About

The School Site Council (SSC) is the governing/advisory body at each school. The SSC comprises equal numbers of parents and staff, as well as two student representatives. Parents on the SSC are accountable to the School Parent Council (SPC) and are elected by the SPC (see below). The SSC plays a critical role in hiring of school staff, reviews and comments on the annual budget, and helps determine school regulations.

First meeting of the year

Please join the SSC for a joint meeting with the SPC on Tuesday, September 15, at 6 pm. Head of School Rachel Skerritt will provide an overview of the school’s preparations for remote learning this fall, as well as an update on pertinent protocols and programming. Additionally, Student Council officers will present findings from a survey they administered to BLS students designed to capture perspectives and experiences with virtual learning last spring. Before opening the question and answer period at the end of the meeting, SSC members will discuss October meeting dates and next month’s election for council representatives and officers. The meeting will be virtual, and can be accessed through this link.

Parent Representative Elections

BLS parents: please consider running for the SSC! Elections for the 2020-21 academic year will be held on Tuesday, October 13, at 6 pm. There are three openings for SSC parent representatives and four seats for parent alternates. SSC parent representatives serve a two-year term, while alternates serve for one year. You must be virtually present at the October 13 meeting to run. Even if you don’t plan to run for a parent leadership position, please plan to join us for the October 13 elections to cast your vote. No absentee ballots are permitted.

Future programming

The SSC is always happy to hear from the BLS community, and you’re encouraged to join SSC meetings as your schedule allows. If you’d like to suggest a topic for a future SSC meeting, please contact parent co-chair Magda Hernandez.

Welcome back, returning parents and guardians, and a hearty welcome to those of you new to Boston Latin School! Although the 2020-2021 school year is starting off remotely, there are still many ways to connect with fellow parents who are eager to meet and reacquaint with you (virtually at first and in-person when we are able).

About

The Boston Latin School Association (BLSA) is comprised of enthusiastic and caring parents and alumni who look to continue the mission of supplementing our student’s academic experience throughout the school year through our philanthropy. To those of you whose students are just starting out at Boston Latin School, the BLSA may have already touched your lives through its financial support of the Exam School Initiative (ESI) summer exam prep program. A few other tangible ways the BLSA provides support include:

• Financial assistance for athletic uniforms and transportation,

• Extracurricular activities, musical instruments and arts programming,

• Online and print library resources,

• Fellowships, and

• College admissions assistance

Donations to the BLSA ensure that all students can take full advantage of what the school has to offer, no matter their family’s financial situation. In the current academic environment, another crucial way the BLSA has supported the school is helping to provide Chromebooks and technical support to students and faculty as they facilitate remote learning.

The coming year will bring much uncertainty and challenges but the BLSA and the Parents' Committee are committed to helping to provide the support that students and faculty require to maintain the academic excellence which has defined BLS since its founding almost 400 years ago.

The Parents’ Committee would normally kick off the academic year with an in-person New Parents’ Welcome Brunch for incoming parent and guardians of Sixie and Bsie students. Although we will not be able to meet in person at this time, we are planning to do a virtual get together for new parents after the school year commences - so please be on the lookout for updates. We look forward to meeting and/or reconnecting with you in the months to come.

With international travel on hold for now, the Clough Center has pivoted to supporting virtual exchanges in history, world languages, and other academic areas. Over the summer students participated in virtual global programming and online forums with students from China and South Africa. This school year students in World History 1 will be connecting with peers in Morocco for a year-long virtual exchange coordinated by Global One to One, with the support of a grant from the Stevens Initiative.The homestay exchange programs in Hamburg, Grenoble, and Beijing will transition to virtual exchanges as well. Student organizations including BLS Model United Nations (MUN) will have an opportunity to participate in virtual Model UN conferences with students from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America with support of the Clough Center, which provides funding to BLS MUN to help further develop student global understanding through the MUN conferences.

A New Initiative for Facing History Students

This year’s Facing History students will embark on a new initiative that will link them to students in dozens of nations around the world. Through this initiative, Exploring Civic Obligation: A Global Perspective, students will be exploring the question of what their responsibilities are to advance the common good in their local, national, and global societies.

