Dear CommuniTEA,
You have one final opportunity to witness the Senior Capstone magic in person when Jameson Drum shares his presentation on Fire Resilient Trails: Using Recreational Areas as a Wildfire Buffer next Monday, April 27 beginning promptly at 1:30pm in Building One.
Rosie's Reflection on Your Kindergartner's Trajectory to Senior Capstones
This week I had the privilege of sitting in on our high school seniors’ capstone presentations, and I have to share what I witnessed, because it draws a very clear through line on what we have been doing at TEA for the past 15 years.
The seniors stood up and spoke with the kind of authority and poise that stops you in your tracks. I sat there with eyes wide, on the edge of my seat in awe. They weren’t presenting safe, tidy topics. They were wrestling with real complexity…legal loopholes in international humanitarian law, the deep and contested conflict between ranchers and wildlife agencies over wolf reintroduction. Hard things. Nuanced things. Things that don’t have clean answers. Things they put themselves in the middle of by creating their own project and living out the experience of deep research and field work they created themselves.
They moved through the complexity with eloquence, conviction, and genuine intellectual courage.
What struck me most was this: they weren’t reciting what they’d been told to believe. They were navigating with their values. Using what they’ve internalized: constructive adversity, multiple perspectives, character over comfort, as a compass to find their own way through difficult terrain. That is not something you can teach in a single lesson or a single year. That is something that gets built over years.
When your child sits in a circle and learns to listen to a perspective different from their own, that is the beginning. When they work through something hard and stay with it instead of walking away, that is the beginning. When they are treated as a capable, whole person with something real to contribute… that is the beginning of everything I saw on that stage this week.
I have been at TEA since the very first day this school opened its doors. I have watched the vision we built this place on, move through children year after year. But watching those seniors – many of whom I knew as kindergartners – step into their full selves was something I will carry for a long time. It was my dream of this place being actualized in real time. It's a dream that's rooted in creating something different, meaningful and disruptive from the educational system that most of us have known.
Your child is on that same path. What we do together right now matters more than it is possible to fully see in the moment. I see it, I wanted you to know, and I want you with us.
—Rosie Striffler, Kindergarten Crew Leader
