by Renee Owen | Mar 18, 2016 | Blogs, CEO's Kaleidoscope, Director's Blog, Publications
Kaleidoscope: The many colorful things happening at Rainbow, from the Executive Director
Hello beautiful Rainbow Community. I am so happy spring is here! It was a mild winter in terms of weather, but emotionally speaking, I found it hard to keep the ol’ disposition sunny during the dark days of winter. How about you? Was it a little harder to be patient with your family or community? At school, the kids seem fine with the darker days. In fact, in our fast-paced, extroverted world, the slower, inward days of winter are a time for the children to focus on academics. At your child’s conference, you will find they have accomplished a lot over the winter months.
No matter what one’s age, the gloriousness of spring lifts the spirits, and it is good to see everyone outside more often. Every grade, K-8 is busy with their citizen science outdoor projects.
What is citizen science? It’s the collection and analysis of data that is contributed to national scientific projects. So essentially, our students are participating in collaborative projects with professional scientists throughout the year to help identify trends or changes locally, regionally and nationally! Here are the projects our students are participating in:
- Kindergarten and 2nd grade – Nature’s Notebook – recording observations of local plants and animals.
- First grade – Project Squirrel – tracking our squirrel population.
- Third, fourth and fifth grade – Project eBird – tracking bird populations on our campus and other local areas.
- Omega – Project Budburst – tracking plant phenophases throughout the year.
Speaking of science, did you see the cool one minute video that Michael and Ange made from the Design Fair and Science Fair? If not, CLICK HERE, and be sure to share it on social media!
Keeping Tuition Affordable: Help Crack the Nut! It sounds like there is going to be good attendance at this Community Circle meeting coming up on Tuesday, March 22nd, 4 – 6pm in the 4th Grade Classroom. Child care is free during the meeting. Please be a part of this important discussion. (More information is at the bottom of this Kaleidoscope.)
YOU make all the difference in the world
One of the strategies for “cracking the nut” is to raise grant funds, but this requires proof that our program works. That requires lots of data, and YOUR data counts, literally! PLEASE CLICK HERE NOW, and complete the research survey that PhD candidate, Alan Bush, has created. Alan is tabulating all the answers and providing us with a report. What an awesome opportunity – don’t miss it!
YOUR CHILDREN make all the difference in the world
Our Rainbow kids never cease to amaze me. I recently received this message from the highly esteemed Dr. Theo Dawson:
Hi Renee,
I’ve been checking out your students’ Reflective Judgment scores today and I think they may well be the most impressive results we’ve ever seen. It’s making my heart sing!
Warmly,
—Theo
Dr. Dawson, and her team at Lectica, has spent almost three decades creating tests that can assess student’s complexity of thinking and ability to reason ethically. This work is based out of research from the Mind, Brain, and Education program at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the work of Kurt Fischer. Rainbow’s fourth through eighth graders took the Reflective Judgment test, which reveals how they think about inquiry, evidence, learning & the mind, truth & certainty, conflict resolution, persuasion, and deliberation.
As you can imagine, I was pretty thrilled to get a personal email from the head of the Lectica saying our students’ scores may be the best they have ever seen!! Soon, we will be receiving the formal score reports and sharing them with your children and with the world. It is so exciting to finally have real scientific evidence proving what we already knew – Rainbow’s holistic program creates kids who are highly ethical, empathetic, and cognitively developed to a level of sophistication that is beyond their years. (Of course, Rainbow students score very well on traditional standardized tests too, but those tests only show a small sliver of rote skill attainment, without showing complexity of thinking or soft skill development.)
Rainbow students’ high level of social/emotional skills will serve them very well when applying to colleges. The most prestigious universities are now changing their application processes to make the SAT optional, and to stress empathy as the most important quality– and this trend is going to become much stronger by the time your kids are applying for college. I recommend clicking the link for the following Washington Post article: To get into college, Harvard report advocates for kindness instead of overachieving.
Everyone a Changemaker!
Rainbow’s new Director of Equity, Kyja Wilburn, and I attended an Ashoka Changemaker Summit in February. CLICK HERE to view Kyja’s presentation on our experience at the summit, information about the Changemaker network, and some of her thoughts about building equity in schools. If you haven’t met Kyja yet, this is a great introduction. Incidentally, Kyja and first grade assistant, Clarissa, also coached Odyssey of the Mind this year, and our team is going to state!
