Dear AFS Families,

I write to you knowing that we are all shaken to our core by the senseless loss of young lives and those of caring teachers in the school shooting in Florida this week. As educators and families who hold children and their bright promise at the center of our everyday lives, we especially feel the grief and profound loss experienced by the Stoneman Douglas High School community. I know that you join me in holding the students, parents and teachers of that community in the light and in our collective sense of mourning.

A tragedy like this brings strong and complex feelings into our lives: sadness, anger, vulnerability and fearfulness, hopelessness and despair all rise to the surface and can overwhelm. We take time at a moment like this, too, to hold our children and families especially close, profoundly grateful for the light that they are in our lives, freshly aware of how precious each life is. Even as we know how truly rare and unlikely such events are, our everyday faith in the fundamental safety and goodness of the world around us can be deeply shaken and slow to return.

In the face of these feelings, several things can be of help. At AFS, we have well-developed protocols and practices for daily campus safety and for responding quickly and professionally to emergencies. We are renewing and rehearsing these routines as a part of our 10-year accreditation process this year. We also are part of county-wide system that, with remote devices throughout our campus, allows us to summon all first responders, police, EMTs and firefighters immediately to our campus in the case of emergency. And we have a close relationship with the Abington Police, who have played an integral role in training our faculty and staff in emergency response.

We value the strength of our highly relational community as well, where we both formally and informally attend to the emotional well-being and mental health of our students and other community members on a day-to-day basis. When we see signs of concern, we use our highly developed support teams to share these concerns and put together appropriate protocols and supports. I know of no other school so well-attuned to this aspect of community health. This dimension of care for social and emotional well-being and alertness to concerns is vital for daily safety at AFS even as it is a core dimension of our educational vision.

We value, too, the spiritual depth of our community, which helps us to stay centered, keep perspective and be observant and responsive to the stresses that students, families and teachers may be feeling in response to this recent tragedy. When anxiety threatens our sense of daily trust and well-being, it is all the more valuable to find grounding in the peace at the core of our beings, to be attuned to the abundant goodness of the world around us and the people in it. It is from such a place of grounding that we can face the world clear-eyed and committed to action that will indeed advance a safer and more peaceful world.

On that last note, I know that all of us are searching for answers and responses to the violence we see far too often in our culture. Empowerment is a powerful antidote to anxiety and I encourage you as families to find voice and channels of civic engagement that are essential to moving our country forward. We at school will be helping students, in age-appropriate ways, to find their roles and sense of agency for the issues that are most important to them.

Finally, I encourage hope and fortitude at this time. At Friday’s faculty and staff in-service day, we sang together We Shall Overcome to break the silence of our Meeting for Worship at the end of the day. I chose that great civil rights hymn because it is a song of resolve, hope, faith, solidarity and a call to build together a world perfected in love, human dignity for all and peace.

This is a future that we are building together every day at AFS in our profound vision for education. We are helping children grow into deep capability, spiritual depth and a powerful sense of purpose. This is our most effective and hopeful response to a troubled world and I am deeply appreciative of our remarkable community of families, students, faculty and staff who are joined in this strong sense of common purpose.

All the best to you,

Rich Nourie