August 30, 2026
Dear Mirowitz Community,
Monday we had Bounce Back, the day before the first day of school when families come to meet their new teachers. The event was celebratory and spirited. Friends who hadn’t seen each other for hours, days, or months gallivanted all around the building, meeting their teachers, some for the very first time.
I overheard one boy say to another, “You know something, I hated being away for so long. It always feels like a second home when I get to come back to school.”
That is, of course, what all school people want to hear about their school. The kind of place you can come to every day and not worry about what kind of messes or mistakes you might make, putting on your proverbial slippers as you walk in the door.
The most anticipated meeting happened when the newest of new kids got to see their new teachers for the first time. Our kindergartners and their two adults, the lead teacher and the assistant teacher, caught a glimpse of what the future might hold for them. Moments of curiosity, of real joy, in a place designed to be magical and like home at the same time.
Seeing the care people put into welcoming the youngest learners still takes my breath away.
Heading out the door after Bounce Back had wound down, our lead kindergarten teacher stopped for a moment, as if she’d just lived through the most sublime hour of her life.
“This day. This day,” she said, smiling serenely. “It’s why I got into this work so many years ago.”
Neither she nor I is Jewish, but there’s a Hebrew phrase that seemed to spread across her face just then, one that captures the mood of her expression better than anything I could come up with on my own, Simchat Gan (שמחת גן). It translates to “the joy of kindergarten.” Simchah is also one of our core values.
Around the building, outside the kindergarten classroom, a pond breathes life into the air. Pollinator gardens ring the school, and somehow that feels like an echo of what happens inside the walls, too. The same quiet tending, the same trust that something will grow if you give it light and time and attention.
The richness of what students can discover in themselves, and what a teacher or a guide can recognize and mirror back to them, that’s what school should always be about.
What I know for certain is this: tending those growing, learning places is not so different from creating a home for the self, or for the people we love. It’s the work of building and sustaining the conditions of being alive, long after the last bell has rung, the questions have been answered, and the friendships have taken hold.
May it always be so.
Shabbat Shalom,
Brian Thomas
Interim Head of School