022 Annual Report.

• We commit to setting the need for CJA’s existence and the scope and breadth of CJA’s mission within the broader context of our country’s history of systemic racism and the past 70 years of disinvestment on the West Side of Chicago. Unjust structures – specifically, inequitable access to well-resourced public schools – created the need for CJA.

  • Throughout the summer and fall of 2021, the CJA board of directors gathered for special sessions to review and discuss our Catholic and Jesuit mission and identity as well as the history of contract selling and redlining on the West Side of Chicago. The board of directors views this work as foundational to the board’s oversight and leadership responsibilities.

• We commit to listening to and learning from one another – especially the members of our Black Affinity Group (BAG), which was formed in June 2020 and includes Black members of our faculty and staff. We commit to compensating BAG members justly for their additional work.

  • To improve compensation for our classroom aides and a subset of school-side staff, CJA increased salaries for these employees by 20-26% year over year from FY2021-2022 to FY2022-2023. These changes disproportionately and positively impacted a subset of Black and Hispanic staff members who were serving in these roles as we transitioned into the 2022-2023 contract year.

  • CJA also maintained our existing college loan repayment program for all employees as well as our additional loan repayment program for employees who were the first in their families to attend college or are employees who identify as members of historically under-represented minority communities.

  • We are also working to create pathways for employees without four-year college degrees or education credentials so that they can pursue college or graduate degrees in education and become classroom teachers at CJA. These policies would disproportionately and positively impact a subset of Black and Hispanic members of CJA’s staff who have the potential to become excellent teachers but do not yet have the necessary college degrees or credentials.

  • The Development and College & Career Persistence (CP) Departments created job bands for all Development and CP employees, which clearly define performance standards for excellent service to our students and alumni while also clearly mapping the additional job responsibilities and standards that employees must meet to earn higher compensation. In creating these job bands, we also increased our starting salaries so we could be more competitive in the market for the talent we need for our students and alumni – especially talented candidates whose life stories mirror the stories of our own students and alumni. For the same reason, CJA is reviewing our existing lane-and-step pay scale for teachers and social workers, and we are exploring new structures to improve starting salaries for our teachers and social workers through a special 2022-2023 work group.

  • The BAG continues to meet as an affinity group of CJA focused on mutual support for and the personal growth of the BAG’s membership.

• We commit to learning from diversity, equity and inclusion experts as we critically review our curriculum and strive to build broad cultural competency across our entire faculty and staff.

  • All employees and each department of CJA continue to actively engage in professional development opportunities that root DE&I work in our Jesuit and Catholic mission and identity. As we grow to serve more students and add the girls’ program, we continue to review our curriculum to ensure that we are meeting the needs of all our students.

• We remain committed to having a transparent process by which CJA parents, employees and other members of our community can share feedback about the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department (CCSPD) officers with whom CJA has contracted to help ensure the blocks around CJA are safe. We continue to check in with each officer when they arrive for duty and strive to build relationships with them. CJA does not employ a school resource officer, and the CCSPD officers do not serve as school resource officers inside CJA. They have never been involved in student discipline at CJA, and we commit to maintaining this policy.

  • We continue to invite our families, faculty and staff to share feedback about our CCSPD officers with CJA via an anonymous online form. CJA’s Parent Safety Committee is invited to meet quarterly and give input on the CCSPD presence on campus. Each CCSPD officer is greeted and checked in daily by a member of our campus safety team.

• We commit to supporting our Alumni Board, which several alumni created in summer 2020.

  • We continue to strive to support new initiatives of our Alumni Board.

• We commit to strengthening and broadening our relationships with our neighbors and the surrounding community by sustaining partnerships with local organizations (i.e., The West Side Coalition) and hosting neighborhood athletic leagues.

  • Throughout the 2021-2022 school year, we collaborated with our neighbors on the review and approval of the planned development for our campus expansion, and we continue to partner with organizations throughout the Austin neighborhood and other West Side neighborhoods. We are grateful for the opportunity to host athletic leagues, community meetings and other initiatives in partnerships with our community.

