Yesterday was Veterans Day – the 99th since President Wilson brought it into being as Armistice Day in 1919. It is interesting to note in acknowledging this day that there are no calls for students to be released from the schools on this day as there are for other holidays. A part of this might be attributable to the growing rift between those who have served and the ordinary citizens they have served to protect.

Much has changed over the last seventeen years in terms of how parents and teachers communicate with one another, but the importance of them doing so has not diminished.

In many places throughout America, the turkey shoot has remained a popular pastime as frozen turkeys have been substituted for live ones. Typically, the turkey shoot is a straightforward event, similar to a shoot-out-the-bullseye, carnival-style game. In Ridgeview’s case, it is rather more elaborate.

If you have not yet had a chance to read with our students, you are missing more than you might imagine, but still not as much as they are.

Comments made during the parent weekly reading groups and the Principal’s Coffee last Friday raise important questions about how Ridgeview can promote itself.

This time of year makes it remarkably clear how fortunate we are to live in Colorful Colorado.

We thank our service members who return home from having defended our freedom from external threat, the law enforcement personnel who uphold our liberties at home, and the firemen, paramedics, and search and rescue crews who are the first to arrive when things have gone badly awry.

Ridgeview, always a promoter of conversation, would prefer to resort to something like what is known in Great Books circles as “shared inquiry.” This bit of jargon means simply this: people from a variety of backgrounds come together to read a text and explore the ideas, meaning, and information they find therein.

We hope that you and your children enjoyed the trips this August and that the first week of classes has passed propitiously. We would like to suggest to our community five things that can be done to make the most of the year ahead.

In less than a week we will begin a new academic year. While it is no easy thing to bid farewell to summer, here there is an aspect of beginning again that has a freshness and an optimism about it. It is neither Panglossian nor Pollyannaish to believe that the year to come can be whatever we would like for it to be.

The journey from Mrs. Bennett’s classroom to this stage is not one that can be easily summarized.

I think that it is important that each of us is not merely at Ridgeview, or attending Ridgeview, or passing through Ridgeview, but with Ridgeview. It suggests solidarity, not principally with a structure situated at the corner of Stuart and Lemay, but with an idea. It is the state of that idea as much as it is the state of the school that we should be concerned with this evening because the two are inseparably linked.