We write today to share some community happenings, announcements, and good wishes for the upcoming holiday break. We’ve had a busy few months leading to some very exciting developments for the school community and beyond.

This is our first installment in Letters from Leadership! In Letters from Leadership, we will continue to focus on life at BNS through the eyes of our children and educators - moments of joy, success, challenge, inquiry, sustainability, social justice, social emotional and physical health.

Student-voice: the thing we hope students who attend BNS will leave knowing they have it and how to use it. We encourage students to advocate for what they need and want.

Sometimes, all it takes is a single word to get a powerful, ground-shifting conversation underway. This week, our fifth graders began the next step of planning and preparing for graduation.

This community is made up of so many amazing people who work to provide specialized services to our students. Each professional focuses on an aspect of development that supports their educational and socio-emotional experiences.

A new calendar year is upon us! We welcome you to 2023, and together, we remember that every milestone such as the start of a new year gives us all a chance to reflect, plan forward and start fresh. We welcome new families who have recently joined our school community and hope that they and their children are having experiences of joy during this transitional period.

Our city school system has layered supports and strategies in place to support school communities when something goes wrong. There were hiccups, surely, as every system and every protocol has at its center humans who are all doing their best, but the responses were swift and helpful when we connected with each person along the chain.

Today we write to share about some moments in our school lives these last few weeks, the big and the small, the local and the worldly.

We start with a short narrative from kindergarten teacher Jenn, whose class lives in room 201, with Kori, Kodjo and Swimmy.

Welcome to the 22-23 school year! This is our first of many letters from leadership that we will write this year, in the tradition of Anna Allanbrook’s “weekly letter.”

We started the draft of this letter in mid-May, when some of us were wondering, “How did that happen?”, while others were thinking about how the summer feels close and far at the same time.