Objective and inspiration

Ms. Judi Freeman, Seevak Chair in History, conceived this initiative in July. Since then, she has been working with educators at secondary schools in more than 46 countries on 6 continents (as of this writing) who are in the classroom preparing their students to participate.

The objective of the initiative is to explore what individuals in a wide variety of nations believe to be their civic obligations and the degree to which they embrace and fulfill these responsibilities. Comparing the information that students will gather from their peers globally will enable students at Boston Latin and elsewhere to consider and advance what they envision ideal civic responsibility to be.

The initiative was inspired in part by the oft-quoted 1961 statement from President John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” The idea behind this initiative is to both answer that question and widen that lens. What can individuals do locally? Nationally? Globally? For example, do we wear face coverings and take vaccines to protect one another’s health? Do we serve on juries to insure fairness and justice? Do we participate in community service in order to support the lives of others around us? Do we vote to participate actively in democracy? Do we recycle and consider our consumption in order to protect the environment?

In Facing History, a yearlong history elective for juniors and seniors, a key theme in the curriculum is the roles of bystanders, upstanders, and changemakers. Individual choices have governed so many events in history; in class, we look back at those choices as well as the choices being made today and how they affect society. The initiative fits squarely within that framework, as it offers an additional way to examine our roles as responsible and engaged citizens. Moreover, the course at Boston Latin has a long history of traveling abroad annually and offering students the opportunity for global experiences.

The initiative unfolds

Students will begin the year partnered with an individual student at one of the partner schools and will correspond via e-mail or What’s App from October through early December. Together they will contribute to the design of a survey on these topics that will be implemented at all of the participating schools. Students will be surveying family and community members as well.

Come winter students will be participating on asynchronous discussion boards, contributing to discussions prompted by the data they have collected as well as themes proposed by the participating teachers and students as well as readings to focus those discussions. Certainly they will be discussing topics including the social contract between governments and states and their people, issues of social justice, marginalization and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, and identity, and beliefs in a core set of human rights (whether it is the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the previous Millennium Development Goals, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or related documents).

By spring, schools will be grouped and communicating virtually via Zoom, Skype, or another platform to continue these conversations and propose collective action projects to advance student ideas.

Advice and participant recommendations were sought from staff at a broad range of organizations: the Fulbright program at the US Department of State, Citizen University, the Democratic Knowledge Project and Project ZERO at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, UNESCO, Educators’ Institute for Human Rights, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Human Rights program at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Alumni of the BLS Facing History program are being invited to work as teaching assistants (TAs) to work with individual global partners to ensure that the interactions are well supported and maintain their momentum.

If members of the Boston Latin School community have suggestions or questions related to this initiative, please contact Ms. Freeman.

Welcome back to a very different start to the school year. For those new to BLS, Parent 2 Parent is a subcommittee of the Parent Council. Our goals are primarily to provide assistance regarding individual student needs, increase SPC understanding of general parent concerns and act as a liaison with school administrators regarding these issues, and to create a sense of community among parents. The full document describing P2P is here.

We will continue to have monthly meetings this year, dates TBD. As always, we welcome parents suggestions for topics to be addressed. Just send one of us an email (see below).

Our notes and comments from prior meetings can be found here. If you would like to join the P2P Google Group please begin by filling out this form.

Wishing you a healthy school year!

Anne Brown P’18 & ‘22 and Nancy Fitzgerald P’18 & ‘23

Long time head of the Visual and Performing Arts Department Mr. Paul Pitts has said for a decade that 2020 would be the year of his retirement. Being true to his words, Paul turned in his paperwork this summer. We are eternally grateful to Paul for the dedication, expertise and love he has shown the department, students and personnel at BLS and are planning a huge celebration of him and the successful and extraordinary program he built when it is possible to gather. We are very happy that we get to keep a bit of Paul Pitts as he will continue being the director of the BLS Big Band. Mr. Pitts has also been very busy helping with the transition.

Get your “We Love You Mr Pitts” T-Shirt

FOtA is showing our Pitts love with “We Love You Mr Pitts” T-shirts. If you would like to purchase a shirt, $5 of your purchase goes directly to the Paul Pitts Keys4Kids Campaign to help buy the BLS choir room a new baby grand piano.