Have a Wonderful Winter Break!

Aloha Island School ‘Ohana,

Here we are; we made it to Winter Break! I hope you and your whole family have wonderful ways to close out 2024 and ring in the new year. At Island School, we have our rituals and traditions this time of year too – from the sweet Holiday  Sing-a-Long with Elementary and Nā Pua Keiki that we got to enjoy today to secret gift exchanges and spirit weeks. And at the same time, Winter Break can be a necessary time for a change of routine - a chance to spend extra time doing the things we love and / or extra time with the people we love. Whether your family tradition to celebrate this time of year is Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice and/or New Year’s, I hope your children have meaningful extra time as they turn towards enjoying their school break. But before I sign off with you for 2024, I’d like to share some important thinking I’ve been doing around phones / “smart devices” and their impact on school life and our children’s lives.

As I see more and more students struggle with the role phones play in their lives, our lives, I worry more and more about the impact of “smart devices” on our students. I’ve been spending some of my time engaging in the most recent research on how children’s lives have been impacted as their brains are growing and developing in this context as smart-digital-device natives. In the past few months, we’ve had to intervene at school in more ways lately from elementary school through the high school regarding problematic exchanges via phones/smart-devices that impact our learning community. Here’s an invitation, one that I’ve shared with our faculty and staff too. If you haven’t already, consider reading or listening to The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. This is the leading source on critical research regarding how phones and smart-personal devices are impacting our children. If you know yourself and you don’t have time to read the book anytime soon, check out either this video (50 min or so) or this article from The Atlantic that preceded the publication of the full book. (Please note the article has some supporting links that require a subscription to The Atlantic. There is a free-trial option or you can just ignore those links.)

Phones are a great example of the critical partnership between school and home. So, I hope as we go forward into 2025, we will spend time together thinking about how we partner through issues like phones and how we support our students, your children at school, at home, with friends, with family – all while they are also needing to develop essential human interaction skills. 

We’ve got so much important work to do together in 2025, and I am looking forward to it all. I wish you and yours a joyful season, and truly know how grateful we are that you have chosen Island School as your partner for these critical years of your children’s lives.

P.S. Mahalo to everyone who has already donated to the Annual Voyager Fund this year! If you haven't already, please consider a tax-deductible donation before the end of the year to help us meet our goal of 100% family participation.

Together,

Nancy Naramada P’29

Head of School