A Letter from Dr. Williams
Dear Families,
It was lovely to see so many of you at both the HSA Coffee and the Welcome Back Pizza Party on Wednesday. The excitement and joy over the start of the new school year felt palpable, and I feel lucky that we were able to come together as a community. The momentum is certainly strong right now, and as we continue with the “launch phase” of the 21-22 school year, there continue to be plenty of new opportunities getting started in the coming weeks. The soccer season is about to begin, so if you have an interested child, please check out the information below. We also have parent interest in starting both a Let Me Run chapter and a Girl Scouts troop. There is a survey further on in the newsletter to gauge participation interest so that we can hopefully get both of those programs up and running. Lunch time clubs are also getting started, with daily Run Club starting Monday and other clubs soon to follow. If your child has interest in leading a club, please encourage them to speak with their homeroom teacher. We love to support student initiatives!
In other news, I recently started reading Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer by Steven Johnson, and it is proving to be a fascinating read. I originally heard about the book through a favorite podcast: The Next Big Idea. On the podcast (and in the book), Johnson talks about varying feats of human ingenuity, from fertilizer to seatbelts, that have led to the staggering doubling of human life expectancy in the last one hundred years. And saving billions of lives is… the vaccine! Johnson says, “It is one of the most impressive things we have done as a human species… if we celebrated the eradication of smallpox in the way we celebrate something like the moon landing, which happened in the same time frame…we’d recognize that wow, vaccines did this amazing thing. They eradicated an ancient killer [smallpox] for good. That’s what science does!”
So for anyone looking for a book or podcast recommendation, there you go. And for anyone looking to get vaccinated, we’ve got an exciting event coming up for you! Below, we’ll outline the steps to register for an upcoming Vaccination Event at Pilot on September 20th. You can register your children, yourselves, and anyone in your family to come get your seasonal flu shot and/or the COVID-19 vaccine or booster. We’ll hold community hours from 2:30 to 5:00 so that you can schedule your vaccines around pick-up time. If you’d like to get other vaccines during that time (like the Shingles vaccine, HPV vaccine, or the TDAP vaccine, for instance), let us know and the pharmacy will bring them along for you too. What a lovely way to embrace the human ingenuity of modern science and come together in community to keep ourselves and each other safe and healthy.
Finally, if your family celebrates Rosh Hashanah, we hope you enjoyed happy celebrations this week with family and loved ones. In honor of this new year celebration, this week’s video asked students to share their favorite holiday. We hope you enjoy it, along with a photo gallery from this week.
Wishing you all a joyful weekend!
In partnership,
Alli
