FROM THE HEAD O F SCHOOL
Learning What We Are Made Of By Clair Ward As you have heard me say before, Shore won last year. We did it by having absolutely every oar in the water, paddling madly: the families, the children, the employees, and the trustees.
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SHORE BU LLET IN FA LL 2021
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hat a difference a year makes! My guess is that each of us could name the moments in the recent span that made us and those that broke us. Like many schools that maintained in-person learning, when we open school this fall it will be the third version of school that we have launched in a total of 17 months. In the spring of 2020, we opened fully remote learning with two weeks of preparation. In the fall of 2020, we opened in-person school while a global pandemic raged. This fall, we planned to open something closer to a normal version of school. Each time, we were inventing. There was no playbook, no course we could take; we simply had to keep safety and children as our focus and press on.
As you have heard me say before, Shore won last year. We did it by having absolutely every oar in the water, paddling madly: the families, the children, the employees, and the trustees. Yes, this was a different version of Shore. But we kept children in school and learning (even our standardized test scores looked as strong as they ever have). For this reason, by June, I found myself feeling elated and no longer tired; hopeful and no longer discouraged. And now, after spending months and months dreaming about normal, I am beginning to wonder if normal is good enough for Shore. We have learned what we are made of, and if we consider what is possible when we are no longer battling a pandemic, perhaps there is an opportunity to