• Our work is still far from done. We commit to holding ourselves accountable for this work. As we strive to build a more just and equitable world, we remain committed to publishing annual updates about our progress each June.

We root all these commitments within our mission as a Jesuit Catholic institution. We are animated by our belief in the Resurrection, knowing the cross is not the summary statement for our human condition. We acknowledge that we are a people who regularly miss the mark, but we also believe we are loved, capable of repentance and redemption, and worthy of God’s mercy. In all that we do, we strive to model for our students and alumni our Grad-at-Grad values by seeking intellectual excellence and being open to growth, loving, religious and committed to doing justice in the service of others.

Our Commitment to Justice, Equity, Inclusivity and Belonging

June 2021 Update

On 9 June 2020, CJA published a statement honoring Black lives in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In that statement, we promised to review our diversity, equity and inclusion practices, and we committed to publishing a summary of our review and any new commitments by 15 October 2020. We also committed to sharing an annual update about our growth toward becoming a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community each June. Please find an update on our progress through June 2021 below:

• As a work of the Catholic Church, we remain committed to walking in solidarity with our students, alumni, families and colleagues as we strive to repair the social sin of racism. We commit to engaging in respectful dialogue and anti-bias, anti-racist training that recognizes and affirms our commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion as essential elements of our mission as a Jesuit, Catholic institution.

  • There are many secular notions about what Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) work ought to look like. Some of these secular perspectives implicitly or explicitly champion a political ideology. We do not believe that is what we are called to do at CJA. Instead, we believe we are called to lean into our Jesuit and Catholic mission and identity. Catholic social teaching – summarized well in these articles by Rev. Chris Devron, S.J., and Rev. William Byron, S.J. – is our guide.

  • We have also tried to spend meaningful time reviewing what the Jesuit Schools Network (JSN) says our Jesuit schools are called to be. In 2015, JSN published Our Way of Proceeding: Standards and Benchmarks for Jesuit Schools in the 21st Century. During this past school year, JSN reviewed and revised Domain 5: Faith That Does Justice. As a result of this review, JSN renamed Domain 5 “Faith That Lives Justice” and materially updated the standards to better articulate and better integrate diversity, equity and inclusion work into the mission and identity of all Jesuit schools. In reviewing these standards, we have found the following three passages particularly instructive:

    • Today our prime educational objective must be to form men [and women] for others; men [and women] who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ – for the God-human who lived and died for all the world; men [and women] who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men [and women] completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce. (Pedro Arrupe, Valencia, Spain, 1973)

    • A Jesuit school community understands and develops a core Ignatian worldview that presupposes the goodness in all people and recognizes the Catholic principle that every person is charged with the Divine, created in the image and likeness of God…

    • 13.2 The school program includes anti-racism/anti-bias training for board, faculty and staff, and students. All school personnel work to eradicate barriers between and among people such as misogyny, homophobia, and gender and socio-economic stereotyping and discrimination.

• We have reviewed and updated CJA’s mission statement in partnership with our alumni, our alumni’s parents, our faculty, our staff and our board. Please find the new statement below:

  • Mission: Chicago Jesuit Academy is a loving and academically rigorous tuition-free Catholic elementary school for students and families from resilient communities impacted by historical disinvestment. We accompany our students and alumni from enrollment through the start of their careers as they develop their gifts and grow as men and women for others.

  • Means: Located in Austin on Chicago’s West Side, CJA admits students to all grades in our lower and middle school without regard for their race, ethnicity or religion, and CJA enrolls 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-grade students without regard for their past levels of academic achievement.

  • We use small class sizes, extended school days and an 11-month school year to give personal care to our students and help them develop as whole persons.

  • We accompany our alumni on their unique paths to meaningful employment and support them throughout high school, their post-secondary education and the start of their careers, always welcoming them back as leaders at CJA and in the broader community.

