Theme for the 2019-2020 Meadows School Year

I want to take a moment to welcome each of you to what promises to be a fantastic year on Scholar Lane. In looking forward to this school year, I spent some of my summer wondering about what might be the best theme for the year, and in doing so, it got me thinking about summers past.

Two summers ago, my wife and son and I rented an RV and drove from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and then on up the coast to a friend’s wedding in Lake Tahoe. We had such a good time that we decided to buy our very own travel trailer to have those kinds of adventures more often.

I suppose the draw of that kind of trip is threefold. First, a family traveling by car gets a lot of time to spend together in the close confines of an automobile or camper (for better and for worse, sometimes!) Second, you get the opportunity to see a lot of different landscapes at a slow pace. We saw the ocean, cities, the redwoods, the desert, and the forest in nine days.  Third, and most importantly for my point here, traveling by RV allows a feeling of self-sufficiency. You bring your home with you and cook your own meals, stop where you want to stop, and make “home base” wherever you choose. No one bothers you; there’s no noisy neighbors (for the most part), no lines or crowds.

But this summer, in taking a trip through Nevada and Idaho with my son and some old family friends, I changed my thinking a bit. Like many of you, I spent some of the summer bemoaning what I see as a fundamental breakdown in our society. We seem more divided than ever along political, social, and sometimes racial lines. But as I was traveling through the towns and campgrounds of central and northern Nevada and southern Idaho, that is not what I found.  Although I am very different in many ways than the folks I met while traveling, my family and friends and I were always warmly greeted and treated with respect. One man left his campfire to help me back my trailer into a tricky spot. A worker at a shoe store dropped everything to help me replace a lost pair of sandals. Without fail, people greeted us at truck stops and restaurants like they knew us. Or like they wouldn’t mind knowing us.

In thinking about our theme for the year, I started to feel that one of our core values, “Community,” would be the most fitting right now. The Meadows School is a community in the best possible sense, a place where students and families from a diverse set of backgrounds come together through a common belief in the transformative power of a top-flight educational experience. But our community is so much more. It is a reminder that understanding people who are different from ourselves is a big part of being educated. It acts as a salve and a bulwark against the forces of division that cleave our country’s citizenry. It is, in a very real sense, home.  And home is where you feel most secure, most loved, most understood.

Please join me in celebrating, in a year where we are marking our 35th anniversary, our community and all it represents. I hope you feel as lucky as I do to be a part of it.