March 11, 2022 
Dear LREI Community,
Happy Founders Day! Maybe more importantly, happy Centennial Founders Day! And what a wonderful Founders Day we had today! Today was a typical day to begin with and for the seniors, it was their last regular day of classes as they will embark on their senior projects when we return from spring break. In the afternoon, the divisions gathered, in turn, in the Performing Arts Center at the high school for a performance of the traditional Founders Day Play. In the before Covid times, the whole school gathered at the Thompson Street Athletic Center, students with their buddies, to see the show. Maybe next year, to start our new century. (If you have never seen the play, click here for the recording that we shared last March.) The day ended with everyone having the traditional Founders Day treat … ice cream. Mmm!
Why Founders Day? We are so very proud of our heritage and of our founder, Miss Irwin. She had a vision, based on her research and that of her mentor, and she set out to create a future path, a new model for and of education. She encountered significant roadblocks along the way and she worked through all of them. It was not easy but the work she was doing was (and is) important so she stuck to it, collaborating, learning, growing. Truly impressive stuff. Through all of this, she never lost her belief that school should focus not on the needs of the past but on the needs of the world students are in and the one that they will join. School must also provide for authentically rigorous practice in order to develop essential skills and content-area knowledge. Her “experiment,” as she called it, prepared students to go out into the world and to participate in our democratic society. These ideals, this mission, continue to guide our community today. LREI students develop deep connections to their communities, to their world, to their colleagues, and these connections combined with the academic and intellectual challenges they encounter create a series of transformative experiences over their 14 years at LREI.
As we are in March, Women’s History Month, it is important for us to recognize that alongside our own founding, many of the early progressive schools – Dalton, City and Country, Bank Street, to name a few – were founded by women. We are indebted to these pioneering, brilliant, educators.
I would be remiss, on this day focused on LREI’s mission, past, present, and future, if I did not recognize that two years ago today was the first day the students were home instead of in school due to the pandemic. The faculty spent one last day together in school and then we followed. We all know what came next – a complicated, challenging, changing, unpredictable, frustrating, sad, grounding experience; different for each of us though I am sure we have had many overlapping experiences and feelings. This confluence of Founders Day and the anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic begs us to look for connections and there are a number. LREI’s ability to pivot from in-person school on March 12 to being ready for online school a few school days later to going to a hybrid school model a few months after that, etc. is due, in part, to our progressive practice. When you are practiced at placing the needs of students in the center, and you have an expert faculty and staff who are skilled in revising what they do according to the needs of the day, asking them to create their pandemic program, while clearly out of the ordinary was not the first time that we adjusted to the needs of the day. They asked themselves, what do the students need? What does the community need? How can we continue to grow and learn and connect with a world that is changing and has moved farther away? This work tested our mission, in a variety of ways. From my vantage point, it confirmed the importance of what we do each day.
I want to thank LREI’s employees for their work this year, and for their work over the past two years. It has been challenging, unexpected, and, oddly, fulfilling. It is essential that we take a moment to thank the students, as well. Their resilience, care for each other, and daily commitment to learning has been inspiring.
We wish all members of the LREI community the best of everything in the coming weeks. Have a terrific spring break and we will see you at the end of the month.
Peace and health,
Important News and Notes
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Ava Dawson, our incredible health director and high school nurse, will be on family leave for the remainder of the school year. Thank you, Ava, for taking care of us. Welcome to Barbara Bode who will be the high school nurse for the remainder of the year. You can continue to contact the nurses via “nurses@lrei.org.”
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A reminder that all students must have a home Covid test before coming to school on Monday, March 28 and on Wednesday, March 30. Please report positive test results to nurses@lrei.org
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The 2022-2023 School Calendar – can be found here.
- Get excited! The Centennial Shindig is coming our way. Check it out!