Bobcat Stories - Bosque School | Private school serving grades 6-12 in ABQ, NM

Sep 13 2024

It is hard to believe that we are already more than four weeks into Bosque’s 30th year. The past month has flown by with the busyness of our staffulty orientation and professional development week, our new student and family orientation, the excitement of the first day of school, a stunning senior sunrise, a beautiful convocation ceremony, grade-based retreats, and the pleasure of welcoming all of our parents and guardians into the classroom during Back-to-School Night. The best word to describe our launch has been smooth and joyful.

I’m excited to share that we’ve started this year celebrating some great successes:

We achieved a 30% growth in new student enrollment over last year and reduced student attrition by 4%. We’ve already kicked off the 25/26 admission season and nothing is more important than having our community share their positive experiences of the school with prospective families. You can help by encouraging folks to engage in the admission process, introducing friends and colleagues to the school, inviting them to events like our upcoming Fall Fiesta, and writing online reviews. Whether you are an alum or current parent, grandparent/friend, current/past trustee, or community partner, I would be so grateful if you could take a few minutes to share your positive reflections about Bosque School (even in just a couple of sentences) on our review sites.
Thanks to the efforts of our amazing philanthropy director, Valery Galanter, and the engagement of our community, last year we surpassed Bosque’s biggest-ever annual fundraising goal of $580k, raising $614k (this is above and beyond Jenny Plane’s transformative million-dollar gift). We also had 98% staffulty engagement in the Bosque Fund, surpassing the national average of 76.3%. That is truly an amazing statistic and reflects the commitment of our incredible staffulty to not only support their students academically, socially, and personally, but also to stand in support of the mission and values of our school. We have a goal each year to have 100% community participation, so whether you are a current or past parent or guardian, alum, or friend, I hope you will help us start moving the needle on that goal.
Our annual student, staffulty, and parent and guardian surveys showed many impressive upward trends. Please take a moment to read some of the highlights here.

Hot Topics
At the beginning of each school year, I open our August staffulty meeting by sharing summer “hot topics” that feel important to engage and reflect on. This year’s topics included:

The impact and importance of the Pixar Movie, Inside Out 2: This summer’s blockbuster grossed more than $1.5 billion and shattered animation box office records. For those of you who aren’t familiar, In Inside Out, which debuted in 2015, we are introduced to 11-year-old Riley, who is the same age as many of our incoming sixth graders. Like our newest Bobcats, Riley is facing a big change, with a move to a new city, a new school, and all new friends. She is joined by other key characters in the movie who are personifications of her core emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. These five characters operate out of Headquarters, the control center of Riley's mind, very clearly displaying how her emotions steer her reactions and experiences. Joy, the most dominant of Riley's emotions, is committed to keeping her happy, actively working to sideline Sadness, whom she sees as a threat. Through a mishap, Joy and Sadness end up ejected from Headquarters, leaving Anger, Fear, and Disgust in charge—creating chaos as Riley struggles with the adjustment to her new life and her sense of self. As they travel through Riley's mind to get back to Headquarters, Joy realizes the value Sadness brings to Riley's life in helping her process difficult experiences and connect more deeply with others. This allows Riley to share with her parents how challenging the move has been for her, meaningfully connect with them, and authentically navigate her emotions, which ultimately helps her adjust to her new life.

In Inside Out Two, Riley becomes a teenager and faces the inevitable emotional, social, physical, and psychological changes and challenges that accompany adolescence. The main cast of emotional characters from the first film—Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust are suddenly joined in Headquarters by new and more complex emotions, including Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Boredom.

Very quickly, these new emotions wreak havoc on the original team’s dynamic, especially as Riley is faced with enhanced social opportunities, a greater desire to fit in and be popular, and less confidence in her own voice and sense of self as she begins high school (not an unfamiliar reality for our rising 9th graders each fall!).
While it is easy to take a Pixar movie as simply entertainment, there are so many valuable lessons engrained in this storyline for every one of us to better understand ourselves, our children, and others. By creating relatable characters out of each emotion, the filmmakers established a common language and understanding of their nuances. I grounded my convocation remarks this year in the important life lessons of Inside Out 2, starting with an acknowledgment of the inevitable anxiety that every one of us, were facing as we began the new school year.

We live in a culture that frequently villainizes many emotions, including anxiety. While any unchecked emotion can be destabilizing, it is also important to remember all the good things anxiety does for us. It helps us focus and pay attention, listen to our gut, and keep us safe. It would be unhealthy and even dangerous if we all didn’t live with an appropriate amount of anxiety.