Smart People Strategizing
On Wednesday, March 16, one of my professors from Columbia University Teacher’s College, Lyle Yorks, and his colleague, Harold Penton, are consulting with the Rainbow board on something called Blue Ocean Strategizing, and they will be interviewing various people on campus for research they are conducting. (Another great opportunity for Rainbow!) I hope you get to meet them.
I can’t wait for Domain Day!
Domain Day is Friday, March 18, and the whole school is celebrating. Children will spend almost the whole day “specializing” in one of their favorite domains in multi-age groups. I am one of the leaders for the spiritual domain. Chris Weaver and I will be taking eight young children on a magical hero’s journey for the day. I LOVE my job!
Rainbow-ize everything!
It will take many years before the new section of campus is “Rainbow-ized” like our old campus, but we make creative progress little by little. This weekend, community muralist, Ian Wilkinson is painting a rainbow and a sun on the front of the Rainbow Community Center (auditorium) building. Ian has created more than 40 murals in Asheville. His most famous is the chess player painted on Lexington Ave underneath Highway 240.
As promised above, more information on the upcoming Community Circle:
On Tuesday, March 22nd from 4-6pm, in the Fourth Grade Classroom, RCS will hold a Community Circle meeting. No fee for childcare during the meeting. As a community we have such amazing ideas and we each have incredible contributions to make to our school. We work together to solve so many challenges. At this meeting, we need the collective wisdom of our community members to “help crack the nut!”
Rainbow Community School needs to solve the largest puzzle that we have. The board calls it “the nut we have to crack.” Essentially, the “nut” is that we charge tuition and that makes it hard to serve a wide array of families. The “nut” is trying to figure out how to keep tuition as low as possible, so that Rainbow education isn’t just for those in the highest social-economic demographic. At the same time, we need to have enough revenue coming in to pay our staff, maintain/improve facilities, and to keep a low teacher/student ratio and all the quality programming that we have. Currently, we do it by paying our staff very low salaries. Rainbow lead teachers make, on average, about $7,000 less a year than Buncombe County teachers and North Carolina ranks 46th in teacher pay in the US.
The board has decided that we have two major equity issues to tackle – racial equity and teacher pay equity. There are only two ways to solve the teacher pay equity issue – either save money by staffing more kids per teacher or increase revenues. Doing the former would compromise our quality, so that means focusing on the latter.
So, how can we increase revenues? Tuition is our only consistent source of funding, and it makes up 95% of our revenues. Currently, tuition goes up quite a bit every year, just to keep up with the 3%-6% salary raise teachers receive annually. If we started providing larger staff raises, tuition would have to increase immensely.
How else can we raise more revenue — A LOT of revenue, like $200,000/year more– without making Rainbow totally unaffordable? We could have a much larger annual campaign, but the $80,000 we currently have is not easy. We could raise tuition steeply, but on a sliding fee scale. This has its obvious drawbacks. People have also suggested we have an additional fee each year and families below a certain income wouldn’t have to pay it. Again, this has some major drawbacks. While we may have to consider some of these options, the ultimate goal is to get creative and find funding – consistent annual funding — from outside the parent body.
COME TO THE COMMUNITY CIRCLE MEETING ON MARCH 22nd TO HELP US FIGURE THIS OUT AND MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD!
We need the collective wisdom of our community members to crack this nut!
We hope to see you there.
by Jessy Tickle | Nov 6, 2015 | CEO's Kaleidoscope, Director's Blog, News
November 2015
Kaleidoscope: The many colorful things happening at Rainbow, from the Executive Director
November is here; it feels like life is being squeezed into shorter days. Classrooms have established their mascot names. Relationships have formed. Academic units are rolling along. What is your child’s school experience so far this year? Has he or she attached to his/her teachers? Is she feeling some success in all the domains? November conferences are just around the corner, and that will be a good time to get a feel from your teacher’s perspective. Will Ray, director of counseling, is also available (extension #430, will.ray@rainbowlearning.org) if you sense that there may be a need for some extra intervention, or if you need guidance as a parent.
The Hoedown was a huge success in every way. The core team of Stephanie Cody, Jenny Hatcher, and Lisa Sullivan totally rocked the planning. The band rocked the stage. And parent council and all the volunteers made it all happen. The Hoedown netted $4,967! Did you go through the haunted house? Did you do the scary tour or the not-so-scary? Aren’t those Omega students clever? They put all that together in only one day.
