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Dear Coates Families,
I’m hoping that you’ll join me, Mrs. Bowman (PTA president), and leaders from the FCPS Equity & Family Engagement Office at school for a special meeting on November 13 at 6:30 PM. My staff, the PTA Board, and I are working on something crucial to our school, and we need as many parents/guardians as possible to lend their voice to this. Here’s what's going on:
We want to create an agreement or compact between Coates families and school staff. But I don’t want to just throw together a list of statements. I want something meaningful that represents us as a community and that lives up to the very idea of partnership. We come together for our kids, and when home and school have common understandings, we can accomplish so much more than if we work in silos.
We are a diverse community, but the differences should never hamper us. In fact, the opportunity to use the wide range of perspectives in the Coates community should be an advantage to our school. There’s a collective identity that we can create, and that’s really the goal of our meeting on November 13. We’ll talk about our hopes and dreams for our kids. We’ll have a forum for sharing our stories. Candid feedback about your experience at Coates is encouraged. We want any insights you have to share with other parents that can bond us better as neighbors. We’ll have many teachers in attendance, and they want to know of any fears, hopes, concerns, or aspirations you have so that they can better understand their students and be better, more empathetic teachers. Stories matter. We want this event to serve as a place to hear others’ stories and to tell yours if you choose.
This meeting will be followed up by another meeting on December 4. Our hope that we come out of our meeting in November with a stronger relationship, and that can make us ready to create a compact between home and school. Again, we do not want to skip the important step of sharing our stories on November 13. If we rush this, we risk building a document that lacks depth, might contain bias, or worse.
I want to be clear that this is not something we are required to do by FCPS. We want to do this. We already have a great bond between home and school. We just want to ensure that we make it better if we can. At the very least, we want the home-school connection to always stays strong.
The Coates PTA is sponsoring this event and will be hosting childcare and free pizza for families who attend. Please watch Coates Facebook, Instagram & Twitter for continued updates on this series of Parent Partnership Gatherings! I hope to see you.
Jesse Kraft
Proud Principal, Coates ES
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