Page 8 - Demo

ANNUAL IMPACT REPORT
Chiaravalle Montessori · 425 Dempster Street Evanston, IL 60201 · 847.864.2190 · www.chiaravalle.org
My son is in 8th grade this year. We’ve been at Chiaravalle since kindergarten and I could fill a library with stories of why we came and why we stayed—the community, the pedagogy, the commitments to empathy and lifelong learning—but what I really want to talk about is this: the past year was hard. Really hard. Like so many families, the pandemic flipped ours upside-down. My son and I lived
in four states, chasing work where I could get it. Michigan, Nevada, California, and back to Illinois, me and a twelve- year-old kid in a global pandemic with a laptop for remote seventh grade. This school, this community, his teachers and friends and the mothers who cared for us in ways I’m only beginning to understand, let alone articulate—you were the rock.
Every day he logged into class and I’d hear him laughing. I’d be in the middle of teaching my own students and from the other room I’d hear, “Well, in that article about voter suppression we read in The Atlantic... ” He ran across my Zoom meetings to find cans of beans to do weight-lifting in gym class. He met up with his friends on Facetime and Discord to read and research, finish projects. He met up with Victoria, bouncing in and out of her online meeting space with questions: “It’s fine, mom, we figured it out.”
At the end of the day he’d say, “It’s time to close the computers,” and we’d hike the Huron River, Red Rock Canyon, the Redwoods, talking about what had happened since we saw each other at breakfast; the big world out there, and our little ones in here.
I don’t have language yet for what it means to know, when everything is falling around you, that your kid is okay.
I recently overheard him explaining this time in our lives to some friends. He used the word adventure. I hadn’t thought of it as an adventure. I’d thought, survival. But sitting here now, I think I’m going to steal his perspective. I’m going
to look at the world the way he does: full of possibility and excitement and people who care about each other, who demonstrate that care in word and action.
He learned this at Chiaravalle. So did I.
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections, most recently The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, National Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University.
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