It is a new year and we are so excited to be back in school making an impact on students lives! Thanks for joining us on the journey of making school so much more than a classroom.
Last year, we began the process of redoing our school’s mission statement. We started at the beginning of the year and planned out the way we were going to re-write it. Our Culture Team felt like we would likely keep the same statement and the work would be very little.
Boy were we wrong!
A team of educators went to Washington DC for the National Forum of Character. In one of the keynote speeches, they talked about how our mission in school could boil down to one word. It should be the single most important thing our students gain from our classrooms. This idea began a new journey for our school mission statement.
We returned to Independence and asked each staff member to write down the most important thing our students gain from our classroom. Just like the data suggests - 80% of adults do not identify performance words as more important. They choose the word LOVE.
We decided to complete the same process with each stakeholder: parents and students. The results came back...LOVE.
We then looked at our existing mission statement and knew that it no longer matched the single most important thing for our students. Teams of teachers, parents and students began to draft a mission that matched “WHO we are as a building.”
Parents, students and staff voted and we are proud to announce our new mission statement:
Independence Elementary where all students are valued for who they are and inspired to be all they can become!
Next was the big reveal! We had students from all abilities and every language spoken in our building create a video sharing our new mission. The fifth graders announced the new mission statement at the end of the video leaving a legacy they were proud of!