MICDS has been a member of the national Independent School Data Exchange association, or INDEX, since its inception, and before that we were members of the Joint Research and Planning Office of Benchmark Research out of which INDEX was formed. INDEX exists to capture annual data, furnish reports, and analyze trends across a wide range of operational metrics to assist member schools in program and policy development and strategic planning. I have spent the majority of my career in INDEX schools, which are among the highest-performing K-12 institutions in the United States, and it has been my pleasure this week, along with our extraordinary Chief Financial and Operating Officer Beth Miller, to attend a meeting of all INDEX schools in Salt Lake City and to share information with other members about the MICDS Student Census Survey that we rolled out this year.
To date, approximately 87% of MICDS students are represented in our Census database, and I am grateful to all parents who took the time to complete the survey on behalf of their children and thereby bring into much sharper focus the cultural, ethnic, geographic, linguistic, racial, and religious diversity of our community of families. I am writing this letter on borrowed time, being due back in an INDEX conference session shortly—and in any event, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words—so here are some snapshots of what the Census reveals about our students in the current academic year.
(Please note that the sum of the race and religion responses exceeds our total student enrollment because many parents indicated multiple racial or religious backgrounds for their children.)
The Census also reveals that MICDS students collectively have known ancestry in the following nations or territories, over 100 in number, beyond the United States:
Antigua and Barbuda • Argentina • Australia • Austria • Bangladesh • Belarus • Belgium • Belize • Benin • Bosnia/Herzegovina • Botswana • Brazil • Bulgaria • Cameroon • Canada • China • Colombia • Croatia • Cuba • Cyprus • Czechia • Denmark • Dominica • Dominican Republic • Ecuador • Egypt • El Salvador • Estonia • Finland • France • Germany • Ghana • Greece • Guatemala • Guinea • Guinea-Bissau • Guyana • Haiti • Honduras • Hungary • Iceland • India • Indonesia • Iran • Iraq • Ireland • Isle of Man • Israel • Italy • Jamaica • Japan • Jordan • Latvia • Lebanon • Liberia • Lithuania • Luxembourg • Malaysia • Mali • Mexico • Moldova • Morocco • Nepal • Netherlands • New Zealand • Nicaragua • Nigeria • Norway • Pakistan • Palestine • Panama • Paraguay • Peru • Philippines • Poland • Portugal • Puerto Rico • Romania • Russia • Senegal • Serbia • Slovakia • Slovenia • South Korea • Spain • Sri Lanka • St. Vincent/Grenadines • Sweden • Switzerland • Syria • Taiwan • Thailand • Togo • Turkey • Ukraine • United Kingdom • Uzbekistan • Venezuela • Viet Nam • Yemen • Zambia • Zimbabwe
Considered as a whole, our students have at least some affinity, if not a strong affinity, for the cultures of 89 of these countries and territories. The map below, moreover, indicates the relative scale of our students’ ancestral connections to the most frequently cited nations in our Census beyond the United States.
I hope that you find these data as compelling and informative as I do. With a more precise understanding of the composition of our student body, our faculty and staff will be far better equipped than ever before to ensure that our curricular and extracurricular programming, our handbook policies, and our planning efforts are optimized to dignify the backgrounds and perspectives of the children and adolescents we serve. “I am large,” Walt Whitman announces in Song of Myself. “I contain multitudes.” We contain multitudes at MICDS as well—and happily so as we prepare our students for the ever more heterogeneous world that awaits them. We see ourselves more clearly now thanks to our Census, an improvement of vision that recalls a lovely proclamation by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Gotthold Lessing (and, with more MICDS student ancestral ties to Germany than to any other nation, why not give the last word to a German philosopher?): “The greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.”
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you and your families for a wonderful weekend ahead.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist is Trying to Get to You by Elvis Presley, the eighth track on his debut record, Elvis Presley (1956), which is cited here, here, here, here, here, and here as one of greatest albums ever recorded (Apple Music / Spotify).