Dear Parents,
I was delighted to see so many of you at our Family HeARTs Night. Thank you to Ms. Nadeau for the wonderful, creative, inspiring lesson. I know that many of your children will be finding ways to use what they learned to express their creativity at home. Special thanks to our Parents Association for helping to assemble the materials, and thank you to Jen Thomas for her inspiration and leadership for this event. We had more than sixty families in attendance! I know that I will be trying some of Ms. Nadeau’s ideas! Please remember to send photos of your children’s projects to her.
I wish you could be here with me to experience this school. I am so impressed with how the school has grown and changed during my time away. The energy, creativity, and commitment of the faculty here humbles me every day.
Last week we came together for a faculty meeting. In close to forty years of being in schools and attending meetings, this one stood out to me as the best faculty meeting I have ever attended. While we covered several topics, our main focus was the question of what we are doing to bring diverse voices and experiences into the classroom so that all students feel heard, understood, and represented. Teachers from kindergarten through grade eight weighed in with ideas, resources, materials, websites, TED talks, personal stories, and wisdom garnered from recent professional development coursework. Two teachers had, of their own initiative, been creating a database of resources. Stories of how these new resources were woven into the fabric of our existing Core Knowledge and Core Virtues showed all of us how this extra effort is enriching the lives of all students and teachers.
Many of you experienced a piece of this during Family HeARTs Night as Tina featured a variety of artists, enhancing the children’s exposure to Core Knowledge. Our Lower School students felt the same way when Scotty Harris brought Kianny Antigua to our weekly Lower School assembly via zoom. Only this time, it was more about the other pillar of our program, Core Virtues. Kianny spoke of the virtues she needs to practice as an author and as a person. She told us about her background, what inspires her, how she has grown as a person, and how happy she is to be a part of a school that values both knowledge and virtue.
We are growing, as individuals, as a school, and as a community. I am so happy and humbled to be a part of Crossroads Academy.
With gratitude,
Jean
