February 22, 2023

Dear Annie and Members of the OCS Board of Directors,

When we were granted coveted OCS spots for our children and registered them to attend this school, we were thrilled to join an educational community that prides itself on being empowered, ethical, and informed. We signed up for a school that promised “staff members, students, and families [would] collaborate in the ongoing process of education,” because we agree that “a strong home-school connection helps children succeed.” We signed up to join a school where “students, their families, and the staff feel a sense of belonging as valued members of our community.”

Yet the school that OCS describes in its mission statement, handbook, and promotional materials is not the school that our children currently attend. Over the last year or more, the administration has consistently failed to provide families with updates and information in a timely manner, including essential details such as the availability of summer and after school programming and the procedures for attending school assemblies and other on campus events.

The administration provided families with details about OCS’s 2022 summer program on May 25, 2022, two weeks before the last day of school and the beginning of the time that working parents would need to have childcare for their children. For the 2022-2023 school year, registration for after care was sent at 5:08 PM on August 16, the night before the first day of school, and morning care did not start for another two weeks. The administration announced its decision to release our children early every Tuesday on August 8, 2022, just over a week before school began. They did not include any details about alternative childcare arrangements, because the school did not provide any arrangements for the care of our children.

This lack of communication and basic planning fails OCS’s promise to keep families empowered and informed. It is difficult to feel like a valued member of the community when the leaders of our community send us scrambling to find childcare at the last minute. This shows an utter lack of concern for our families’ basic needs.

In addition to the lack of communication, the closed-campus drop-off and pickup procedures have created a literal barrier severing the home-school connection that our school claims to value. By physically banning families from the school, the procedures prevent any meaningful contact between parents and our children’s classrooms and teachers. This procedure was instituted in the name of Covid safety and we accepted it when it helped prevent the spread of Covid-19. But despite our repeated inquiries, the administration has never offered us an explanation for why these procedures are still in place now that emergency Covid protocols have been lifted.

The current pick-up procedures represent a lack of respect for our time and are chaotic for our children and the paraprofessionals who are charged with ushering them from their classrooms and into our cars. Some of us arrive up to an hour early if we have afternoon work commitments, other children to pick up, or after school activities that require us to get our children right after the bell. Others wait in long lines outside of the gate or in our cars. Meanwhile, our children are expected to wait quietly in their classrooms so they can hear when their names are called. Once they get outside, students stand there waiting again, until a paraprofessional or administrator yells their names, sometimes using a megaphone. At that point they are rushed out of the gate so they can get in their parents’ cars and keep the line moving.

The process appears stressful to the paraprofessionals who are doing their best to efficiently run an inefficient system, and it is a drain on the time that administrators and teachers could be using for other important aspects of their jobs. There are times when students exit the gate early amid the chaos and are wandering around the sidewalk unattended and unsure of where to go. This chaos could be avoided by simply allowing us to walk onto campus to pick up our kids.

This procedure also makes it challenging for us to communicate with the hardworking teachers who take care of our children every day. The only way to reach teachers is via email, and they do their best to respond on top of the other demands involved with teaching our children. We appreciate and value the teachers’ efforts to keep us empowered and informed even though the administration severely limits our ability to interact with them. By contrast, the administration displays utter disregard for the “open door policy” that is described in the OCS Handbook. While the policy indicates that administrators will respond to parents within 24 hours on weekdays, we find that communicating with the administration is nearly impossible. We cannot reach Lynn by phone; we are not allowed to speak to her on campus, and she seldom responds to our emails.

Returning to an open campus during drop-off and pick-up would be an important first step in rebuilding the connections that the administration has failed to maintain in recent years. Instead of spending their afternoons standing on Hatillo and racing our children from the gate to our cars, Lynn and other members of the administration could spend a few minutes each morning and afternoon greeting students and families as they arrive on campus. The school administrators currently have a very weak understanding of OCS families and the home contexts that shape our children’s learning, because they rarely interact with us. Even when they do respond to our phone calls or emails, these brief interactions offer a shaky foundation for building our community.

We have made it through the unimaginable nightmare of a global pandemic, and it is no longer necessary to prioritize Covid prevention over the social and emotional well-being of our families and our children. It is time to reforge the meaningful connections and community that have always been central to the mission and identity of Our Community School.

Sincerely,

OCS Parents