Parents' Corner
By Evelyn Hardesty, Parent
From the Winter 2003 Newsletter

Recently, I saw an actress interviewed on television. She owned a company that created software intended to get children excited about science. She mentioned statistics that show students in the United States have less scientific and mathematical knowledge than in many European and Asian countries. (There was a time when the U.S. ranked number one in these areas.)

I find it interesting that the two classes recently formed by DVS students are math and biology. While traditional schools use expensive resources to get the "medicine" to go down, our children are learning by choice with books, paper, and pencils.

My daughter Rose recently asked me to help her with long division, an area of mathematics that never took a permanent foothold in my mind. I went to the Internet to refresh my memory and found a web site that would work out long division problems for you. When I started to put one of the problems from Rose's work sheet into the program, she said, "I want to work these out on my own. Let's make up a problem [to use on the web site]."

In my experience, this is reflective of what it means to be involved with a school raising adults, not children.

Diablo Valley School admits students of any race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin to all rights and privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students and staff at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan program, and athletic and other school administered programs.

Our school has enrolled students from: Antioch, Berkeley, Clayton, Concord, Danville, El Cerrito, Lafayette, Livermore, Martinez, Oakland, Oakley, Pittsburg, Pleasant Hill, San Francisco, San Leandro, Vallejo, Walnut Creek and other communities in the Bay Area.