Dear Oak Brook Families,
The Oak Brook school community is a supportive and caring community committed to doing the right thing for each of our students. This dedication is shared by students, parents, community members and staff. Because of this, Oak Brook has been recognized as a three time National School of Character by Character.org. We recently completed our National Application Review process and will be working to implement some of the suggestions our evaluators have made to improve our work focused on character development.
Our focus on developing students of strong character, along with helping them manage their social-emotional well being, will continue to encourage and empower student success as they are faced with opportunities and challenges in our ever-changing world. Research tells us that the ability to develop resilience and perseverance when things get tough makes individuals successful. Resiliency and perseverance is one of our focuses through our school improvement plan this year. Additionally, happiness in life comes from our ability to understand and manage emotions. How do we help students become resilient, generous and emotionally intelligent?
A strong partnership between home and school focuses on providing students with a toolkit to manage emotions and show resilience when things get tough. This toolkit will help our students succeed in and out of the classroom. We will be sharing resources with Oak Brook families to help effectively teach character traits our community feels are important. We call these traits our core values. Our core values beginning this year are respect, responsibility, integrity, self-control, kindness and curiosity.
Over the course of the year, we will be inviting you to join us in this important work. First, we would like to extend an invitation to all parents to join our Character Education Advisory Panel. If you would like to join our team, please sign up using the button below. We will meet approximately 2 times this school year in conjunction with one of our PTO meetings. These meetings will be in January and April. Meetings will be held in a hybrid format. We will provide an online link for those of you who can't make it in person. Childcare will be provided.
Each month we will send a character education focused newsletter home detailing what our school is focusing on and giving you an update of our work around character education and social emotional learning. We will also be offering at home activities and information related to our character education work. We hope you will join and try out some of the activities with your family.
We know students need us working together to help set a strong foundation for success this year and in future years. We look forward to working with you as we continue to develop Oak Brook Strong students.
Sincerely,
Katie & Chris
