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One of the ways we have been innovating is that we believe that you can't have excellence
without diversity, and so we’ve really been providing--actually my school is the only
place that Bill Gates has ever earned a degree. And so we want our school to be able to have
a lot of socio-economic diversity as well as religious and ethnic diversity. So we’ve
been concentrating on that. And that has really changed our school in some remarkable ways.
Our classrooms are now much more dynamic. The philosophies that the kids are learning
in schools they actually are seeing other kids in class have those philosophies. So
things are much more real and--and we’ve seen that, you know, sometimes there’s clashes
with diversity when you have different groups with different values come together, but the
benefit from that has outweighed any sort of negatives, much more than we ever thought.
And so those are some of the ways that we’ve been innovating.
We’re also looking at online learning. How do we make sure particularly with the technology
now that we can bring that kind of education--use the internet for students that don’t have
the ability to come to a school like ours. So those are some of the ways that we’re
trying to innovate and change education at our school.
When I was a kid I found a whole new world. I was one of the first black students to come
to this school, a long time ago, and I found a whole new world there, a world that I had
never seen before and never knew existed. And--and so I’ve had the--the great fortune
of being able to now assist in helping other people be able to come to the school too who
would never have an opportunity to do that. I found an opportunity to--to go to a school
and it opened a new world for me. I think there were people at the school that saw in
me, not a stereotype, but a real human being that was very different from what they saw,
too. So I like that kind of bridge approach where you have different groups of people
come together and that inspired me and I hope it inspires others.