We Are Grateful You Are Still With Us
Nearly 9 months ago we sent a message to our community at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in the US.
Our fierce commitment to equity and excellence requires us to take thoughtful, collective action in the midst of challenging times to support educators with meeting the needs of all students. The SRI community genuinely cares about the students and communities we serve and have recognized prior to this crisis that schools as they currently exist need to improve so that all students have the chance to succeed. As schools plan to support students through alternative measures, we must be the voice of reasonable discourse to constantly ask the difficult questions. Who is not being served well by this plan of action? What do we need to know and be able to do to meet the needs of our most vulnerable student populations given this plan? In what ways is this plan a quick-fix, and what needs to change to make it a sustainable approach to a problem that may persist longer than we expect? These questions require that we learn and work together to address them. Loving and caring about all students is at the center of where we start.
SRI is committed to be a resource as educators reflect on their own learning needs in order to support their students. Now more than ever, educators will need to capitalize on the power of creating spaces that support learning as a community. We have developed a series of webinars that we anticipate you will find useful to create that community virtually. We cannot afford to put the work of achieving equity and excellence on the back burner. Equity must be at the forefront of our professional learning in order to guide our professional practice even through virtual platforms. Please access our calendar of events in the coming weeks for virtual learning opportunities.
To meet this commitment to supporting educators we switched to virtual-only professional development sessions to continue putting our mission into action. Part of these offerings was running multiple sessions of “Facilitating Virtual Learning Communities” and “Leading for Powerful Learning Online” to meet the pressing need of practitioners who desired to shift their focus to support adult learning virtually. We also offered Virtual Connections for colleagues to meet and decompress. In response to the needs of the community, we offered a free webinar: “What’s a Coach to Do!?” Summer Virtual Meeting was launched as a way for everyone in our community to connect and share their learning and ask the deep questions about race, identity, privilege, and power dynamics in our schools. So many educators left Summer Meeting wanting to do more in their school contexts to achieve racial equity and excellence. In response to their desire to meet the needs of all learners, we partnered with Pegasus Springs Education Collective to launch a Commitment to Equity learning series for leaders, teachers, and students. School Reform Initiative stands firm in keeping equity at the forefront and learning with educators about what it means to do better action in schools.
All of these measures were taken to support our community, while in the background we faced the same economic challenges as many other nonprofits. We have persevered while some of our like-minded organizations have not, and we have you to thank for that.
We also launched paid affiliation in School Reform Initiative. Your contributions allow us to continue to provide educators with access to our tools and scholarships for engagement in our professional development offerings. If you have not become an affiliate of School Reform Initiative, we hope you will consider joining our community of learners.
#PowerofCommunity
Our goal for 2020 is to help educators remember why they became educators, and to do whatever we can to not only help them to ‘feel’ supported, but to actually ‘be’ supported, and work together to create the schools our students deserve. I hope you will join me and continue to support SRI!
SRI is fiercely committed to educational equity and excellence, and we cannot do this work without your support!
Thank you for your commitment to students, families and communities!
Do you have news to share? Interesting things happening in your area? Please let us know so we can share with our community! Email Chris Jones, chris@schoolreforminitiative.org.
Thank you,
Deirdre Williams, Chris Jones, and Patrena Wright
On behalf of School Reform Initiative
