At the beginning of our national health crisis, we wrote about the hope and resilience of our Rainier Prep community. We said that we have this time to understand the real connections of our work and life more deeply. We said that we have this time to re-discover, re-imagine, and even re-invent our common humanity. And we said, as we have before, that Rainier Prep will meet another challenge as a community — and thrive together.
Those words still ring true, but have taken on a completely different urgency. Our families’ and students’ lives MUST BE VALUED the same as the lives of any other. We bear witness to the tragic reality of centuries of privilege and power that continue to uphold, sanction, and promote racism, and we affirm that yes, this is nothing new. We will react with empathy, purpose, and power — and this is nothing new, either.
Rainier Prep affirms our solidarity with all protests against state-sanctioned violence against black people, indigenous people, people of color, and immigrants. We will not restrain ourselves from boldly educating our community with the facts of our nation’s history, our nation’s present, and our nation’s future. We will not deviate from our mission to prepare our students to take their rightful places as EQUAL, attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible citizens of a nation that has always depended on their strength and skills, but must now recognize and advance their potential along with their accomplishments, their goals, and their vision.
We will continue to elevate our community’s agency, power, and choice — and we will reach out to partners as never before to ensure this. We will continue to promote and draw forth the skills, resources, resilience, and strength of our families and community — and we will transform how we already equip our staff with the anti-racist means to do so, more than we ever have.
Our students are the citizens, demonstrators, change-agents, and voices of justice and equity of today and tomorrow. They are gifts to our community and our nation — as they have always been, but they will become so much more.