  • CJA students, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, volunteers and benefactors listen to and learn from one another and make disciplined sacrifices to accomplish our shared mission.

  • We partner with other schools and the broader community to create access to better educational resources, confront systemic racism and remove obstacles to educational equity.

  • We call one another to find God in all things and be men and women for others who are open to growth, loving, religious, intellectually competent and committed to doing justice.

• We have renewed our commitment to adding more Black and Latinx voices to CJA’s board of directors, committees and executive team. We are spending more time, dollars and other institutional resources to make greater progress toward this goal.

  • During the 2020-2021 school year, CJA’s board of directors was 82% white, 12% Black and 6% Latinx. In 2021-2022, CJA’s board of directors is 70% white, 20% Black and 10% Latinx. Across the same time, the female/male gender balance of the board of directors remained constant at 35%/65%. We have also added two CJA alumni to committees of CJA’s board of directors.

  • During the 2020-2021 school year, CJA’s executive team was 71% white, 14% Black and 14% Multiracial. In 2021-2022, CJA’s executive team is 57% white, 14% Black and 29% Multiracial. Across the same time, the female/male gender balance of the executive team remained constant at 57%/43%.

• We commit to sharing the stories of our students, alumni and families in ways that emphasize their strength, resilience and courage. For an example, please see our 2022 Annual Report.

• We commit to setting the need for CJA’s existence and the scope and breadth of CJA’s mission within the broader context of our country’s history of systemic racism and the past 70 years of disinvestment on the West Side of Chicago. Unjust structures – specifically, inequitable access to well-resourced public schools – created the need for CJA.

  • Members of our board of directors, faculty and staff have found Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Handsand Beryl Satter’s Family Properties especially instructive texts.

• We commit to listening to and learning from one another – especially the members of our Black Affinity Group (BAG), which was formed in June 2020 and includes Black members of our faculty and staff. We commit to compensating BAG members justly for their additional work.

  • The BAG continues to meet twice monthly. Quarterly, the BAG meets with our Executive Team to offer questions, concerns and suggestions. We paid stipends to BAG members who gave additional time to this work in the 2020-2021 school year.

• We commit to learning from diversity, equity and inclusion experts as we critically review our curriculum and strive to build broad cultural competency across our entire faculty and staff.

  • We have contracted with DE&I experts to support our ongoing anti-bias, anti-racism (ABAR) professional development for our faculty and staff as well as our board of directors. This work is rooted in our Jesuit and Catholic mission and identity.

• We commit to having a transparent process by which CJA parents, employees and other members of our community can share feedback about the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department (CCSPD) officers with whom CJA has contracted to help ensure the blocks around CJA are safe. We commit to checking in with each officer as they arrive for duty and to building relationships with them. CJA does not employ a school resource officer, and the CCSPD officers do not serve as school resource officers. They have never been involved in student discipline at CJA, and we commit to maintaining this policy.

  • We continue to invite our families, faculty and staff to share feedback about our CCSPD officers with CJA via an anonymous online form. CJA’s Parent Safety Committee continues to meet quarterly and give input on the CCSPD presence on campus. Each CCSPD officer is greeted and checked in daily by a member of our campus safety team.

• We commit to supporting our Alumni Board, which several alumni created in summer 2020.

  • We continue to support new initiatives of our Alumni Board, which recently created a charter and shared it with our alumni community.

• We commit to strengthening and broadening our relationships with our neighbors and the surrounding community by sustaining partnerships with local organizations (i.e., The West Side Coalition) and hosting neighborhood athletic leagues.

  • Representatives from our community outreach team attend monthly faith-based community meetings in addition to participating in other community meetings and events throughout the West Side. We continue to partner with the West Side Coalition to host neighborhood cleanups and plan to resume hosting neighborhood athletic leagues post-pandemic.

• We commit to making significant additional investments in our community as we continue to explore how CJA is called to be of greater service to children and families in our community.

