Principal's Message
Welcome to New Vista!
Dear New Vista Community,
At long last we are at our moment to launch the 2022-23 school year together! On behalf of Kiffany Lychock, our new assistant principal, and the whole New Vista staff, I am grateful and humbled to welcome you to a new school year. We hope you have all had an enjoyable summer and we are eager to have some students in the building!
These past few weeks, as we have been preparing for returning to school, I have been feeling deeply grateful for the opportunity that is in front of us. New Vista has, for many years now, stood as a beacon in the Boulder Valley School District. The freedom and autonomy to thoughtfully and intentionally create a different high school experience for your youth continues to thrive and grow. And, the school and its foundational ideas have withstood the test of time, with much thanks to a committed staff that has seen it through.
Our focus on equity, experience, personalization, and relationships, all continue to contribute to serve as the foundation for a focus on creating critical thinkers that have the academic skills, the self-awareness and the passion to become the change agents that our world sorely needs.
As we make our final preparations here at school for coming together, we want to partner with you, perhaps more than ever. What we know is that when parents engage in and ask about school, student achievement and engagement goes up. In that light, we hope you will take a few moments to ask your teenager a few of these questions prior to our first day together next Wednesday:
-What are you excited to learn this year?
-How do you see yourself contributing to New Vista and the larger community this year?
-What might get in your way of you doing your personal best work this year?
-What might you consider doing to expand your friendship group?
-Are you clear where you are with your Path and Common Learnings and how these are setting you up for success for graduation and after?
-What are you thinking about in regard to your Culminating Project in your Senior year?
-And finally, why do you want to go to school, particularly, why do you want to go to New Vista? (Even if you are not new!)
Thank you for considering doing this. The exercise of exploring this set of questions could be quite helpful to us as we work together to remind our student body, your teen, that while we will and want to be here for their whole person, we are also eager to lean in on who they are as learners and how we might, together, peak their interests and passions for academic pursuits and skills. Ultimately, we want to teach, and we want our students to want to learn. And, it takes all of us, with all our young people are facing today, to help them regain their focus and find their love of learning.
John McCluskey, Principal
