We write today to share some community happenings, announcements, and good wishes for the upcoming holiday break. We’ve had a busy few months leading to some very exciting developments for the school community and beyond.

This is our first installment in Letters from Leadership! In Letters from Leadership, we will continue to focus on life at BNS through the eyes of our children and educators - moments of joy, success, challenge, inquiry, sustainability, social justice, social emotional and physical health.

Student-voice: the thing we hope students who attend BNS will leave knowing they have it and how to use it. We encourage students to advocate for what they need and want.

Sometimes, all it takes is a single word to get a powerful, ground-shifting conversation underway. This week, our fifth graders began the next step of planning and preparing for graduation.

This community is made up of so many amazing people who work to provide specialized services to our students. Each professional focuses on an aspect of development that supports their educational and socio-emotional experiences.

A new calendar year is upon us! We welcome you to 2023, and together, we remember that every milestone such as the start of a new year gives us all a chance to reflect, plan forward and start fresh. We welcome new families who have recently joined our school community and hope that they and their children are having experiences of joy during this transitional period.

Our city school system has layered supports and strategies in place to support school communities when something goes wrong. There were hiccups, surely, as every system and every protocol has at its center humans who are all doing their best, but the responses were swift and helpful when we connected with each person along the chain.

Today we write to share about some moments in our school lives these last few weeks, the big and the small, the local and the worldly.

We start with a short narrative from kindergarten teacher Jenn, whose class lives in room 201, with Kori, Kodjo and Swimmy.

Welcome to the 22-23 school year! This is our first of many letters from leadership that we will write this year, in the tradition of Anna Allanbrook’s “weekly letter.”

We started the draft of this letter in mid-May, when some of us were wondering, “How did that happen?”, while others were thinking about how the summer feels close and far at the same time.

Our hearts are broken, and our spirits are tired. We are, many of us, not even yet processing the April subway shooting here in Brooklyn, and the racist killings in Buffalo, when the awful news of a senseless and disgusting school shooting in Texas …

We ended last week, a week with a lot of big feelings, and found ourselves reflecting on our current state of being. One piece of the BNS story is that people come and stay. This is true of its teachers, staff and students - no one really leaves. People plant roots and make this their home away from home.

Last week, our chickens (Red, Speckles and La Rubia) let us know that spring was here, by surprising our first graders with the first eggs of the season! If you’re not subscribed to the ecorama blog, we recommend it.

It’s been another busy series of weeks at BNS! Check out some highlights and upcoming events below. We are happy to announce our new website (still at bns146.org) is live! A huge thank you to our website committee who worked tirelessly to revamp…

There has been much in the air and on the news this week about mask mandates in public spaces, and most notably for us, at public schools. On Monday, when we returned from break, we experienced the first day of the lifted….

This week in the life of BNS, teaching teams have put the final touches on their thoughtful and hearty narrative progress reports that you will receive over the break. These reports are currently…..

With the mid-winter break quickly approaching, we know that this week and next can be times where children have an uptick in unanticipated behaviors as they feel this break approaching. We are closely monitoring the social-emotional pulse of students…

In this week of learning and celebration, we think about the ways in which culture influences our lives and shapes our experiences. The Lunar New Year celebration and BLM in Schools Week together in the same week allows for many opportunities…

What a busy week we’ve had with so much deep curricular work well underway. Our students are using their hands to express what they’ve learned. Fourth grade students continued to work with ancestral technologist, Nancye Good…..

We are holding onto a sense of stability in a rapidly changing backdrop. While we do all we can to keep all members of our community safe and taken care of, we share the ways in which we have centered joy.