Dear SWCS Parents:
Saturday night’s Rockin’ Riverboat Ride Dinner & Auction will not only be a school-wide event with music, riverboat games and amazing deals. It will also be a night for our community to celebrate the staff and raise funds to hire a Field Work Coordinator at SW Charter School. The following description of this new position has been posted on the auction website as well.
The goal of this year’s auction is to raise money for a new position at SW Charter: A Fieldwork Coordinator.
Our mission at Southwest Charter School is to provide a creative learning environment where students develop a sense of place and become stewards of the natural world and active citizens within our community. Our vision is to look beyond classroom walls. We believe that healthy communities are created by engaged, informed & compassionate citizens. Through service, integrated curriculum and experiential learning, we provide opportunities for our students to actively build relationships locally, inspiring them to become catalysts of change in a global community.
Field work lies at the center of how we achieve these goals. We endeavor to get our students out of the classroom and into the community as much as possible. Students cannot learn about our community from textbooks. There are none written specifically about Portland! They have to experience it and engage all their senses in the learning process.
Our desire to have a field work coordinator is a key way for Southwest Charter School to achieve these goals. Firstly, having a field work coordinator can support our hardworking teachers. The time and effort needed to plan and execute quality field work experiences can be challenging for teachers to fit into their busy days. A field work coordinator can work collaboratively with the teachers to seek out unique experiences that are tightly tied to teachers’ curriculum plans, freeing up the teachers time for direct work with their students.
The second key function of the field work coordinator is to connect with the community. The field work coordinator can become a new kind of face to the community for Southwest Charter School, a person making tangible and meaningful connections between our students and the real work happening in our world. Connections made can lead to all kinds of additional benefits to our school, from new field work, to media connections or even funding opportunities.
Lastly, the field work coordinator can allow us to focus more distinctly on our mission. Schools everywhere are under increasing pressures year-after-year to improve everything they do, from improved teacher development, increased academic achievement, to implementing new Common Core standards. Though we have an obligation to meet these new challenges, we do not want to sacrifice our core mission to do so. Instead, the field work coordinator can help us to ensure that the support for our mission is built into our school in a real and meaningful way.
Friends of Southwest Charter School 