Yesterday 18 Inquiry Hub grads crossed the stage and received their high school diplomas. They then went to a room and stood behind a camera for a quick 3-5 minute interview. I watched them all, hearing what they had to say about their experience at our school. Time and again I heard them speak of enjoying the community and relationships they built with each other.
I know we have challenges at the school and things can always be better, and I know that in a small school, things can get cliquey, but we have been able to foster a lot of cooperation and acceptance of very different groups.
One of our students who has thrived at our school was actually out of school, taking online courses having been completely dissatisfied with her previous school experience. She was coming to our building to do testing, (I’m principal of the online school too, and Inquiry Hub shares a room with the online school to offer testing twice a week). She said that when she came in for testing she could feel the positive atmosphere from the school and knew that it would be a good place for her.
We’ve had educators come through to visit the school and they have said the same thing. This has been a constant. It even happened 4 years ago when we were struggling to build community with two student groups that felt more like factions than cliques. It was weird, here we were struggling to build community and even bringing in an elder to do a circle, and a couple days later four educators from Alberta spend a morning with us, and when I meet them at lunch they told us what a great vibe they had, and what a positive learning environment it was.
As I said, we are far from perfect, but we strive to help everyone feel like they belong. Our school special events and celebrations are run with a lot of student input and organization. But this has been much harder to do with students mostly learning remotely. The iHub Annual tomorrow night is usually 90% student run. This year its being run by me and two former students hired to assist. Their expertise will go a long way in making the event special, and since they are brothers they can work closely together while we still respect social distancing expectations. It will go well, it won’t be the same as a team of students both running the event and training the younger students, which normally happens this time of year for us.
With the likelihood of school starting up in a limited capacity in September, I wonder what we will need to do differently to foster that sense of community and belonging? It’s harder to build community than it is to sustain it, and so we will need to intentionally think about what we do to keep our positive sense of community going next year.
