November 2001

What a great opportunity this year is providing! What a challenge it is to watch the PDS community at work and to extract from what one sees the principles that shape our identity. As a student of educational practice, I have a sense of what they ought to be. Educational theorists have postulated them and scientists have documented them. The works of Dewey, Piaget, Bruner, Vygotsky and Perrone, to cite only a few, are replete with concepts like active learning, shared inquiry and constructing knowledge from the dissonance between new activities and past experience. One sees them in action daily in our classrooms, on our playing fields and even in the hallways between classes.

There is another principle that is important at PDS that receives less mention, but that seems to me to be critical to our well-being. It is the concept that the connected relationships within the community shape a school’s emotional and educational health. For a school to be truly successful, each member of the community must feel fully respected, connected and affirmed. In a recent study conducted at the Institute for Education in Transition at the Claremont Graduate School, and entitled Voices from the Inside, researchers found that the most important factor in the ethos of a school is the construction of reciprocal relationships, the meanings of which must be discovered together.

They describe the reciprocal processes inherent in the construction of relationships as those that evoke potential in a trusting environment, reconstruct old assumptions and myths, focus on the construction of meaning and frame actions that embody new behaviors and purposeful intentions. I see these things at work here every day. I see teachers, parents and students striving to communicate, ready to take risks for the things they believe in and willing to examine past practice in order to promote new understandings. These are the things that give PDS life.

They show up in many ways. Parent and faculty discussion groups, classroom debates, all-school activities planning meetings and committee sessions, and the willingness to serve as volunteers in a variety of school activities and fundraising events – these are all ways in which we attest to the importance of developing inclusive relationships throughout the school. I want to thank you all for your willingness to engage, your commitment to remain involved and your determination to make all the voices from the inside clearly heard. My commitment is to help these things happen by working to assure that we create an environment that feels safe to each of us, that provides opportunities for trust and responsibility and that guarantees the security of honest and respectful discourse about that which matters most to all of us – the education and well-being of our children and our school.

Thank you for this most exciting opportunity. Thank you for engaging in it with me.

-- Mary Jane Yurchak