Journalist Soledad O’Brien Addresses SPHERE Faculty

Westminster kicked off the new year Jan. 6 by hosting a gathering of faculty members from area SPHERE schools for a reception and a presentation by award-winning broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien.
 

SPHERE is a consortium of 11 independent schools from the greater Hartford area that coordinates programs that bring students and faculty together from member schools. Its mission is to help member schools collaborate in becoming and remaining culturally diverse, inclusive and responsive environments for teaching and learning. The consortium consists of Avon Old Farms, Cobb School Montessori, The Ethel Walker School, Kingswood-Oxford School, The Loomis Chaffee School, Miss Porter’s School, Pomfret School, Renbrook School, Suffield Academy, Watkinson School and Westminster School.
 

Following a reception in the Armstrong Atrium of Armour Academic Center, faculty members assembled in Werner Centennial Center to hear O’Brien speak about her career and issues related to diversity.
 

O’Brien is a broadcast journalist, executive producer and philanthropist who has received numerous awards including the Emmy, the George Foster Peabody, the Alfred I. DuPont and the Gracie Allen for her work. She is the chairman of Starfish Media Group, a media production company and distributor. She served as the anchor of CNN’s morning news program “Starting Point” in 2012. O’Brien lists CNN, HBO and its sports news program “Real Sports,” and the Al Jazeera America news program “America Tonight” among a growing list of networks she is working with through her Starfish Media Group. She also serves as executive producer and moderator of the National Geography Bee and chairs the Board of The After School Corp.
 

O’Brien began her presentation by talking about her early broadcast career right out of Harvard and how she has been able to work on ground-breaking coverage over the years. “Where you sit and what you see is everything,” she said. She also spoke about growing up as the daughter of a white Australian father and a black Cuban mother and attending a school that was 99 percent white. She said most of her reporting has focused on race and class and talked about her work on the CNN documentary “MLK Papers: Words that Changed a Nation,” including how she was able to see some original draft speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. She discussed Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and how he was a regular man who decided he could do great things. “Leadership is about justice,” she said.
 

With respect to school diversity, she said, “Implementing diversity is not as simple as the math. The key is to have blunt conversations about the issue.” She showed some video clips from the forthcoming PBS documentary “American Promise” that was 13 years in the making about two middle class black families as they navigate the ups and downs of educating their sons. In closing, she stressed, “Every level of support must be in place to make actual change.”