El Dia de los Muertos was beautiful. Thank you to Oscar and Laura (parents of Tona in Kindergarten) for making this year’s celebration especially sweet and gorgeous, and for sharing your tradition. I have never seen such a beautiful Day of the Dead altar.
Speaking of beautiful, I just finished writing a new Heart of the Matter on BEAUTY, and the place that beauty has in a holistic education. It will be in your box, and you can read it here. It is a revised version of a shorter essay I wrote last year. How much beauty is in your life?
XQ Super School: The Next High School?
You have all heard of IQ. Most likely you have heard of EQ (emotional intelligence), and you may have heard of SQ (spiritual intelligence). Now there is XQ! The XQ Super School competition is a nation-wide grant contest, calling for “audacious” high school designs that completely scrap the current, obsolete model of education and start over. Steve Job’s widow, Lauren Jobs, is donating $50 million dollars, with the intention of awarding five winning High Schools $10 million each. Obviously, this is a bit of a long shot, but when I received an email with a link to the XQ website, I felt called to give it a try. West Willmore sent me that fated email, and she is coordinating the application with me. The XQ rules require that the school be a public school, and we are not sure how the XQ people plan to merge “audacious” school designs with “government controlled.” If that is actually realistic, it would be great, because it will ensure that the high school will serve a diverse population, especially those who most need it. Free is awesome! We are putting together a great team of people who have expertise in many areas. The concept we are working on has a mission and holistic approach similar to Rainbow: To develop change leaders who are prepared to build a world that is socially just, spiritually fulfilling, and environmentally sustainable. Maybe “spiritually fulfilling” is more “audacious” than the XQ Super School grant is looking for? We will see. I will update you more on this process in upcoming Kaleidoscopes.
Got justice?
The current Rainbow Mission Statement reads: To develop accomplished, confident, and creative learners who are prepared to be leaders in a compassionate and environmentally sustainable world. The board has been working very hard on finishing the revised strategic plan, and within that work, the idea of adding “socially just” to the last part of the mission statement has come up. What is your reaction to that? Do you want to be preparing your child to help create a world that is socially just? Some of the representative faculty members who discussed this issue wanted to make sure Rainbow can really walk that talk if we adopt socially just into our mission. What would we have to do to be more socially just as an organization? As a private school?
Racial Equity is currently the biggest issue of discussion amongst the faculty right now. We have about a dozen faculty members taking the Building Bridges course right now. Plus, we are doing some in house trainings on structural racism, and last night we discussed how each of us develop in terms of racial identity as we mature and become more dedicated to justice.
What can you do as a parent? I strongly advise taking the Building Bridges course. It is life changing. It’s a nine-week course, starting on January 25, on Mondays; from 7 – 9pm. It’s only $35! Besides providing a wealth of information, this course brings people of multiple races together to have open, honest conversations about race. Asheville has become known, sadly, as a very segregated city, but Building Bridges is working to change that. You will be so glad you made the commitment to be a part of the change, by signing up here for the next Building Bridges course.
How else can you help?
Speaking of social justice, the annual campaign is one of the most important tools we have toward becoming a more socially just organization. Besides simply paying the bills, it helps us keep tuition down and provides financial aid, so we can have a more diverse and equitable school. We are fortunate to have much more socio-economic diversity at Rainbow than most private schools, so we recognize the amount each family can donate is very different for everyone here.
My goal for this year and years to come: To spend more of my time on making Rainbow the best school it can be, and less time on fundraising. You can help by turning in your annual campaign pledge early! Similar to public radio station campaigns, the sooner we meet the $80,000 goal, the sooner we can end the campaign– greatly saving on staff time, resources, and on how many times you have to hear about it. Don’t delay! Pledge today! (Also, like radio stations, you only need to pledge now, and pay later.) We definitely want to meet that goal before the Winter Program, so that we don’t have to interrupt that precious programming to talk about the annual campaign.
An Original
! The winter program is going to be made up of ALL original music written by Sue Ford and students. The faculty had their first practice for our faculty performance, and it made my heart sing. I can’t wait to share it with you.
What Happens “Over the Rainbow?”
The Middle School Open House included a panel of alumni students that was wonderful and heartwarming. We put a call out on Facebook asking for Rainbow alumni to participate, and had two very full panels of high school students who were eager to talk about their high school experience and how Rainbow prepared them. I have immense respect for these students, whom I consider to be some of the most wonderful people on Earth. Soon, there will be a videotape of the panel posted on our website. Look for a link on Rainbow Reminders.
