Daily Community Meeting
Reimagined for 2020-21!
“I think that without morning meeting, we wouldn’t be the school that we promise we are.” – Senior Keegan Priest
It was perhaps the biggest hurdle we faced when adapting to our pandemic reality for the 2020-21 school year — how can we maintain an all-school community meeting when we can’t physically be together? How do we preserve this shared experience each day?
The answer, as it most always does, came from the students: we’d make a morning meeting that we can broadcast to students and teachers wherever they are.
These trailblazing broadcasters, led by a group of tech-savvy seniors, took over the stage area and converted it into a real-world studio, with sets, lighting, sound equipment, and more. They learned by doing, by creating a live broadcast each and every day. It wasn’t always perfect — but neither was our in-person community meeting — and when things went wrong, they kept their good humor and fixed it for next time.
It’s a simple thing, spending time together each day. But it’s what makes our school a true community.
I don’t hate technology, or social media, but I do hate it when things fall out of balance. When we lose the ability to move at a speed not measured in mega-bytes per second. When we say things online we would never say to someone’s face. When the time we spend in the digital world outweighs our time in the real one, together.
And that’s why I love morning meetings. Because we’re all here together. We’re all in a moment together. And sometimes from the back of room, I feel it, that slowing, that immersion, that unified pulse, that thing we had to think to look for.