Bosque School’s signature whole-child WELLBEING curriculum, creates opportunities to help our students understand their emotions and give themselves permission to experience them in natural and healthy ways. We seek to support our students as they build their capacity to recognize when any one emotion has shifted into overdrive and to identify and practice the coping skills that help them restore healthy boundaries and emotional balance. In addition, our WELLBEING curriculum helps our students develop their emotional quotient (EQ). EQ refers to our ability to recognize, understand, manage, and influence our own emotions and the emotions of others. It includes skills such as empathy, emotional regulation, social awareness, and interpersonal communication. It works in partnership with their Intelligence Quotient (IQ), which measures cognitive abilities, such as logical reasoning, problem-solving, and analytical skills. The research is unequivocally clear that our EQ is as, or possibly even more important than, our IQ.

A second hot topic we discussed was Jonathan Haight’s New York Times Bestseller, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness and the tidal wave of initiatives and media regarding the harmful impacts of smartphones and social media, the importance of re-instituting play into childhood, and how schools can and should respond. I wrote about this book and Bosque’s response to ban cell phones in our middle school in last May’s Buzz. During the 23/24 academic year, Bosque was a local and national leader as our 6th-grade team piloted collecting 6th-grade cell phones each day. After the success of that pilot, we made the decision last spring to update our policy to collect all smartphones and devices for our entire middle school. We are also actively engaged in discussions regarding potential adjustments to our upper school phone policy. I am very proud of our school for Challenging Education in this very critical way. Our decision continues to be validated as news story after news story came out over the summer (some samples):

We also are consciously thinking about how we can respond to the equally important research in Haight’s book regarding the loss of the play-based childhood that was present until the early 1990s and was characterized by independence, autonomy, and free play. This loss has impacted students’ sense of confidence, resilience, collaboration, conflict resolution, and problem-solving skills. As a middle and high school, we are not graced with playgrounds, but we are actively exploring how we can create more play spaces on campus, from bins of Frisbees and balls that students can borrow during breaks to possible additions of tether and gaga ball spaces, cornhole, coloring/beading/maker space stations, four square courts, ping pong, Foosball, etc. Our students are hungry for ways to meaningfully connect with each other and to play free from the distractions of their phones. We are confident we will see high engagement with these enhancements.

The final hot topic we discussed was preparing for the election season to come. As we look toward the fall election season, at a time when our country is increasingly divided, our goal at Bosque School is to stay grounded in our mission, core values, and Equity, Community and Culture Principles and Best Practices. These core resources provide us with relevant, reflective, and responsive philosophical underpinnings to guide our engagement through moments, big and small, and they illustrate how we seek to exist in relation to our students, our colleagues, our families, and through the contributions we each make within the broader world.

Conversations began last winter in our Academic Leadership Team regarding how to best plan for and navigate this fall’s upcoming elections. The splintering of school communities across the country over recent presidential elections was difficult and damaging, and to avoid this, we have been proactively planning for how to best support our students and our staffulty through education, discussion, and application of our philosophical underpinnings.

In our planning, we revisited and updated a resource we have used to guide our response in recent presidential elections: Guiding Principles for Elections. These guidelines are introduced by the following preamble, taken from our ECC Principles and Best Practices resource: At Bosque School, we commit to creating a learning environment that respects and dignifies the diverse identities and lived experiences of our students, their families, our colleagues, and the many communities that we engage as an institution. This commitment is grounded in our belief that an inclusive and equitable learning environment is essential to fulfilling our school’s mission and our mandate as educators to enable our students to make a positive difference in a diverse and changing world.

Through our core value of inspiring academic excellence, it is important that we engage our students in thoughtful and developmentally appropriate curricula and conversations about elections and democracy. That is occurring throughout the fall in both classrooms and morning meetings. Past topics have included democracy, voting history, absentee ballots, etc.

At Bosque School, we intentionally deliver a Challenging Education, and we recognize and appreciate that these conversations and the heightened tensions surrounding any election can be difficult in a variety of ways. First and foremost, we seek to create a safe and brave space for all of our students and staffulty to embrace our mission and to “...lead lives of intellectual curiosity, personal integrity, and compassionate contribution to a more just world.”

We hope that the lessons learned from the 2016 and 2020 elections prepare us as a community and as a nation to come together and lean into our shared values of inspiring academic excellence, cultivating community, fostering integrity, and learning from place.

In Closing
The energy and opportunity at Bosque School feel truly powerful as we start our 30th year. Remember to invite your friends and family to Fall Fiesta. We can't wait to share the joy of our community with them! Finally, please save the date for our 30th-anniversary celebration, which will occur on the weekend of May 16-17, with a full weekend of celebratory activities and events, culminating in a Gala on the evening of May 17! We hope all of you will join us at this marker moment for our community, and please watch for communications to come!

I am so grateful for each of your roles in the past, present, and future of our amazing school.

In community,

Jessie Barrie, Ph.D.
Head of School