Dear Friends, After two decades in education, I came to the WPS Institute because of the opportunity to work on something I could never had the chance to address in my other roles: the design of school itself. In our work with schools and communities at WPS, we often ask people to describe a learning experience that stayed with them, something they still remember vividly, years later. Their answers are rarely about a great lecture or a well-designed worksheet. People talk about a teacher who saw something in them no one else had, or a project that forced them to work with peers they didn't already know. They describe moments – often out in nature, or on the streets of their city – that put them in a new context and asked them to do something meaningful. Growing up on Cape Cod, my memories include piloting an underwater robot with scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 7th grade Earth Science. In 10th grade, I had the opportunity to polish my German and test my independence while studying abroad at our partner school in Heidelberg, Germany. By the end of high school, I was volunteering each week with struggling readers in an elementary school classroom, which is what first made me want to become a teacher. What strikes me, looking back, is how local and conditional these moments were — how much they depended on a teacher deciding to take a risk, or connecting me to an opportunity. None of them came from a standard curriculum. They came from adults who had the vision to look beyond their own classroom, from school leaders willing to bend where and how learning happened, and from a community eager to partner with schools. That's the work in front of us now at WPS: making that kind of access ordinary, rather than something that depends on which school you attend or which adult happens to take an interest in you. It's harder than it sounds. Good ideas about how school could work differently are not in short supply. What's scarce is the capacity to build something new, with partnerships, sustained funding, and a willingness to keep pushing against the accumulated weight of how school has always been done. That capacity-building is what the WPS Institute is for — helping schools and communities engage and empower young people the way my school, in its own way, once did for me. Together, we can build an education system where loving school is neither an exception nor a privilege, but the norm. Thank you for being part of that work with us. Laura Tavares Executive Director, WPS Institute