August 7, 2020

Dear Bolles Community,

As summer somehow begins to fade into another school year, we wanted to share an important update with you on Bolles’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

In our last communication with you, we announced plans to hire an independent consultant to conduct a comprehensive and objective review of the posts made on the @BlackAtBolles Instagram page. The Bolles Board of Trustees assembled a subcommittee tasked with finding and hiring a firm that could best fulfill this critical role for our community. Ensuing was a national search, which yielded an impressive list of 15 providers experienced in this specialized area of engagement. We are pleased to inform you Dan Schorr, formerly a managing director with New York City-based Ankura, has been hired to partner with The Bolles School as we begin this research and review.

Mr. Schorr has a long, successful history working with schools, companies and institutions to discover truths, analyze facts and help communities move forward. He has more than 20 years of legal and investigative experience managing a variety of complex assignments at the university and secondary school level. Mr. Schorr received a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Harvard Law School and his master’s and bachelor’s degrees are from the University of Pennsylvania. We look forward to working with him and know his expert guidance will assist our School become a better place. Mr. Schorr will be tasked with reviewing the @BlackAtBolles Instagram posts and speaking with concerned parties in order to identify major themes for the School to address. This work will begin immediately. Throughout this process, we support our entire community—students, faculty/staff and alumni and continue to look for ways to improve our great school.

Racist thoughts and behaviors exist in communities across the world, and the Bolles community has not been immune. Our goal is healing and learning from these painful experiences. We want to address hurt feelings on all sides of this complex issue. To everyone feeling this pain—our faculty, staff, families and students past and present—we acknowledge your feelings and shared experiences and are working toward community recovery. We are taking multiple steps to help ensure that racism of any kind plays no role in our environment and are connecting with students, parents and faculty and staff to better support our Black students and move forward together. We have complete faith in our faculty and staff as we collectively work to make Bolles a more inclusive and supportive environment.

Bolles will continue its long-term commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and while this will take time, we are tackling it with urgency. (Please click HERE to learn more about our ongoing efforts.) We will share updates with you as we continue to make progress in this area to create a more inclusive and welcoming Bolles. We encourage you to contact us directly with any questions, feedback or concerns. Together, we're going to make Bolles an even better place.

Respectfully,