Progress Updates
IMSA’s mission prioritizes the well-being and success of our students. This pillar focuses on creating a space where every student feels safe, recognized, and supported. By fostering a sense of belonging, strengthening relationships with teachers, and ensuring students feel secure in their identities, IMSA helps students reach their full academic, social, and personal potential.
Second Quarter 2025-2026
This quarter, we advanced our work to ensure that all students experience IMSA as a place where they belong—emotionally, socially, academically, and culturally. By strengthening relationships, elevating identity safety, and re-imagining transition supports, we are building the conditions for students to thrive both in the classroom and across residential life. Highlights include:
-
Expanding Inclusive Recruitment & Student Engagement
Planning is underway to refine recruitment outreach to better connect with diverse student interests. Collaboration began with Student Life and Co-Curriculars/AD. Additional efforts include creating Zoom-based interest groups to help prospective students connect with IMSA’s community in a safe, supportive way. -
Community Day: Strengthening Belonging Across Adult Teams
Members of the DEIU Leadership Team are planning a session for Community Day focused on improving communication and collaboration between Residential Counselors, academic faculty, and support staff. This work aims to strengthen the safety net around students by ensuring they experience consistent care and connection across every part of the Academy. -
Deepening Faculty Capacity to Support Diverse Learners Differentiated PD tracks continued this quarter, with ongoing work on supporting diverse learners. Licensed clinical social worker Jermaine Wall will join the IMSA all-academic team on Wednesday, February Feb 18 for a day of professional learning. Mr. Wall will work deeply with our academic PD strand focused on supporting diverse learners through unique and relatable pedagogy and promoting belonging. He will also provide a keynote during lunch for the entire academic team.
-
Identity-Affirming and Empowering Student Programs
Students engaged in a range of belonging-focused programming, including Race Talks, an HBCU Panel, an Environmental Justice Seminar, and a Building Self-Confidence Through Spoken Word workshop. These experiences help students explore identity, voice, community, and purpose. -
Math Sense of Belonging Initiative
For Community Day, a session led by the Math TC and the Math representative on the DEIU Leadership Team for math colleagues, will focus on Students’ Sense of Belonging in Mathematics. This session will center on inclusive strategies that build confidence, persistence, and identity safety in mathematical learning environments. -
Re-imagining the New Student Transition Experience
Significant work has begun to redesign the transition journey so students feel connected, informed, and safe from the moment they enter the community:-
Increased awareness-building around transition resources
-
More consistent, two-way communication with students and families.
-
Strengthening early relationships between students and faculty/staff to boost emotional safety.
-
Gathering student-defined understandings of “safety” to ensure supports align with their lived experience.
-
Drafting posters/digital boards with QR codes linking directly to support resources.
-
Revisiting the Soph Seminar curriculum to expand exposure to support systems and trusted adults.
-
Planning short-form videos (Reels/TikToks) to help students explore lesser-known spaces and resources—doubling as admissions and social media content.
-
Reassessing the Big Sib program and training needs.
-
Reviewing the Academy Advocates model and advising options for all students.
-
Conducting a thorough review of Residential Life programming for sophomores, including onboarding structures.
-
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
First Quarter 2025
Academic Deans and the TCs are reviewing class schedules through a lens of equity by focusing on quality vs. quantity. Based on the results of the Challenge Success survey, the Support & Engagement period has provided time for all students to reach their faculty members and support team daily.
The team is considering how to build a structure around various non-traditional modalities and is also thinking about how to incorporate new ideas like evening classes, seminars on I-days, and weekend classes This year, Fine Arts, Wellness, and Computer Science are piloting different structures including asynchronous time. We look forward to more of these opportunities in future years.
Academic professional development is focusing on three tracks this school year: Responsive Teaching for Diverse Learners, Assessment Practices and Processes, and Curricular Design and Delivery for Various Course Modalities & Structures. This focused professional development is providing our academic team additional resources to provide responsive teaching and learning to our students.
A cohort of sophomores took the Intercultural Development Inventory Assessment this fall. The score will provide IMSA with a baseline from which to measure their cultural competency over the next two academic years.
IMSA is incredibly diverse, which creates great opportunities for our students to understand and appreciate differences among their classmates. Celebrating through culture shows is one way IMSA showcases its diversity. October 3-4, Asian Students in America (ASIA), one of IMSA’s four culture clubs, celebrated the heritage of Asian and Pacific Island countries with their show. November 7-8, ISA (Indian Student Association) celebrated Diwali with their performance. The Black Student Union Cultural Show is scheduled for February 27-28, 2026 and the Alma Latina Cultural Show will be held April 24-25, 2026.
DEI, History/Social Science, and Science departments collaborated on our Equity and Excellence Scholars Series to feature a conversation with environmental justice expert, poet, and musician, Mr. Marcus Sibley.
A Race Talks program featuring Dr. Courtney Wilkerson was held on November 13. The event aimed to build a positive racial identity, find solutions to racial injustice, improve race relations at IMSA, and bring IMSA closer together with mutual understanding and respect. Race Talks was sponsored by: DEI, BHSC, CCE, Poetic Justice, and FOCUS.