This Spring’s Equity Balance and Inclusion (EBI) speaker for Uppers and Seniors is Justine Ang Fonte. Fonte is an educator and speaker on sexual education. She will give her talk “Power, People-Pleasing, and Pleasure” today, which discusses the nuances with regard to power and safe, healthy relationships. The talk was organized in partnership with the Brace Center for Gender Studies (Brace).
Fonte has visited Andover several times, having previously worked with the EBI program and Brace. She emphasized the need for discussion, especially at a time in which she views the stakes as elevated due to the mainstream influence of pornography, self-proclaimed online experts, and influencers. However, she explains, not everything is about sex.
“So much of sex education is not about sex. It’s about relationships. It’s about connection. It’s about communication. It’s about empathy. You can’t address rape culture without addressing all of the much lower-stakes, much more frequent instances of non-consent. That is not emphasized enough in education. It’s certainly not practiced in a lot of the spaces we occupy, which is why we are in an era of awareness that there is so much violence,” said Fonte.
She continued, “I would want [Andover students] to be able to really look at the many more examples and occurrences in their lives that involve a lack of consent that has nothing to do with sex or sexual relationships. If we can get better in those small, little, much more frequent instances, we are going to be better, and we’re going to be well-practiced for the higher stakes situations that are a lot more intimate.”
The EBI program is structured for 11th and 12th-graders to have a speaker meeting once a term, along with events throughout the term. In previous years, the system consisted of forty-five-minute weekly meetings. Taylor Ware P ’25 26, Head of EBI for 11th and 12th graders, explains why this is.
“We felt that uppers and seniors had a lot of demands on their time. Rather than having, you know, seven 45-minute periods a term, it could be more effective to use the speaker and event-based program. So, for example, the Upper Carnival is scheduled for this Friday, right after our speaker. So that’s one of the events I get to throw, which I love,” said Ware.
Ware gives additional insight into the selection process for EBI speakers, who are chosen by the Speakers Committee, which consists of adults, including those within the Dean of Students Office, within Brace, alongside Director of Alumni Engagement Jenny Savino, Chief Communications Officer Tracy Sweet, and ASM Coordinator Reverend Gina Finocchiaro.
“Speakers are chosen in conjunction with the Speakers Committee. It’s a big group of adults on campus. We’re thoughtful about who the different speakers coming in are, whether it’s ASM or class speakers, to make sure we’re offering a broad range of views and topics and that kind of thing. EBI speakers are chosen for the way they fit into the EBI umbrella,” said Ware.
Fonte’s work has previously generated some controversy, with an alleged incident occurring at the Dalton School in 2021, where she worked for nine years. Some Andover students were there at the same time as she was, such as Hugo Appen ’27, who was in sixth grade.
“All my friends were talking about [her leaving], and it was a crazy moment… They were claiming that she got fired because she was apparently teaching inappropriate things to first graders. One person said it was, she was teaching them about pornography or something,” said Appen.
He continued, “I understand that sex ed is necessary, even for young kids, because you don’t want them to be getting sexually abused. But in the case of pornography, I don’t really think that’s something you need to be teaching to a young kid, because that’s not really something they’re gonna be interacting with, and that’s not something that would happen to them, even if that was a case where they were in an unsafe situation.”
