"It is exciting to begin another school year," Pine Bush superintendent of schools Joan Carbone wrote us this week. "Students return today, Sept 2nd, before Labor Day. Every few years this happens especially when Labor Day is so late. We coordinate our school calendar with other school districts in Orange Ulster BOCES and we look at ensuring we have enough instructional days. The end of year schedule also has to coordinate with the NYS Regents."

Carbone went on to note how the district has built in six days for inclement weather closings, but then noted how their first day of the 2015-16 school year was marked with recognition of "32 staff members who have served the district for 20, 25, 30 or 35 years of service and three recipients of Mid Hudson School Study council awards of excellence, along with Christopher Bement Award winner Gayle Britto, secretary in Pakanasink Elementary School.

"Our students return to schools with increased technology and improved facilities as our Capitol Project is essentially complete," the superintendent added. "We are proud of the accomplishments from last year including new Common Core instruction, enriched summer and school academies, virtual field trips and schools all identified as No Place for Hate. This year students return to a new social studies curriculum for grades K-8, a middle school STEAM initiative, school-based mental health clinics, a work and life skill program for high school and middle school special education students, and continued diversity training and No Place for Hate and Positive Behavior initiatives."

Talk about coming back from a challenging year strong!

Similar sentiments were coming in from Ellenville and Rondout Valley administrators as well, albeit under the strains of last-minute preparations as those districts prepare to open for classes next week.

As usual, this all goes to remind us to remind our readers not only about being safer on the roads as school buses start their travels, but also to cherish again the roles that education play in all our lives, young and old. Carbone and others are talking this year about "educating the whole child," a term meant to take into account the various ways in which we each learn differently, but can absorb so much. It gets down to the idea of enabling a joy for learning rather than a punitive system for bad behavior... a proactive rather than a reactive means of bettering us all in our society.

For adults, it means being open to newness at as many points as possible. It means pushing ourselves beyond what we believe to interact with new knowledge that might just shift those beliefs. It means a certain devaluing of the primacy of "principles" for a new willingness to try out compromise in the pursuit of better answers, of deeper understandings.

This past week we saw such a move in the amazing Pope Francis' announcement of a year during which all who have gone through the trauma of abortion can be forgiven by the Catholic Church for their actions. Which move, by decreasing the demonizing of the medical procedure, reboots our ability to discuss it... and possibly move on from the black and white discussion of abortion matters that's been holding our nation's politics hostage for decades now.

Talk about a great preparation for the pope's upcoming visit to the United States, and deepening of the sense of commitment he's asked for in regards to our climate, as well as our approach to economics and the underlying ideal of equity.

Perhaps, we are hoping, this sort of new approach, along with a resurgence of all adults' ability to learn, themselves, via a "whole child" ideal, will move us beyond some of the truly ugly talk that's been surrounding our national debate around presidential politics. Perhaps it will allow us to question the real benefits of national walls, and cause-and-effect tragedies tied to civil rights ideals, instead of merely talking through our fears, or allowing our opinions to be ping-ponged about by celebrities with other agendas in mind.

We welcome the new school year, as always, but also its coinciding with what seems to be shaping up to a seismic shift in all our realities. Which, as we teach our kids when they start school, shouldn't be feared but welcomed, and celebrated.

Drive safely!