Abby Hogan ’18: The EA Speaker Series next event will be a March 5 symposium entitled “Equity and Access: A Symposium on Education” in the competition gym. The event will focus on the broadening of access to education and educational resources, both in our area and around the country. According to Dr. Catherine Hall, Episcopal Academy Assistant Head of School, “The idea is to approach different perspectives on educational access and equity.”
The event will be formatted like a panel, with a moderator, a group of five panelists, and an audience. “The idea was to bring in a handful of different voices who could share their perspectives on different ideas,” Hall elaborated. Jane Williams will moderate. The official list of panelists is still in the works, both William J. Hite, Superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, and Marc Mannella, the CEO of KIPP Philadelphia Charter Schools, have been confirmed as panelists.
Photo Courtesy of Development Without Limits
The audience will include EA students, who will be able to attend for a window of about 35 minutes before classes resume. Students are encouraged to be active members of the discussion and a major part of the conversation. They will be introduced to some of the material beforehand, during advisory or a set academic block.
There will be a wide range of audience members in attendance besides EA students. According to Hall, “We are invitin g to the event area university leaders and public school and independent leadership from surrounding counties . . . We are obviously casting a wide net. This is a pretty open event.” The wide range of guests is meant to facilitate more productive discussion with a wider range of viewpoints, as a goal of the symposium is “to start a regional conversation.”
“The conversation on educational access has become so polarized in many ways along the lines of politics and people feeling like it’s only a question of having access to resources or not,” said Hall. However, the symposium’s goal is to “shed light on the complexity of the problem first of all, and secondly to cover the diverse ways in which people try to solve the problem…There is no one clear answer. There are many answers, which allows for a lot of discussion and debate.”
At EA there have been several attempts to create educational access. According to Hall, “There have been lots and lots of solutions put in place to try to solve the problem…like Horizons at EA,that provides enrichment in that format.”
Hall encouraged attendance to this event, saying, “I honestly think that everyone has a role to play in our county’s education system. Obviously the access we have at Episcopal is incredible . . . and so I think we are in a unique position in which we are able to think critically and really hopefully impact the conversation.”