  • In response to requests from parents of both our alumni and current students as well as requests from other members of our community, we have committed to creating a new girls’ program at CJA that will be the equal of our existing boys’ program. To accomplish this goal, we launched a $30 million capital campaign to fund the construction of a new $25-million 47,000-square-feet addition to our campus and to create a $5-million scholarship fund to underwrite the tuition-free education of the girls who will enroll at CJA in June 2023. The construction project has prioritized the hiring of CJA alumni who work in the trades as well as the creation of pathways into the trades for our alumni.

  • Over the next five years in partnership with the University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), CJA’s High School Bridge Program (HSB) will expand to work with students, families, alumni, faculty and school leaders at 18 elementary schools in communities that have been impacted by historical disinvestment throughout Chicago. These elementary schools will include traditional public, public charter and private schools. HSB helps 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th graders find and succeed in their best-fit high schools and build the foundation for their success in high school, post-secondary education and the start of their careers.

• Our work is still far from done. We commit to holding ourselves accountable for this work. As we strive to build a more just and equitable world, we remain committed to publishing annual updates about our progress each June.

We root all these commitments within our mission and identity as a Jesuit, Catholic institution. We are animated by our belief in the Resurrection. We believe the cross is not the summary statement for our human condition. We believe God’s love is greater than any hate.

We acknowledge that we are, all of us, sinners. We are a people who regularly miss the mark. But we also believe that we are loved sinners, capable of repentance and redemption, made of both the dust of the earth and the inspired breath of God.

In all that we do, we strive to model for our students and alumni our shared commitment to our Grad-at-Grad values by being open to growth, intellectually competent, loving, religious and committed to doing justice in the service of others.

Our Commitment to Justice, Equity, Inclusivity and Belonging

On 9 June 2020, CJA published a statement honoring Black lives in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. In that statement, we promised to review our diversity, equity and inclusion practices, and we committed to publishing a summary of our new commitments by 15 October 2020.

Please find a summary of these commitments below:

• As a work of the Catholic Church, we remain committed to walking in solidarity with our students, alumni, families and colleagues as we strive to repair the social sin of racism. We commit to engaging in respectful dialogue and anti-bias anti-racist training that recognizes and affirms our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

• We commit to reviewing our mission statement in partnership with our alumni, our alumni’s parents, our faculty and staff, and our board by June 2021.

• We renew our commitment to adding more Black and Latinx voices to CJA’s board of directors, committees and executive team.

• We commit to sharing the stories of our students, alumni and families in ways that emphasize their strength, resilience and courage.

• We commit to setting the need for CJA’s existence and the scope and breadth of CJA’s mission within the broader context of our country’s history of systemic racism and the past 70 years of disinvestment on the West Side of Chicago. Unjust structures – specifically, inequitable access to well-resourced public schools – created the need for CJA.

• We commit to listening to and learning from one another – especially the members of our Black Affinity Group (BAG), which was formed in June and includes Black members of our faculty and staff. We commit to compensating members of the BAG justly for their additional work.

• We commit to learning from diversity, equity and inclusion experts as we critically review our curriculum and strive to build broad cultural competency across our entire faculty and staff.

• We commit to having a transparent process by which CJA parents, employees and other members of our community can share feedback about the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department (CCSPD) officers with whom CJA has contracted to help ensure the blocks around CJA are safe. We commit to checking in with each officer as they arrive for duty and to building relationships with them. CJA does not employ a school resource officer, and the CCSPD officers do not serve as school resource officers. They have never been involved in student discipline at CJA, and we commit to maintaining this policy.

• We commit to supporting our Alumni Board, which several alumni created this past summer.

• We commit to strengthening and broadening our relationships with our neighbors and the surrounding community by sustaining partnerships with local organizations, i.e., The West Side Coalition, and hosting neighborhood athletic leagues.

• We commit to making significant additional investments in our community as we continue to explore how CJA is called to be of greater service to children and families in our community.

• Our work is far from done. We commit to holding ourselves accountable for this work. As we strive to build a more just and equitable world, we commit to publishing annual updates about our progress each June.

