We have so much to celebrate, be in awe of, and savor as we come to the end of what has been a wonderfully successful school year for Primary Day, its students, and our school as a community. Our teachers have given their best to nurture the growth of our young friends; and we know that as we partner with parents to help raise good people, school and home often find ourselves swimming upstream against strong and negative cultural currents that ignore what is good for children.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s article How We’ve Lost Our Moorings as a Society talks about the foundational value of mangroves along tropical coastlines and uses them as a metaphor for the value of filtering, stabilizing, buffering, protecting, and preserving. Friedman writes, “To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today, but not just in nature. Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative, and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.”

I highly commend Friedman’s article to you because there are fewer and fewer social institutions which provide strong or authentic models for our children. In an odd way, by providing the finest education for the most important years, Primary Day is countercultural because our whole reason for being is to serve the very unique needs of young children. As we break for summer, it is important that parents continue to provide those metaphorical mangrove functions that lead to healthy development, strong intellects, intact psyches, thoughtful questions, and civil discourse. The shelter of Primary Day roots will not just await the 2024-25 school year; they will live within our students as our second graders emerge into the wider world and as our younger friends swim through summer and return to our moorings come September.