Opening Remarks, All School Assembly
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Welcome, welcome! Welcome back to our returning families! And a hearty welcome to our new families. Welcome back, teachers! And a special welcome to our new teachers—Katie Maiberger, Heidi Kollins, Kristin Doherty, Jeremiah Dyke, Bob McDonald, La Tasha Do’zia-Earley, and Donna Day.
We have many, many thank yous this morning. As you probably noted on your way into the building, much has changed here on the Stephens City Campus. Thanks to Ms. Meghan’s leadership and vision, we have a new outdoor stage, a sound garden, an outdoor chalkboard, a much cuter fence, Tire Mountain, and several other tire-based structures. As a matter of fact, TIRE as both a noun and a verb was the theme of the summer—tire, tires, tiring, tired. As much as we love that play on words, today we would like to rename Tire Mountain in honor of someone very special–someone who spent a lot of time on Pinterest figuring out how to create an upcycled playground and then even more time (literally every day this summer) making her dream a reality. I hereby rename Tire Mountain “Meredith Mountain.”
Inside, our teacher workroom has moved to a new location that includes conference room space. Our Commons Room is now significantly more spacious. The Lobby got a new trophy shelf and a little new paint. And we have not one, but two, Upper Elementary classrooms! You may also notice that Ms Meghan’s room has a different look and feel too, and very soon you will be able to walk between Rooms 3 and 4 without running through the coat room, the hall, and the Commons.
In addition to some pretty significant upgrades here on the Stephens City Campus, we also acquired space at the Youth Development Center. Our Middle and High School students will enjoy a black box theater, a café, a gym, a pavilion picnic area, and a creek. Of course, getting those areas ready required packing up several rooms here, moving what seemed like thousands of boxes, unpacking said boxes, painting, building storage units, sewing theater curtains, buying and installing lab tables and a ton of lab equipment for science, new literature books, white boards, a smart projector, and new professional lighting for the theater.
Ms. Meghan, teachers, parents, and students, these improvements were made possible by your generous contributions of time, and in some cases, blood, sweat, and even the occasional tear. If you assisted us in any way, please raise your hand to be recognized!
All these changes are very exciting. And a little scary. ISW’s history is already filled with change. We spent the 2008-09 school year in a tiny barn on our family’s property. We spent two more years on the second floor of a renovated barn in Cross Junction. In 2011, we moved the program to Stephens City, and we opened with 16 full-time students. Today, six years after our first Opening Day, we have twice that number in this building and 10 more students at our new campus, the Youth Development Center.
What gets us through all this change with our identity as a school community intact? How do we keep our ISW-ishness? Certainly, our progressive education approach and our Core Values (respect, responsibility, integrity, empathy, and commitment to education) will carry us a long way. But ISW is far more than a progressive school, and it’s more than a collection of Core Values.
It’s about the people. It’s a community of like-minded and sometimes not so like-minded people (students and adults) working together to develop our minds and spirits and to prepare ourselves for the future. With all our emphasis on pursuing our individual passions and dreams, our community is also exceptionally good at taking care of one another. This is a place where students make cards when a fellow student’s parent is ill, where meals show up when someone has surgery, where thank-you-for-being-you cards and emails show up with no holiday necessary, where students burst into song or poetry on the playground out of sheer joy, where students trust adults with their heart of hearts.
For the next year or two, while we look for a more permanent home, ISW will be a dual campus school. Let us each do our very best—in big ways but more importantly in small ways—to retain the intangible connections that make us ISW.
And let us hope that, at the end of the school year, we are able to say something more positive about our move to a two-campus model than Washington Irving had to say about his experience with a stagecoach: “There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse. As I have found travelling in the stagecoach, it is often a comfort to shift one’s position and be bruised in a new place.”
In hopes that we will avoid new bruises, it is time to buckle our seat belts and begin this school year…
Kindergartners, Lowers, Uppers, Middles, and High School Students, thank you for your excitement, your inspiration and your trust. This school is, as always, our gift to one another. Welcome to the new school year.
–Claire McDonald 9/2/2014