2008 Family Weekend Parent Speech

When I was asked to say something today, I immediately agreed, enthusiastic to be able to pay tribute to our school.  But to my surprise, when I sat down to compose something, even though I make my living by using words, I found it difficult to find the right ones to describe my feelings about Stewart Home School.
How do you describe the relief a father feels when, after a long and discouraging search, he finally finds the right place to send his child?  Or the gratitude a mother feels when she realizes that her son is being taken care of by loving people who can give him what he needs better than she can?  How do you explain coming to the realization that the best life for your loved one doesn’t necessarily exist within the confines of your home where, although you can control most everything, you can’t provide peer friendships or enough activities or the measure of freedom and independence that allows a person to grow?    

The decision to send our son to Stewart Home School was an agonizing one.  Honestly, I was terrified it wouldn’t be right.  But from the very first day we brought him here and David said goodbye to us and walked away without a backward glance with his correspondent Peggy Gould….while I scrambled around the corner and sobbed…Stewart Home School has been much more than I ever thought possible.  David has thrived here, grown here and has been given more opportunities here.

At home, David is surrounded by people who love him…but at Stewart, David is not only surrounded by people who love him but he has a fuller, more well-rounded life.  Where I live in New Jersey, sometimes it seems that if your child isn’t in the gifted and talented program and bound for graduate school, people feel sorry for you.  But here, the attitude is different.  The students are understood, appreciated and celebrated for who they are and for the strengths they DO have.  I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me to have Stewart staff members actually thank me for sharing David with them and acknowledge what I’ve known all along:  that our children are blessings.

The rolling hills, the historic mansion house, the manicured grounds are the apparent things…but we all know that those things aren’t what make Stewart Home School what it is.  It’s the dedicated staff that makes the place what it is…and how they honor the trust we’ve put in them by respecting and taking care of our loved ones.  I think everyone in this room is all too aware of the patience and kindness required of the people who work at Stewart.  The fact that they choose to spend their professional lives helping our children makes them angels on earth as far as I’m concerned.

It was when we came for our first Family Weekend that I became fully certain we had made the right choice….and that was because of all the other families I saw here…some who had traveled great distances…all who were trying to do right by their children and loved ones.  I felt a kinship that only people who have been through the same experience feel. 

Each time I come here and look at the variety of students, see their various ages and abilities, I marvel at the fact that it all works out here….but somehow it does and, from my perspective at least, at Stewart Home School, life IS great in 2008.