As a family, please take the time to read through our entire handbook. Please note that we revise and improve the handbook annually, so re-reading is important for returning families as well. The following pages clarify many of the essential details that a family must understand to participate fully in our community. In effect, knowing the handbook helps your family to join the larger VPA family as we share common values and expectations of one another. When you have finished reading the handbook, both parents and the student(s) should complete and detach the mandatory signature page. Please return this page to the school office by the end of the first week of school.
The center of our school is the classroom and the Socratic dialogue between the teacher and the student. Yet our community would be incomplete if the partnership between the Academy and each family stopped at the classroom door. As such, I urge every parent, student, and teacher to become wholeheartedly involved in at least one VPA activity outside of the classroom each year. For a parent, this might mean joining the Parents’ Organization or volunteering at the reception desk; for a teacher, coaching a sport or organizing a club; and for a student, playing a sport or being a leader in an extracurricular arena. Through work and friendship, let’s continue to build up each other’s spirits and develop our community.
Before you turn the page, I would like to quote from The Athenian Oath. The young men of ancient Athens took this oath when they reached the age of seventeen.
We will revere and obey the City’s laws, and will do our best to incite a like reverence and respect in those above and below us . . . We will strive to quicken the public’s sense of civic duty. Thus in all these ways we will transmit this City, not only, not less, but greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.
What a powerful call to service from one of the great cities of the Western tradition! Each of us, as free citizens of the Academy, should equally strive to make our school a better place—a city of truth, beauty, and goodness - for those students, parents, and teachers who will follow us.