A New Year Message

Director Vince Durnan shares gratitude for parents, faculty, students, and Operations for a constructive start to the academic year.
Dear USN families,
 
Greetings from a new school year, from my cluttered office here at 2000 Edgehill, now home again. Prepare for a gratitude message—watching these first few days of classes resuming prompts that feeling in abundance for me. And that appreciation comes in different flavors, connected to constituency. In no particular order, here’s an enumeration, with an update at the end about what’s next in our journey to get everyone back on campus.

 
  • Let me start with thanks to you at home, especially for those who’ve contorted their personal and professional lives to be there. Nobody loves school being open more than I (remember those non-snow days?), but with metrics where they’re still hovering, and in consultation with an amazing team of medical advisors, being here in numbers reads as irresponsible. Our neighbor independent schools and our city and our state may succeed in defying epidemiological experience globally—and I’d be delighted if that happened—but right now studying remotely still appears to be the best route to our ultimately being together for any length of time. The creative child care solutions, the pod-making, the earnest effort to link arms (metaphorically), and the commitment to pass this version of the now reconsidered Marshmallow Test are not going unnoticed.
  • Next let us pause to salute our faculty, whether they are planning for days to get hours of programming just right, or practicing volleyball on a newly-assembled outdoor grass court behind the school, or handing out bags (and bags) of materials for home learning, or retooling schedules yet again to best balance what we know about young people with what we know about high academic standards. We may never have hosted, convened, and counted more on evening meetings—not to mention what we’re doing in-house before the sunsets. The collegiality that’s so evident in their work is something that not every school can count on right now—and I’m more impressed than ever.
  • Making it all possible, providing all the motivation and inspiration we need, behold our students, K-12, revealing a resilience that we might not have presumed they’d possess. Not in every minute, not without some wistfulness, not necessarily on demand, but still in abundance. Checking in with my brave little crew of High School advisees has already become a highlight in my day. Their capacity to recalibrate and reinvent serves as a helpful model for those of us with more stuck-in-place mindsets about school, and while it’s far too early to wax predictive about permanent changes in education growing from this jarring experience, my strong sense is that our students will look back at this time as a capacity-builder on their path as lifelong learners and active citizens.
The fact remains, though, that we dearly want to be back here together. The public health numbers offer some good news, with ups and downs combining to trend healthily downward. And then there are the natural experiments happening at schools and universities locally having just opened. Fingers crossed there, but not without worry, given stories emerging daily. Fairest to say, with that backdrop, that we’ll work to create the best in-person connections with teachers and peers that conditions permit, starting with our youngest little Tigers.
 
Each Friday we review the public health trend for the prior two weeks and consider appropriate adjustments for the next two weeks. And meanwhile, we’re working as hard as we know how to get remote in an optimum form, to be ready for whatever the fall, winter, and spring may portend. Advancements in on-site, rapid-result testing could be game changers for all schools, USN included, well in advance of vaccine availability. I’ll keep you posted along the way. And thanks, in turn, for staying aware of everything we’ve been sending to those crowded inboxes in a quest for transparency and community.
 
Things are as ready in the building as they could be—with handwashing stations at every turn, cleaning protocols already in action, and the bipolar ionization air purification system up and running, all thanks to the tireless Operations team, celebrated recently on Channel 4. We need conditions beyond our 7 acres to improve, neighborhood by neighborhood, household by household. Maybe that message is taking root—when it does, we can get open and stay open—there’s the tag line.
 
With that, and with the perhaps surprising twin truths that our enrollment now stands at an all-time high (>1080), while the number of families who did not return, sits at an all-time low (<2%), even in this COVID era, I’ll get back to work. There’s a lot of that going around here. Hard not to, especially in the shadow of the Suffrage centennial on our opening day.
 
Humbled by this moment,
Vince Durnan
Director
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University School of Nashville models the best educational practices. In an environment that represents the cultural and ethnic composition of Metropolitan Nashville, USN fosters each student’s intellectual, artistic, and athletic potential, valuing and inspiring integrity, creative expression, a love of learning, and the pursuit of excellence.