End of Day, 3/18/2020
Dear Stone Community,
As I write this letter it is 3:30pm, our brand new “virtual” school has made it through its first day, and -- all hyperbole aside -- it has been an extraordinary day. We opened the day with a ten minute, 85+ participant All-Hands meeting and from there the day absolutely took off. I don’t even know where to begin my personal list of highlights: the shared workspace photographs, the Diego Dance, #petpics, this afternoon’s Yoga and Meditation class, the updates from Additive Manufacturing and Furniture Design, Piper “playing us in” to Morning Meeting, the shared gratitude, the grace, all of it.
In every single way, it has been a remarkable -- and restorative -- day of school.
This has been a true community effort, getting us to this very specific 3:30pm: for close to ten days now everyone -- our Board Chair Jason Confair, our amazing parents and Parents’ Association Executive Committee, our creative and relentless and hilarious students -- each have met the challenges ahead of us with support and patience and kindness. And, perhaps more than anyone, the fourteen members of the Stone Independent School team have proven once again to be a group of professionals unlike any with whom I have had the fortune to work: in the face of near constant change (over a much-needed “Break”) they have committed themselves to a near total redesign of their work, they have collaborated with and supported one another, they have dug in deeply, they have laughed a lot, they have kept our students’ experience at the forefront of everything they do. It’s an unimaginable thing, to discover that everything you have designed for your students has to be modified, pivoted, and (in some cases) tossed aside -- their profound commitment to their craft is the reason today worked.
As a community, we have so much more to do -- and so many more challenges ahead. Today, as I felt when we opened the school on August 20th 2017, I am so proud of what we’ve built together, and so grateful for the many partners we have in the work which lies ahead.
I am so thankful to each of you,
Mike Simpson, Head of School