SUPERINTENDENTS' MESSAGE

What's up, Lincoln families? I hope you have had a fantastic first few weeks to school. We enjoyed seeing many of you at the high school and elementary school back to school night, and we're looking forward to seeing our middle school families on campus next week. Remember, continue to reach out to us and let us know how your kids are adjusting and what support you might need. We've had ten new students join us since the start of school, which brings our opening numbers to 130 new students joining in August. One of the reoccurring themes is how welcome they feel by you and by your children and by our community. Thank you.

We started off our year focused on Agents of Change, as one of our attributes of a Lincoln Learner. Aaron Moniz, who works with Inspire Citizens, spent a week here at Lincoln leading learning. He met with parents, with students, with admin and with teachers. Lincoln has a very long history of community service. The beach clean ups, our work with El Ceibo, are opportunities to engage in our immediate community as well as beyond. What Aaron is doing with us is a little bit different.

We're adding to that profile of community service with a focus on service learning. We want our service experiences to be embedded into our curricular experiences, into our classrooms, and into our classroom learning, beginning in pre-K all the way through Grade 12, grounding our work in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

All of us had the opportunity to engage in dialog and conversation, and we've decided to launch this initiative with what we're calling a coalition of the willing. We're asking the parents, the students, the faculty that are actively ready to start this conversation, to step forward and to lead us in this work. What that means is that we are starting off with projects from K-4 and K-5 as our youngest condors begin a Lincoln Learning garden. Our middle school PE students are engaging with our community partnerships right here in our neighborhood to create physical education learning experiences. Our high school math students are diving into quadratics for impact.

So throughout the school, we've had groups of teachers who are ready to step forward and build the learning experiences. We'll continue to build this into next semester and into the following years. We're on a three-year plan to create an integrated service learning experience for every child at Lincoln every year.

Through embedding this within our curriculum and ensuring that every student has an opportunity to access a service learning experience, they learn to connect service into their academic content and how to make a positive impact on the world around them, whether that's within their family for our youngest condors or globally, as our students grow up and for our parents and for us.

We are so excited to continue developing compassion, action, understanding and connection #ALLTogether.

Dr. Nada Collins

Superintendent