Congratulations to You! 🎉 🤗 ❤️  

First and foremost, congratulations!

It’s easy to forget how hard we’ve all had to push over the past three years. Honestly, they have been absolutely brutal. But from what I’ve seen over the past month, it looks like many of you have managed to turn the tide and bring your schools back to a healthy place.

As a community, folks in education have been working hard to prevent our education system from breaking down completely. There were some dark times to be sure, and I’ll admit the past few years were an intense struggle to maintain a positive and solution-focused attitude.

But as I’ve been touring schools lately, I’m encouraged to see that those efforts have begun to yield results.

This is the turning point. I know all of you have been waking up every day and pushing for your students and for yourselves, grinding away all day every day to try to squeeze out every drop of goodness you can. I know it isn’t easy to tell when you’re operating in your school and not seeing the zeitgeist of education, but as someone who is constantly traveling across the country, I have a message for all of you:

It’s working! It really is working! You’re really doing it!

Keep working together, and continue to use your own individual gifts to contribute to your schools. Keep celebrating one another, and keep building up your teachers, administrators, students, and parents.

I look forward to the end of this semester, as we all press on to empower our schools and spread our positivity across the country. I know sometimes it can feel like you’re pushing against a brick wall, but it is working, and these days I’m encouraged more and more with every school I visit.

P.S. When you are ready, there are three great ways that we can support your school culture efforts this year…

#1 – Host a campus relationships workshop for staff.

#2 – Book school assemblies for your students.

#3 – Offer an SEL focused leadership summit to your campus.