We root all these commitments within our mission and identity as a Jesuit, Catholic institution. We are animated by our belief in the Resurrection. We believe the cross is not the summary statement for our human condition. We believe God’s love is greater than any hate.

We acknowledge that we are, all of us, sinners. We are a people who regularly miss the mark. But we also believe that we are loved sinners, capable of repentance and redemption, made of both the dust of the earth and the inspired breath of God.

In all that we do, we strive to model for our students and alumni our shared commitment to our Grad-at-Grad values by being open to growth, seeking intellectual excellence, loving, religious and committed to doing justice in the service of others.

Honoring Black Lives: A Statement by Chicago Jesuit Academy in support of our Black Students, Alumni, Families, Colleagues, Benefactors, Friends and Neighbors

Black lives matter, and we stand with you.

We believe systemic racism and racist structures created and sustain many of the inequities that confront our Black students, alumni, families and colleagues each day.

We believe those of us who walk around each day safer and more respected because of the white color of our skin must acknowledge and account for that unearned and absurd privilege.

Right now, communities around our city are hurting in different ways and engaging in various forms of protests. These protests are not just for George Floyd or the other Black people who have been unjustly killed by police, but are also a direct response to 400 years of systemic oppression of Black people in the United States.

When we started Chicago Jesuit Academy in 2005, we understood less than we should have about the students we aspired to serve and the communities that make up the West Side of Chicago. We made mistakes.

We allowed more than two weeks to pass between the murder of George Floyd and the issuance of this statement, and we apologize for the anger and confusion that this silence has caused.

We have struggled to diversify our Board of Directors. Among our twenty-two current and incoming Directors, only two are Black women, one is a Black man and one is a Latino man.
Prior to the selection of the incoming chairperson of our Board in April 2020, a Black person has never chaired the Board.

We have struggled to diversify our Faculty and Staff – which was only 11% Black and 3% Latinx in 2014-2015. Today, our Faculty and Staff is 20% Black and 3% Latinx.

As a faith-based institution, we believe every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. As a Catholic school sponsored by the Jesuits, we believe in God’s redemptive love. We believe each of us is made of both the dust of the earth and the inspired breath of God. We also must acknowledge that the history of the Catholic Church and the Jesuits in the United States includes many failures and mortal sins, specifically Georgetown University enslaving Black people and selling 272 enslaved Black men, women and children in 1838.

We try to model our grad-at-grad ideals in all that we do. We aspire to be loving, religious, open to growth, intellectually competent and committed to doing justice in the service of others.

In that pursuit, we try to listen. We try to learn. When we come up short, we try again.

We are mindful that Black families throughout Chicago and within our CJA family have lost loved ones to anti-Black violence in many forms. We stand with the many Black leaders who have done courageous, difficult and critically important work their whole lives – especially throughout the past two weeks. They have been joined by thousands of volunteers throughout Chicago who have stepped up to help others by raising funds for meals, distributing food to families in need and organizing street cleanups – all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted Black families on the West Side.

These stories rarely get covered by the media. We see them every day.

In the days, weeks, months and years ahead, Chicago Jesuit Academy is committed to doing more and better in the service of our Black students, alumni, families, colleagues, benefactors, friends and neighbors. We have created affinity groups to elevate and empower Black voices, and we are committed to prioritizing and enacting a list of institutional changes that came out of those groups’ first meetings last week. We also know that we don’t have all of the answers. We must be guided by and listen to our Black students, alumni, families and the larger community. We commit to publishing an update about our new commitments by 15 October 2020. We also promise to publish an assessment of our progress toward these new commitments one year from today. We are committed to actively collaborating with all of our students, alumni, families, colleagues, benefactors, friends and neighbors to build a just and equitable society in which white supremacy and all systems of oppression have been dismantled.

Sincerely,

Bill McIntosh
Chairperson, CJA Board of Directors

Lauren Smith, MD
Chairperson-elect, CJA Board of Directors

Matthew Lynch
President, Chicago Jesuit Academy