Reopening Update & MLK Day: A Letter from Chuck Jackson
January 14, 2021
Dear Creative Minds Community:
This email is arriving in place of our regularly scheduled school-wide newsletter.
On November 18, I said that January would be our next check-in point for reopening, and my update for you today is that Creative Minds is staying on an all-remote schedule, for now. We will check in again in early February.
The news out of DC over the last week has been so shocking, so all-consuming, that the COVID-19 pandemic almost seems to pale in comparison. But we know that the pandemic is still with us and that the metrics in many places, including the DC area, are grim, though hope is blossoming in the form of vaccines.
I remain committed to Creative Minds’ health-and-safety-first approach to reopening. As we’ve done since last March, my team and I are monitoring data and participating in conversations about how to safely reopen schools. We’ve implemented optional COVID-19 testing for staff, which we’ll eventually expand to students and families, too.
But I do not believe it is safe for us to be together in the school building right now. I will not increase the risk of our students and staff contracting COVID-19 by reopening too soon, and I will not contribute to the virus’s spread in the DC area.
Among educators, there has been much talk about learning loss. The primary concern, of course, is students: Has the last year of school during a pandemic been sufficient for their growth and learning? We must remember how much our students have taken on since March 2020. They have adapted and persevered while still developing the social-emotional skills that we adults have been refining for our entire lives.
At Creative Minds, learning is happening. I have great confidence in our teaching staff, who every day are growing their practices and creating new ways to support students. Learning will continue to happen, even if it doesn’t conform to the linear progress that many standards and assessments set out to measure. Our duty is to remain focused on the whole child.
Books & Supplies
The second semester begins on February 1, and we’ll be distributing a few additional books and supplies at school. Please save the date for a Wednesday, January 27, pickup event. More information will be sent soon.
Minibreak: Martin Luther King Jr. Day & Inauguration
Next week Creative Minds is closed for minibreak, from Monday, January 18, through Wednesday, January 20.
As you know, Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s an important day every year, but this year it feels especially meaningful, after the insurrection at the Capitol Building, where we saw Confederate flags waved, racist language deployed, and an impunity granted to white, armed rioters that is rarely granted to people of color who gather peacefully in protest.
I encourage you to examine Dr. King and his legacy on Monday, and every day. Listen to his “I Have a Dream” speech and read his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” even if you’ve explored them before.
Though these declarations are almost 60 years, or two generations, old they remain powerful and relevant. Their calls for nonviolent resistance, for peaceful direct action and “dignity and discipline,” stand in stark contrast to the hatred and violence that erupted at the Capitol last Wednesday.
I also recommend the book Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which Coates writes as a letter to his son. I’m reading the book right now, and today I am reflecting on this quote:
Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more.
I intend to share the book with my teenage son Xavier as he contemplates leaving the security of his home to enter college and society on his own next year.
Please find more of my recommended books here.
Inauguration Day is next Wednesday, when we’ll see democracy triumph over attempts to subvert it. On this historic day, Kamala Harris will be sworn in as Vice President of the United States, the first person of color and woman to hold this office. I know that security concerns are heightened, so I encourage you to stay home if you can and to heed any orders from Mayor Bowser. And let’s acknowledge the essential workers who don’t have the option of spending the day at home, and thank them for their service.
In closing, I ask you to consider how you can do good through smaller gestures or larger actions, at home or in your community, and make our world a better place by being here.
Be safe, take care of one another, and keep the faith,
Chuck Jackson
Executive Director