A joyful education for the head, hands and heart!
Dear Fellow Pleasant Ridge Parents,  

PRWS Faculty and staff have spent the past several days preparing and implementing ways to support student learning and engagement remotely. Many of us have learned how to host Zoom calls and meetings to practice physical distancing, and worked out ways that we can support each other and the entire school community through this unprecedented time. Teachers have arranged pick-up of materials, multiple lessons for the students (as appropriate by age), and planned for continued engagement with families over the coming weeks.  

One of the most heartening parts of the last several days has been the number of phone calls, emails and texts we have received full of concern and appreciation for the faculty and staff here at the school. It was wonderful to see how quickly your thoughts turned to them as we all face this together.  To answer that concern for you, PRWS is committed to paying faculty and administrative staff their regular pay as long as we possibly can. We hope that most of you will be able to continue to support the school through regularly scheduled tuition payments, allowing us to continue to support the very lifeblood of the school – the faculty and staff.    

As many of you know from our All-School Meeting presentation this past fall, we are an organization that depends on tuition to fund our expenses. And although we have built up a small reserve for things like building emergencies, we do not have the level of savings that we will need to continue to pay salary without continuing tuition payments.  To that end, we are currently holding everyone to their tuition contract for the remainder of the academic year.  However, we know that there are families who may be radically affected by the sudden economic impact of this pandemic. If you are facing such challenges please reach out to the PRWS Finance Coordinator, Jen Cassellius at finance@pleasantridgewaldorf.org , so we can find a solution together to help get you through this in a way that works for your family. 

This is just another part of the balancing act of living in community, and through communication and mutual interdependence, we can work through this together. We are exploring ways to reduce costs in as many areas as possible, extend as much flexibility as necessary, and continue to support the faculty and staff who are all working so hard to make this new approach to learning successful.  

Thank you all,
    
PRWS Board of Directors and Finance Committee