It’s Easy Being Green!
Zhenya Fomin, dad of Misha in preschool, installs green roofs for a living. He has generously offered to install a green roof at Rainbow. It is time to start “rainbow-izing” the new campus, so we chose the walkway roof that goes between 6th grade and the east-side door to the auditorium. Zhenya plans on doing the install very soon!
More Green: We are honored to receive TWO grants from the Arboretum: Inspire and Explore. One grant is supporting the teachers and students in citizen science projects, where every class is conducting science research and collecting data for large data banks for scientific researchers around the world. Ask your teacher what your child’s class is doing for citizen science. The other grant is providing funds and help to install a nature trail and a pollinator garden on the new campus. That installation is now scheduled to be in late winter.
Change is in the Air
! With Hoedown and El Dia de los Muertos behind us, we have properly celebrated the height of autumn, which brings changes in the weather and the soul. In our American culture, which is so often centered on the individual, I look forward each year to Thanksgiving, when we celebrate our gratitude for others. In centering in Omega, the students reflect on a quote every day. I just found one from Dietrick Bonhoeffer: “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” I joined Omega for centering yesterday, which was being led by a student. Everyone was asked to share one thing that they are unhappy about with a partner, so that our partner could then provide us with at least six things we could smile about. My partner shared that she is very sad about this being her last year at Rainbow. I gave this bright student many reasons to smile. For one, she gets to go out into the world and share the beauty and love she has received here at Rainbow with others, and she is truly prepared to do that. That is something to be grateful for. All of us here are very rich.
by Renee Owen | Nov 4, 2015 | Director's Blog
Senior Deputy Ben Fields is seen pulling a student from her chair at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C., in these three images made from another student’s video recording. AP
Like anyone who saw the video of the students at Spring Valley High being slammed to the floor and dragged out of her chair, I was sick, angry, and mortified. The social media comments that followed mostly focused on Officer Fields, otherwise known as Officer Slam on Facebook. But this is about so much more than whether Officer Fields’ actions were warranted. Of course, they weren’t warranted. A counselor should have been called instead of a cop.
Students learn as much or more from the “hidden curriculum” of a school than from the “overt curriculum.” The hidden curriculum is made up of everything else that goes on other than what is being literally studied in class. How are students treated? How do they treat each other? Are the teachers empowered? Essentially, what is the culture of the school? Since the rise of violence in schools in the 80’s and 90’s, many high schools started using school resource officers. New high schools were built that look like prisons with almost no windows, designed more to quell a riot than facilitate education. Some even greeted students at the door with metal detectors. The hidden curriculum in these institutions is one of oppression. What I see in the students at their desks in the Spring Valley video are students who have learned from the hidden curriculum to keep their heads down, so it doesn’t happen to them. Indeed, so many black parents talk about teaching their children this very message. It wasn’t that long ago that a young black man could be lynched for looking at a white woman. Years later, that translates into a prison sentence for looking sideways at a cop, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Niya Kennedy was the only student witnessing the violence who had the courage to do anything other than cower, and she was arrested for it. What is the lesson in that?
As one student said in the attached link, this wouldn’t have happened if the student had been white. Part of the whole point of the Black Lives Matter movement is that our society has become used to treating black people, particularly poor black people, as if their lives are not important–as if they don’t deserve the same opportunities in life as their white peers. They don’t receive the same quality of services, housing, respect, or education. (Black students in primarily black schools receive an average of $733 less on per pupil funding that students in primarily white schools.) The hidden curriculum of large public schools has enforced this message. So the issue is so much bigger than one racist or overly aggressive officer, it’s systematic.
Of course, the term “hidden” means more than “not-overt.” It means that it has been taken for granted. It is so much a part of the “atmosphere” that it can’t be seen any more than the air around us. Everyone is so used to it, that it hasn’t been questioned — at least not by enough people for those questions to be heard or addressed.
We need to advocate for schools that have positive school cultures, where the lessons learned from the hidden curriculum are the following:
- I am a valued and accepted member of my community.
- My unique personhood is seen and appreciated.
- If I am in need, I will be helped
Students carry the “hidden curriclum” they learn in school forward into society. Wouldn’t it be great to have a society with these values?
NPR: S.C. Sheriff’s Deputy Is Fired After Review Of High School Student’s Arrest
