Board Member Report
2020-05-14, Thursday
Revised for publication.
First, I want to thank Ms. Min Woo, Specialist and Mr. James Lemon, Executive Director of Community, Parent and School Outreach for hosting the Well-Being in the Asian Community seminar. I dialed-in and listened for a while. I just missed Dr. Martirano’s excellent speech. It was a great seminar for the community.
We have been hearing more feedback from our parents, students and teachers. For students with special needs or resource limited families, please keep reaching out to school and discuss your children’s needs and how the school can help to meet their needs.
For High School seniors, we care about their graduation, one of the most important ceremonies before their grown-up life.
For High School juniors, they worry about their senior year experience and graduation next year. Please notice that everything will be a little different and take some time to self-reflect, manage your course-load and re-prioritize your curriculum.
At the elementary school level, we are keeping revising our distant learning practice. I believe the school can do a little more than we are having now. For example,
- Having more, short virtual meetings with teachers and peer students online. Building a connected classroom with our teacher and classmates of younger ones will also help our students’ psychosocial well-beings. It does not need to be long and well-scripted. Even a fireside chat with our teachers, a joke around with their peer classmates will be very helpful.
- Providing a curriculum less intense, more engaged and more organized. Building and keeping a good routine for our young students will help them in the long run. Helping them to learn to be self-disciplined and being resilient, being independent from a daily, not so rigid agenda will help our students.
- If a teacher wants to engage more with their classroom and students, we should encourage that engagement. Sure, we don’t want to overburden our teachers.
When we look back in the future, we may realize it is NOT what the academic knowledge our children learn, but the way we deal with this unprecedented crisis. Our children will learn flexibility, adaptability, accountability, discipline, compassion, and resilience. These great traits will benefit them all the way in the future.
Another topic I would like to highlight: we need to use this opportunity and time to prepare on how to integrate distance learning into our curriculum, especially if we are not sure how/when we will come back in the fall. If we are not able to get this right, those less-fortunate students will be impacted more disproportionally.
I truly appreciate our superintendent, teacher and staff’s dedicated effort during this time.
Thank you.