On Wednesday evening I had the chance to discuss the state of the school. However, before talking about our performance in the past 10 months, it was important for me to acknowledge the many parents who selflessly and sacrificially give of their time, talent and treasure to make our community special. While Washington Latin is an intricate tapestry weaving together the creativity and industriousness of our teachers and administrators and the camaraderie and persistence of our student body, it would easily unravel without the diligence of our parent body. You provide the invisible stitching that holds our whole school together.
We are so appreciative of the energy you expend to reinforce our values, through meaningful discussions with your children around the dinner table about the topics they are learning, for the homework help, organizational support, and keeping children on a healthy eating and sleeping schedule all year, but especially throughout these challenging final weeks of school. Please take some time this weekend to remind students to at least clean out their backpacks and review their study guides as they prepare for end-of-year projects and final exams.
I encourage you to review the PowerPoint presentation that I shared with parents last night. I welcome your feedback, including your suggestions for how we can continue to improve as a school. However, please allow me to elaborate on a couple of points below.
We are in solid financial shape in terms of managing our debt and budget, including in terms of having the required cash on-hand. This careful fiscal management has put us in the Tier 1 category of schools. Managing our $15M budget is crucial but bolstering it with fundraising is equally so. We use donations, including from parents, to support our faculty and in turn retain them, provide new opportunities to enrich our students’ experiences, provide programming that improves their academic achievement, and more. Latin Pride helps us fund our core operations, and other funds (including Faculty Fund, Equal Access, Academic Support) allow us to constantly test and improve our model. We ran out of time last night, but there is still a key challenge in finance: garnering the donations we need to accomplish the improvements to our school that benefit students from across DC.
If you have not yet had a chance to contribute to our Faculty Fund or to one of our other fundraising campaigns, it is not too late to do so and anything that you can give will be greatly appreciated. And, if you didn’t have a chance to volunteer at Latin this year, we hope to have you more involved next year. Volunteering at our school helps maintain our loving, warm community.
Valete!