I try not to see it as a challenge. I really do see it as an opportunity because our students will continue to grow and go off to college, where they are going to be exposed to the real world, working with and interacting with people of all different backgrounds, ethnicities, learning abilities, appearances, etc. So we have the opportunity here to start or continue to process being open to that. We really try to do that from day one. In fact, we start school a week from today, but we are doing our retreats for our ninth and tenth graders starting now. Those retreats are all about the process of students opening themselves up to others in different ways and in different formats. We talk to our students about our core values, we want to talk about them so often that they start rolling their eyes at us because
