It is Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year – tonight. (For those folks who don’t know, I am Jewish.)

Today was the last professional development day for Science Leadership Academy and Science Leadership Academy @ Beeber. On Monday, SLA @ B will open with 125 9th graders, and the educators and students and families will embark on a four-year journey that will build a school community where none existed before. It has been humbling all summer long to watch the community come together, learning with SLA teachers and students. It has been incredible to watch the educators create new UbDs, plan projects, and think about what it means to create an inquiry-driven, project-based school – and how to do it in the context of some very challenging educational times in Philadelphia.

And of course, the new year is a time for reflection. It is time to look back about what got us to this moment… not just the last year, with grants and hiring and facilities planning, but the eight years of the journey of SLA. The goal is to learn from what we did so that the SLA@B folks can make new and more interesting mistakes than the ones we did. The goal is to make it just a little easier than it was for us through the wisdom we’ve tried to accumulate. The goal is to always keep growing, not just outward, but inward as well.

And so while tonight is Rosh Hashanah, for the schools, Monday is the New Year. Kids will be at the door. Teachers will be in their classrooms. And Science Leadership Academy @ Beeber will launch. It’ll be messy. There will be days where people doubt their decision to try to do this. And there will be days when something incredible happens, and everyone wonders how exactly it did.

I get to take a role in this new community… I get to help from a few miles away and offer up the lessons we’ve learned at SLA over the past seven years…. I get to find ways to support a new community within the SLA world. And  I get to do the thing I love more than anything else I’ve done in my professional life, I get to be the principal of Science Leadership Academy.

We are going to learn some incredible lessons this year. We are going to face some profound challenges. And we’re going to try to remember to have a lot of fun, no matter what happens around us.

Shana Tova. Happy New Year.