Dear D41 Staff:
I hope you all had a joyful holiday. With the new year just beginning and before the demands of your work accumulate into mountains stretching beyond the horizon, I want to share with you why your presence means so much.
Findings from educational research show students’ sense of social relatedness at school predicts their health and well-being throughout life and it is the student-teacher relationship that matters most. Your everyday personal encounters are essential to allowing each child to feel seen, heard, understood, and truly known. It’s the daily act of building connections that tells the students they are worthy of another’s attention and time. Your tenderness, receptivity, curiosity, affection, and generosity contribute to the positive relationships our children experience.
I know our schools are labeled primarily according to academic achievement but when parents are asked, what they most want in life for their children, no one ever says “higher standardized test scores.” A story summarizing a 2023 PEW Research Center survey about what parents most want for their children used this unambiguous headline: “Kids’ happiness and satisfaction reign supreme.”
Interestingly, the ongoing 80-year-old Harvard Longitudinal Study of Adult Development reveals that the quality of a person’s relationships, “more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.” Unsurprisingly, childhood relationships prove to be a powerful predictive developmental force.
The philosopher Aristotle believed that happiness was the “best, noblest, and most pleasant virtue.” Happiness was the highest good because unlike any other virtue, it was “for the sake of this that we all do everything else.” But happiness didn’t come by chance. It had to be learned in the same way that building a house or playing an instrument had to be learned. “If this were not the case,” Aristotle notes “there would be no need of a teacher.”
So, before you all embed yourselves in another wall-to-wall semester of schooling, let me, on behalf of my School Board colleagues say, “welcome back.” We are very happy you are here.
Dr. Robert Bruno, President
Board of Education
Glen Ellyn School District 41
Glen Ellyn School District 41
Email: webmaster@d41.org
Website: www.d41.org
Location: 793 North Main Street, Glen Ellyn, IL, USA
Phone: 630.790.6400
Facebook: facebook.com/glenellynd41
X(twitter): @glenellynd41