Arms open wide at TSA’s 2022 Welcome Potluck
On the cool clear afternoon of September 1, 2022, The Sharon Academy High School’s cow pasture once again filled with students and their families, faculty and staff, board members, and a few alumni, to celebrate the beginning of a new school year. Once a beloved tradition, the Welcome Potluck was suspended in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. Mary Newman began her tenure as Head of School in 2020 so this was the first time she had the opportunity to welcome families in that role. “We are all new at TSA,” she assured new families. “Whether you are returning to TSA after many years or are just joining our community, we have all changed and are starting this year fresh, and today is an opportunity to renew our wonderful community as individuals, each of whom has something to contribute.”
Mary then took a few minutes to lay out three things that school should be and do.
First, school should be a safe place for everyone: safe from physical and emotional harm, real or perceived. Deep learning doesn’t happen when a person is constantly worried that something bad might happen to them. It is our job to do everything in our power to keep each other out of harm’s way, especially the harm of hate in all of its forms.
Second, school should be a place of resilience and strength, love, empathy, and compassion, where challenges are met with the support to tackle them. Deep learning happens when experiences of persistence and resiliency are cultivated intentionally and carefully to carve new pathways in our thinking.
Lastly, school should always seek to improve itself. The industrial age—when school’s job was to prepare young adults for the world of manufacturing—is definitively over. We carry in our back pockets access to more information than could ever possibly be learned in a lifetime of classroom schooling. It is our job to teach kids how to learn, how to think, how to sift through the oceans of data, how to be a thoughtful, conscious human in a world that doesn’t stop changing.
She admitted that TSA is far from perfect. “We are not exceptional in the wider world of great schools, innovating and breaking the mold. We are small, we are young, we do not have an endowment, and our existence is not a foregone conclusion. But we are a really good place for so many kids, and we really, really love our jobs. We are doing the best we can to make the world a better place, and your students are the future. Thank you so much for being here.”
These words capture the character of The Sharon Academy. For new families, they should affirm their decision to join our community. The first graduate of TSA received his diploma in 2001, just over two decades ago. The school has since nurtured hundreds of students and helped launch them into adulthood. Our world has changed so much in that time, with the pandemic being just the most immediate challenge the school has had to face. Yet, through this time, TSA has adapted while maintaining its spirit and core mission to nurture intelligent, independent, and creative thinking in a small school community, awakening students to their immense potential and the difference they can make in the world.
Welcome to The Sharon Academy.
