From Our Executive Director

Will McKenna PhotoSeptember 2017

This is ABI's 10 year anniversary and I've never been more excited about our future. This year, our schools are doing very specific work related to curriculum implementation, monitoring of student progress and performance, engaging with families, and creating schools that are inviting and attractive places to learn and work. Throughout our website, this work will be highlighted in great detail. More than ever before, we want our website to be informative and interactive—the place to go to learn about and participate in the work of our schools. To provide a better platform for this effort, we've completely redesigned our website. We think the new look is sharp and crisp. It is also much more functional. Over the coming months, we'll be working hard to take advantage of this functionality to provide families and the community with a significantly better viewing and learning experience. To support the effective communication of our mission, we'll also continue writing Friday Letters (see links below), blogging, and posting regularly on our Facebook pages. 

This summer we held our very first ABI Day, a celebration of the new school year with staff from Afya, Brehms Lane, and Tunbridge. This was a day of learning about the past decade and planning for the future. About that future I encouraged staff, this year, to "be" ten things. 

  1. Be: Organized—Great teachers are exceptionally well organized
  2. Be: Proud—Great schools are filled with students, teachers, and families that are alive with pride
  3. Be: Present—Great teachers come to work all the time, not some or most of the time
  4. Be: Humble—Great teachers and school leaders are self-possessed and listen more than they talk
  5. Be: Smart—Great teachers are thinkers: they ponder and plan and then they act
  6. Be: Fierce—Great teachers have no fear: they stand up for what they believe in every day
  7. Be: Creative—Great teachers and school leaders are expressive and life-giving
  8. Be: Fun—Great teachers love to laugh--even when the joke's on them
  9. Be: Peaceful—Great teachers love what they do; they are at peace with the job
  10. Be: ABI—Everyone involved in our schools is a founder of our future; our work starts right now

By visiting our website you are joining our community. Being with us, I trust, is time well spent. 

- Will McKenna
Founder and Executive Director

Afya Friday Letter  Brehms Lane Friday Letter  Tunbridge Friday Letter