Back To School, The Future Awaits

While the Labor Day Parade may formally mark the end of summer in Newtown, it is the roar of school buses that alerts us to the reality that the laid-back season is now leaning forward into fall. The buses will be rolling once again on Wednesday next week, scooping up kids across Newtown’s 60 square miles for the first day of school. No other day in the year so abruptly changes the feel of the town, shifting at once patterns of sleep and traffic and dinnertime talk. The static of summer resolves itself into a clear signal: it is time to get on with life. The future awaits.

So much of this town’s relationship to its future is cast in terms of preservation — preserving the environment, the town’s historic character, its public safety and health. How much of what we like about our past and present are we going to carry into the future?

But our schools, at their best, are great dynamos of invention, not obsessed with preserving or recycling the old, but spinning something new and promising from young lives with the briefest of histories and projecting them into the future. Yes, education is the great conveyor of civilization, drawing on the whole of knowledge from all of history. But one question drives every student at every level of their education: Given what we know now, where can we go from here?

It is useful to remember at the beginning of this new school year that the best schools arise in communities where everyone remains a student for life and asks this same driving question over and over again. When measures of success are no longer GPAs, SATs, and GREs, but schools that work, infrastructure that endures, social structures that support rather than thwart human potential, the stakes become clear to all of us. Education, in the end, lies at the heart of every community’s aspirations. It defines what kind of future awaits. It determines whether we get on with life with trepidation or hope.

Fifty-six hundred students return to Newtown’s public schools next week. Hundreds more head off to private schools and college soon after. We all have a stake in their success, and we want them to know they have our full support and best wishes.