A Note on the Tragedy in Uvalde, TX

Excerpted from Head of School Rebecca Geary's letter to the community on May 25, 2022.

It can be exhausting and frustrating to ask questions that remain unanswered—but it can also be the fuel that keeps our fire going. Clearly, it has never been so important for that fire to burn.?

How many times?

How many times must we bear witness to the tragedy of a school shooting? How many times must our hearts break alongside other parents and caregivers whose worlds have suddenly stopped spinning? How many times must we cry out with devastation and indignation, hoping that?this?time is the?last?time?

It can be exhausting and frustrating to ask questions that remain unanswered—but it can also be the fuel that keeps our fire going. Clearly, it has never been so important for that fire to burn.?

[The] tragic mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX poses a challenge for all of us as adults who live and learn alongside children: How do we navigate the push and pull between wanting to shelter our children's innocence and needing to equip?them with the knowledge they need to go out into the world as changemakers??

At Green Acres, we introduce "big problems" in developmentally appropriate ways.?We model for students how to approach complex questions whose answers are not in the back of a textbook or available with a Google search. We help students sit with the discomfort of not knowing, and then we challenge them to probe, hypothesize, and keeping pushing towards an answer, even when it feels out of sight. There is a?burden to knowing the world's problems, but we scaffold our program in such a way that, by the time they graduate, our students have the right balance of idealism, realism, and tenacity to keep their fire burning bright as they seek to remedy hate and violence.

I hope you will join me in lighting a candle for the lives lost in Uvalde. Together, let us drive out darkness.