Better Together: The Power of Community

October 10, 2025
It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a community to raise a school. This past Saturday, we were blessed with an abundance of community as Parker families, faculty, and friends gathered together for our Community Work Day. Community Work Day is an important event in the year of our school for one obvious reason: We get a LOT done! However, this day is also quite meaningful in the life of our school because it embodies and exemplifies the values we hold most dear: generations coming together in service, caring for each other and our world.
The importance of our Community Work Day cannot be understated. The hard work and effort our volunteers pour into tending to our campus and building all goes towards ensuring that our students and faculty can maximize usage of our expansive 77-acre campus. Thanks to their hard work, our students can now enjoy cleared walking trails through our woods and even a new bridge! Forest Toddlers have a fresh and abundant supply of firewood to keep them warm through the winter months and new stumps for seating at our pavilion. Our gardens are weeded and cleared, windows are sparkling clean, and our woodshop is tidy and organized.

Thank you to the Matzen family, for providing stumps and woodchips to surface a new learning center near our pond. A special thanks also goes out to the Penderleith family, who brought their portable workshop to the yurt and crafted beautiful Shaker pegs for our students to hang their coats! 

Children learn best not by listening to what we say but by watching what we do. In this way, Community Work Day provides a powerful opportunity for our adults to lead by example, showing our children how thoughtful and invested community members take care of shared space and each other. Watching our students work alongside their grown-ups, it is clear that they are brimming with pride and confidence.

Sharing the responsibility of work shows our children that we trust them, that they are important, and that we care about the things that matter to them. We ended our day with immense gratitude for this opportunity to gather together and do the work our community does best — joining together to create an even more beautiful Parker.