Welcome Back to School
August 22nd will mark the beginning of Ridgeview’s twenty-second year. We are excited to welcome our new and returning families, and very excited that we are beginning to move away from the strangeness of the past two years that was marred by the pandemic and its related restrictions.
While we will be surmounting the challenges left in its wake for many years to come, we were fortunate in seeing many signs of recovery in the latter half of the last year and we hope to build on these successes in the coming year.
Typically, at commencement, I find myself waxing nostalgic about all the progress we have seen in our students during their attendance at Ridgeview. Consider just the time: thirteen years, 17,472 hours, or approximately seventeen percent of their waking lives is spent in this building, and this is true only if they’ve never done homework, been on a camping trip, performed in a concert, musical, or play, or played on a team or participated in a club. A quarter or more of your children’s lives are directly affected by Ridgeview, so it bears mentioning that all of us should pause at the beginning and not just the end and attempt to anticipate a conclusion that will come far too quickly to ensure that we take as full an advantage of these years as we can. There will be a sense of profound sadness in these years having passed.
For many, it may be about the colleges they will attend at the end of this journey, but along the way, it will be about many other, and frankly, more important, things. It will be about doing our best as parents to give our children full and happy lives and to do our utmost to fulfill our paternal responsibilities and ensure that they are prepared to go into the world to do and to be good. The substance of the interim period matters: you have chosen to enroll your child at a charter school, and as a result you have a greater capacity to determine the quality of your child’s life. There is greater transparency and an ability to understand what it is that they have been taught and what it is that will shape their hearts.
As someone who may be further down this path than you, my advice, professional as much as personal, is twofold: do not squander a second and do not to flinch at the difficulties your child will encounter along the way that can, if handled rightly, build resilience and character.
Do not become hemmed in by the busyness of life and career to the extent that you do not make time to read with your children and listen to their sometimes-nonsensical stories. Take the time for the bike ride, the movie night, the ice cream. Stare at the stars together on a warm night, roast marshmallows over an open fire on a camping trip, but also show up for them here. Observe a class—any class. Communicate with teachers. Come to a parent reading group, peruse the bookshop, read with the elementary students. Come to the Headmaster’s Coffees, read the perspectives and the Nuntius. Chaperone an outdoor trip, volunteer to help coach an athletics team, or send a note of appreciation to someone who has gone above and beyond for your child. Do not abdicate your responsibilities as a parent by giving in to the stop-and-drop mindset that has come to dominate schooling and parenting in the twenty-first century. Your involvement and regard for the quality of education made available to your children is what preserves and sustains Ridgeview as a charter school.
Secondly, reflect on the difficulties of your own childhood and then multiply these by the incessant barrage of social media and corporate messages our children are subjected to today. When we compound the usual “coming of age” problems with hormones, technology, militant political and cultural messaging, government complicity with various and sundry agendas, and a litany of mental health and social problems, we owe our children and students as much stability and constancy as we can muster. We cannot prevent an often-troubled world from touching their lives, but we can resolve to support them through the inevitable challenges with the knowledge that we will not be around to do it forever. Our goal should not be to pad childhood, but to acknowledge and anticipate the conclusion of childhood. Our job, whether as teachers or parents, is to work ourselves out of a job. Not to pursue the unstinting happiness of our children, but their enduring goodness.
Through all of this, you will watch your children learn to read, and hopefully learn to love reading. Not only out of obligation, but for wonder, for curiosity, for pleasure. You will witness the elated moments when they come to understand one thing after another, and the look of delight on their faces as they rejoice in one another’s company and in the warm praise of a favorite teacher. You will watch them brave the stage for the first time, learn to sing, painfully acquire the skill to play an instrument, and hang dozens of artistic attempts on your refrigerators. They will memorize passages that astonish you, master skills you yourself may not have (Latin), and impress you in performance after performance. They will learn perseverance through the outdoor program and athletics. Plays, musicals, concerts, mock trial, poetry recitations, theses. Over and over again, we will be surprised by what they take up, what they make, and what they do.
At the end of thirteen years, which is how long we hope you will be with us, you can have either a bundle of memories or a bundle of regrets. We hope it will be the former, and we want to give you every opportunity to be involved in the education of your child. We have tried to make it enticing to be in our building, to know the personalities involved, to make it efficient without it feeling bureaucratic. We want for you to want it not only for your children, but your grandchildren and the thousands who will eventually come here that you have neither met nor may never know. Each of us, whether parent or employee, is a steward of this place and the ideas it represents.
I think those who are best suited to explain what these thirteen years can mean are those who have lived out such a length of time in our school. With that, and without further ado, I offer you the following short video as testament to the power and poignancy of this experience in hopes that it will encourage you to all be a part of it and a part of our community.
