Thank you Teachers and Parents

As this school year comes to an end, I want to take a moment and thank all of the students, teachers, and parents who make up our community. This school year has been anything but normal. It has been a school year filled with juxtapositions; a year of both loss and growth; community and isolation; great joy and pain.

As a joke earlier in the year, I thought the cover of all school yearbooks should have been the year 2020-2021 and then simply an asterisk: *To all the students, teachers, support staff, building engineers, bus drivers, coaches, food service providers, parents, and any other people I might be forgetting, thank you for what you have done and do. The work of this year took a colossal effort. You all deserve thanks and praise.

As COVID restrictions come down, as we return to a new version of normal in our lives, I hold in the deepest regard those who pivoted in order to provide for another: from the science teacher who accidentally shot sticky foam all over her kitchen ceiling resulting in the need for a repainting, and the many who made living rooms into learning studios, to all those who went the extra mile, please know that despite the noise coming from the loudest political rhetoric, I believe most Americans are grateful. I know I am, and I know St. Martin's is.

In Christ,
Mitch+