Hello UA Families,

It has been another eventful week at Urban Academy!

Thank you to our families who joined us for our Commitment to Excellence webinar that Ms. Ball hosted this week. If you were unable to attend, but are interested in learning more about assessment, course offerings as students get older, and our enriched program please feel free to watch the recorded version here.

Coming up on April 19, we will have Student-led conferences for Grades JK-8 at school and on April 24, we will have parent-teacher-student conferences for Grades 9-12. All the details (registration times, instructions, registration links, dismissal times, etc.) are available to you on the UA Parent Hub.

This week, staff at Urban Academy participated in a professional development session on culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogy. This workshop was a part of continuous professional development sessions on the theme of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice and Belonging (DEIJB) we have had with Levonne Abshire since last year. For us as educators, it is essential that we model life-long learning and reflective practices if our goal is to create inclusive and equitable learning environments for all of our students. In order to achieve this, we need to critically examine and reflect on our own understanding of power and privilege and audit our content and curriculum with a pluralistic lens: Do all our students see themselves, their cultures, languages and literacies represented in our course materials, library books, school celebrations, etc? Do they see role models that resemble them? It’s been great for us as colleagues to have these conversations; to celebrate our achievements so far and to plan for future growth.

As we approach the upcoming holidays, I hope you get to enjoy the spring days and the cherry blossoms! And if you celebrate Easter or Passover, I want to wish you a joyous and meaningful time with your families.

Respectfully yours,

Khatereh Dadar
Associate Principal