One of the Maatic virtues that we teach our children is balance. We know that it is critical to make our checkbooks balance, to keep our balance so that we do not fall and to find balance with how we treat others so that we are always fair and just. At Sankofa, we are presently doing some things to help us all find balance so that we can be happier, healthier, and more productive.
One of the ways that we are attempting to promote balance is through our work with parents. We presently are conducting meetings and workshops with our SPED parent group, on Wazazi Nguvu Council on trauma informed parenting. We want to help our parents find balance between addressing some of their unresolved pain, while supporting their children in navigating childhood. We also are trying to support our parents by offering a GED program so that our parents will balance taking care of the educational needs of their children with looking out for their own needs.
In the spirit of balance, we have been meeting with our children to discuss their data from the standardized test that they have been taking. We want to make sure we strike a balance between helping them set goals so that they can improve their performance as students with the understanding that they are much more than numbers of a page. No test score will ever be able to capture their beauty or brilliance. However, we must balance our encouraging of them with holding them accountable for getting better.
Another way we are trying to promote balance is by reinstituting our Assessment Fridays for students. Our students need to get better at dealing with tests and we need to get better at making sure they are prepared and have good practice. To this end, we are making sure that on their early dismissal day we are focusing on improving their test taking skills and providing opportunities to assess where they are so that we can adjust instruction. Next year (2023-2024) we will change our early dismissal day to Friday.
Although we still intend to have 5 days of school for our children, next school year, we are reinstituting our 4-day work week shifts that we started in 2019 so that we can help our staff members to find a work-life balance that is healthy and will enable them to be more productive. We all know there is a teacher shortage specifically and actually a worker shortage throughout this country. We hope that our 4-day schedule will help retain and recruit staff members to be a part of the Sankofa family. We look forward to seeing our parents at the Town Hall Meeting on Wednesday, March 1, when they will be able to ask more questions about the Assessment Friday and 4-day work week we have planned for next school year.
Finally, we are looking forward to a day of community service that will give us an opportunity to balance our receiving with our giving. Be on the lookout for more information. We would love to have you join us. Balance is one of the most important keys to our success. I hope by working together we will help one another find balance and help to develop children who have balance so that they can be whole people who have the balance necessary to care for themselves, their families, their community, and impact our world.
