The Partnership

Making the Most of Summit's Parent-School Partnership

Summit School's Mission is both simply stated and profound: Summit School provides a challenging curriculum within a caring environment to help students develop their full potential. The educators and parents of Summit School live and breathe this Mission-each day. How? We begin with a fundamental recognition: Each Summit child is the center of someone's universe. We celebrate that fact. And we are mindful of it.

As educators we can't support a child alone: we don't know all that there is to know in that child's universe. As parents you can't support your child alone: part of your child's universe-a crucial part-is here at Summit. As partners and allies we are able to act in the best interests of your child.

How do we cultivate and sustain this vital partnership? We give the parent-school relationship attention and fill it with intention, and we acknowledge and leverage one another's areas of focus and expertise. In the Parent-School Partnership, parents must be able to rely on teachers to provide leadership in three key areas:

• Child Development

The social-emotional lives of children are inextricably linked to their academic success. As a result, educators must constantly attend to the developmental needs and characteristics of the children we teach.

• Curriculum Development

The big ideas, essential questions, and transferable skills we explore and cultivate must be both timeless and timely-relevant in the first decade of the 21st century and beyond.

• Teaching and Learning

A host of complex issues are recasting how we envision the roles and responsibilities of students and teachers, all of us as life-long learners. Increasingly, we must be adept at reading, interpreting and translating learning theory & research into classroom practice.

Just as parents rely on teachers to guide the development of children at school, so teachers rely on parents to provide expertise at home in three important ways:

• Nurture

As parents you love and accept your children, giving them unconditional positive regard, and cultivating in them the sense that they are worthy of love. Nurture fosters an essential confidence that is the cornerstone of psycho-social development.

• Structure

From their parents, children learn how to conduct themselves: basic expectations for behaviors, boundaries, and fundamental notions of right and wrong. Over time, children internalize this structure, giving them an ability to self-regulate, a sense of competence, perseverance, and resilience.

• Latitude

Parents must provide support for a child's autonomy-creating a safe space to learn from experience. mistakes and setbacks as well as accomplishments. Some of our most important learning stems from mistakes, disappointment, or loss. Our children will encounter setbacks. Coping with those setbacks can build self-esteem (based on the confidence that rises out of competence), self-worth, persistence, and empathy.

To serve the best interests of our children, parents and educators need one another: We need each other's questions, insights, wisdom and support because our children deserve nothing less than the best we have to give. This work that we do together as educators and parents changes our children's lives and equips them to deal with-and reshape-the world they are inheriting. This is work that matters. This is work that every educator at Summit School joins you in feeling privileged to do.