On Tuesday, May 19, 7:00-8:00 pm, you will get an opportunity to hear from Mike and the Admin Team about the thinking and planning for next fall in this age of remote learning. Middle and Upper School parents/guardians are welcome to register for the Zoom webinar using this link.

If you have any questions that you would like Mike and the Admin Team to answer, please send them in advance to Tiffany Lobner. We look forward to seeing you there!

Last week, the Northwest School community extended tremendous generosity at Pizazz Rewritten, raising just shy of $260,000 for The Northwest Experience Fund and the Raymond Taussig Terry Financial Aid Endowment. Thank you to all who participated! You made our first virtual event a great success! You can learn more, watch the videos, and donate here.

Thanks to all of the amazing volunteers and faculty, including book award sponsors, happy hour hosts, graphic designer Barbara Chin, the Pizazz event planning committee, Elvin Jones, Jonathan Hochberg, Lynda Lopez, Kim Armstrong, Mike McGill, Peter Woodburn, Tiffany Lobner, Jo Nardolillo, and anyone else we might have missed. A big shout-out to the student performers: Jonah, Jeffrey, Freya, Jack, Carrie, Roxanne, and Isabelle. We could not have done this without you!

Parent/Guardians, faculty, and students are invited to view and discuss Screenagers and Screenagers NEXT CHAPTER. While these films were relevant prior to our technological response to the pandemic, we hope viewing these films now and discussing them with other community members offers students and families more tools and support in meeting the challenge of remote learning, working, and socializing.

Please use this link to access the Screenagers films from April 28-May 12. Your registration will allow you to access each film three times. Discussion for the films, led by Sue Maul, Amy Berner-Hays, and other Northwest School faculty, will be held on Zoom on the following dates:

• Middle School: May 12, 6:00-7:00 pm
• Upper School: May 14, 7:00-8:00 pm

Learn more about the Screenager films here.

In addition to our scheduled morning counselor coffees, we are now offering biweekly evening parent/guardian Zoom calls to talk about parenting in these challenging times. We will be joined by parent educator Sarina Natkin and former Northwest School counselor and Little School Head of School Peter Berner-Hays. Please email thoughts or questions to JoAnna Hanks to help frame the questions.

Click here to join the biweekly Zoom meetings at 7:00 pm, on Wednesdays, May 13 and May 27.

On Wednesday, May 6, at 2:00 am, Director of Facilties and Transportation Tony Kaufmann received an alarm call on our Haus West building. Police were called and responded in force, with multiple units and a police dog. Someone had broken in at the Crawford entrance. Police sent in the dog and followed through, searching all the floors. They eventually found the perpetrator behind the heater in the basement. Besides damage to the door, which likely will need to be replaced, the only mess was spilled vegetable oil in the basement.

Tony has quickly built a solid relationship with the Seattle Police Department East Precinct. A thank you to Tony for keeping us safe and watching over our beloved campus.

Lylianna Allala, Climate Justice Director at the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability & Environment and co-creator of the new podcast, Growing Old: Tales from an Urban Canopy, will be the first in a series of guest speakers focused on environmental sustainability as a follow-up to Earth Day. Students, parents, alumni, and faculty, are invited to join this Zoom conversation and Q&A session Wednesday, May 13, 4:00-5:00 pm.

The goal of the series is to convene engaging, informal, community conversations with people working on environmental-related issues from a variety of sectors and approaches. Come join the conversation!

Zoom Link
Meeting ID: 949 7298 5893
Password: 014134

If you have any questions, please reach out to Jenny Cooper.

On Tuesday, May 12, 6:30-7:30 pm, Director of College Counseling Erin Miller will be joined by Matt Steiner, from the Compass Education Group, for a program designed to follow the practice ACT offered to 10th grade students in early May. Whether or not you participated in that practice exam, 10th grade students (and their parents/guardians) are encouraged to attend this webinar. 

The webinar will provide information about how to interpret your score report and the broader landscape of college testing will be provided. In addition, Erin will forecast what is to come in the college process in the 11th and 12th grades. Given the uncertainties with testing this year, we have also decided to open the webinar to 11th grade students and families, and Matt will dedicate a portion of their remarks to the current admissions and testing landscape and its challenges for the class of 2021. Please pre-register for the webinar here.

Parenting Coffees with the School Counselors will continue virtually as we all work to make sense of the hows and whats of our parenting roles in the time of COVID-19. These events are intended to offer NWS parents and guardians a space to connect with other caregivers, build community, and have a safe and open forum to discuss the challenges and joys that come with parenting tweens and teens. Resources are shared, parent-to-parent advice is given/received, and we celebrate the successes (and challenges) that transform our homes.

On one of these dates, we will be joined by Sarina Behar Natkin as our co-facilitator. Sarina is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, Certified Parent Coach, Speaker, Author, and parent of two Northwest School students.

Coffees will be held on Zoom. Parenting Coffees will be held on the following dates:

Tuesday, May 12, 9:15-10:00 am - Upper School Parenting Coffee with Megan and Erin

• Zoom link
• Meeting ID: 435 382 028
• Password: 014691

Tuesday, May 26, 9:15-10:15 am - All School Parenting Coffee with Megan, Erin, and Sarina

• Zoom link
• Meeting ID: 794 640 255
• Password: 010479

If you missed the last meeting, click here for a report from Erin North on the contents of the parenting coffee.

On May 21, 4:00-6:00 pm, via Zoom, we are excited to join Jonathan Warren for a discussion about racial literacy and what is at stake. This event is open to parents, guardians, faculty, and students. 

Drawing on several decades of research on social inequalities in Brazil, Vietnam, and the U.S., Jonathan will describe racial literacy, explain why there are varying degrees of it within and between societies, discuss why it is important to nurture this capacity, and identify some of the barriers that exist to building it. Following his brief talk, participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and then deliberate on the ways in which The Northwest School and its broader community could foster higher levels of racial literacy. Click here to read Jonathan's bio.

Click here for the Zoom link.

Looking for practical, actionable diversity and inclusion training that people love? On May 30, 9:00 am-12:00 pm, and June 4, 3:00-6:00 pm, we are hosting an ally skills workshop that teaches simple everyday techniques you can use to make your workplace more inclusive. This workshop will teach people how to recognize when they have power and influence, when they can best act as an ally, and how to take effective action to make their workplace better.

After a 30-minute introduction, most of the workshop will be spent in small groups discussing real-world scenarios in which an ally could take action. Each group will share their solutions in a group report-out led by the facilitator. Participants will learn ally skills by practicing them in discussion groups: listening, amplifying voices, apologizing and correcting themselves, and more. The workshop will conclude with each participant setting a specific goal for their future ally work.

Board President Cynthia Tee will facilitate both workshops, with Math teacher Frances Tee joining as a co-facilitator on May 30. Cynthia was formerly the Executive Director of Ada Developers Academy, a non-profit, tuition-free training program for software development targeted at women and non-binary people, based in Seattle. She also actively speaks at events about diversity and inclusion and has facilitated the Allyship Workshop, originated by the Ada Initiative and Frameshift Consulting, LLC, for teams across several companies in Seattle.

Each event is limited to 30 participants. RSVP here.

Please click here to view additional college admissions updates and College Counseling programming.

About E-News: The weekly E-News covers a two-week period of upcoming events, parent reminders, and campus news.