I sent this note to our founding staff members last night.
Thursday, October 29th, I spent the morning visiting Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, an eleven year old school in Washington D.C. EWS has a French immersion track and a Spanish immersion track, a very diverse student and staff population, a commitment to service learning, a strong parent engagement practice, a commitment to inclusion services, and love, love, love. With each site visit I look for a school that feels like our sister school– an urban, mixed income, mixed ethnicity, tuition-free, language immersion school with IB curricular framework. Most of our partner schools have some combination of these characteristics and are great sources of best practices and resource-sharing for us. The living, breathing spirit at EWS was utterly inspiring. I didn’t spend long periods of time observing teaching practice and I look forward to having further conversations with the about instructional philosophy and leadership. What was most impactful for me was the school culture. We’ve spent the past year talking with families about the community that we want to create, what we believe in and how we envision our work and engagement long-term. Each day we make strides towards our dream. At Elsie Whitlow Stokes, for the first time in any school visit, I could feel where our dream is headed. Don’t take my word for it, check out the video on their website.
The longer time I spend away from classrooms, the harder it is for me to recognize the transformational work that you’re each doing with our students every day. I believe deeply that education is a work of faith, that few teachers get to see the long-term effects of their daily work, see their young people grow into amazing adults. I realize now that I need to reframe that belief. Every day we see glimpses of the best parts of our young people and if every day we can train ourselves to see those glimpses, to appreciate the possible, then we are living the dream. Before I get back on the road next week I want to get in a walk-through in each school and get my daily glimpse of the awesome progress that we are all making. A heartfelt thank you to all.
Rhonda
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.