I am sharing below the remarks I shared with the NEASC visiting committee upon the start of our visit for our accreditation team.Good afternoon.
As principal of Uxbridge High School, it is my privilege to welcome the visiting team from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges to our school and community for what we hope will be a productive, enriching, and inspiring few days of learning with our staff, students, administration, and community. For us, your presence is an opportunity: to validate, to share, to showcase, to reflect, and to open our hearts and minds to feedback and critique.
We welcome you today with the knowledge and respect for what this process means for this community and the sacrifices that you are making to your schools and families, as the time and energy you will spend on our behalf is completely appreciated. We also know that this process can bring up a variety of emotions in communities, particularly in a place like Uxbridge that once had some tumultuousness with respect to some of the NEASC dirty words, like warning and probation. Ten years ago, NEASC created for UHS the lever that defined a building, which created its own challenge in this town. More recently, we have sought to put the conversation about a building in the rear-view mirror and define ourselves less for a building and more as a school. And, so, as we undertook our many projects and initiatives over the past several years, we have done just that- we are a charter and pilot DESE Innovation Pathway school, a member of the National Consortium of Secondary STEM Schools, a Project Lead the Way model school, and a school where our core values and definition as Spartans can be seen every single day, not just a list of words for your sake, no offense.
Before I introduce some of the folks with whom you will meet and get to know over the next four days together, I want to publicly thank our faculty, staff, administrative team, school committee, and our students and parents for their honesty, their social and academic capital, and their consistent and unwavering commitment to excellence. Vince Lombardi once said that “the achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” We believe that our school inspires all who step through its doors to create the very best version of themselves that they can - through our vision of a UHS graduate and our sense of mutual commitment to each other. In particular, we thank the staff for their individual contributions: the honest conversation regarding the self-study, for opening their hearts and minds to an evolved staff, as a staff that welcomed 18 new faces this year, just a couple years after having a dozen new faculty members join us. (Yes, we have 130 more students this year than we did last year, and we have 30 people in the building today who were not here when I started in 2015). It is no small task to get all oars rowing in the same direction, but we have transitioned to having five grades here and incorporated those students and colleagues better than I could have ever hoped. This staff, school faculty, and community as a whole has made a commitment to making UHS a great place to learn and work, not just for yesterday and today, but for the learners and community of tomorrow. In so doing, we have defined, adapted, redefined, and modeled our core values every step of the way. We hope that our school’s culture resonates with you after four days, that this staff and this school will inspire you as it has so of our colleagues, so many of our students, our team, and our community at large.
With that, I have some quick introductions, beginning with our diligent, committed, and dedicated steering committee.
Co-chairs Molly Hendrickx and Nicole Yakstis
Assistant Principal Michael DiMeglio
Science Curriculum & Instruction Leader Tracy Larkin
Mathematics Curriculum & Instruction Leader Christine Prior
We have a number of parents and students in the audience:
People from the community
People from our staff
Finally, it is my privilege to introduce our superintendent of schools, Dr. Frank Tiano.
AFTER FRANK/CO-CHAIRS MOLLY/NIKKI/VIDEO:
At this time, we would like to invite the members of our visiting team to join many of our student organizations, faculty members, and community members in the cafeteria. There you will have an opportunity to interact with students, parents, teachers, and others as we open our doors and our community to you.
Our plan would be to conclude the community fair at 1:15 or so, at which time the visiting team will be joining one of two panels. The parent panel will meet across the hall in the library, and the School Committee panel will meet in the main office conference room.
In closing, one of the last bits of advice we gave our students and staff as we broke for the weekend was not to review standards, not to go through cliched definitions, and not to build off jargon. With all due respect to the standards, we told our community to “just be you.” We did not realize exactly what a double entendre that was until one of our teacher’s husbands pointed it out on Friday, so we leave you with that sentiment - that we want everyone here to “be you/U.” We leave it the team to discover what that is really all about, and look forward to sharing our community with you these next few days.
With that, I invite you to the school cafeteria to meet with our student organizations, faculty, and community.
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