2025-26: Making the Most of Our School Year before It Fades

A JK-12 school year should end with a spotlight and fanfare focused on the graduating seniors (see below). But, while celebrating the end of a high school career, we need to have plenty of accompanying celebrations of the accomplishments of every child across all grades, JK-11.

As a faculty and staff, we end our year in community, squeezing 200 seats into the Lou and Nick Martin Campus Center, celebrating across the silos of our Lower, Middle and Upper Schools, and our Athletic and Fine Arts Departments. That community gathering, two days after all 1,100 students have begun their summer breaks, gives us, as educators, valuable time to reflect on the collective accomplishments of a year’s worth of work. 

Stopping to note the collective accomplishments of getting our students to and from any number of field trips, local and overnight, of preparing them to compete in any number of athletic contests, of putting them on the stage in our Scott Theater for so many performances, of guiding our visual artists as they created works to share in our campus galleries, and of so many more efforts in our classrooms makes for a sense of significant accomplishment for us as a community of educators and school staff.

As striking as the collective wins we more formally note are those of the individuals, both adults and students in the community, that teachers, coaches and staff members carry with them into the summer. 

While we have a formal opportunity to reflect on the year ending, I hope our students have the same opportunity with their families. The call to action here is for parents to sit with their children individually, before the school year is too far in the rearview mirror, with the calendar from August 2025 to May 22, 2026, on display, identifying the most memorable experiences of the child's year. Note the challenges each child faced. Recall how frustrated or upset they might have been in the moment. Process how they got through those challenges. Tally those met-challenges as successes, even if they felt like failures at the time.

And then there are the more obvious successes, maybe the kind that show up on a report card or a certificate or a medal hanging in a child’s bedroom. We still have a few days left in May. Before the calendar turns to June, make the time to stop and honor the growth each child experienced during the year just finished. 

We will be eager to get them back in August, ready to face new challenges and accumulate another nine months of accomplishments.