If school is about guiding the next generation of leaders, then this was a great week for our community. Wednesday last was our annual Deal Gives Back service day. Deal students worked at 23 elementary schools (reading, cleaning, library work, playing, aiding teachers, introducing future Deal students to the Deal world, many other activities), cleaned Sligo Creek, and Rock Creek, learned and gardened at the US Department of Agriculture, rallied for the rights of the homeless at the Wilson Building, raised funds through a basketball tournament, worked at Martha's Table, Miriam's Kitchen, N Street Village, Food and Friends, Catholic Charities, SOME, and supported the Peace Corps, Metropolitan Police and DC Fire, and beautified our building. I am sure I missed a few other activities, but you get the idea - Vikings were everywhere!

I could not be prouder of how well organized the activities were, how teachers infused meaning into the work, and how positive the experience was. For perspective, there were over 1,300 students and 100 staff members across our city focusing on the needs of others. Every staff member in our building put their shoulder to this work - a community service and learning effort that captures the spirit of what it means to be a Viking. Your parent association (ADCA) helped make this happen by providing the support to move our students around town and to make sure that we had the resources necessary to do the work. Parents contributed - ideas, labor, and materials - making Deal Gives Back 2015 a testament to the power of communal work.

Part of the day I spent at the rally at Freedom Plaza. Seeing students pick up the torch of peaceful demonstration, hearing from and speaking to our council members, and making their case to include homelessness as a legal category protected from discrimination, was a powerful moment. As they marched around the Wilson Building and then gathered on the steps, chanting and waving signs, I could envision this same group over the next decades building on this work with their new skills. If you didn't catch the images on Twitter (rolled on our Deal homepage) you could catch up through the audio of the Deal Viking podcast. It is worth the listen!

Reviewing team notes for the coming week - the penultimate week of 2014-2015 - it is clear that there are strong, engaging academic activities for your children on the menu. While we will have the fun, end-of-the-year celebrations and acknowledgements, we still have a significant opportunity for learning. Here is a smattering of items from our team bulletins - items that indicate what students have been working on or will be tackling this coming week:

• Students will learn about the concept of irony
• Students will have to complete a conflict analysis organizer and write a letter to the editor breaking down the different perspectives in the conflict.
• Students will learn how to find the area of composite figures and discover the area of trapezoids.
• Students explored the struggles/successes of cleaning up the Anacostia River and investigated what it means to be part of  a "watershed."
• Students will focus on the rules of exponents. 
• Students continued to factor polynomials, and used factoring to find the zeros of a quadratic function.
• Students have begun the process of writing their final summative assessment of the year - a one-act play about love utilizing Shakespearean techniques and Elizabethan English.

There is obviously more - but I hope you see that there is still work to be done before we put away our pencils for the summer. Please make sure that your children are here on time, every day, for everything - we will miss them once they leave, but await them while there are still days on the academic calendar.

Take care,

James Albright

PS - Registration for Deal is supposed to conclude after the next couple of weeks. While all families who are in neighborhood for attending Deal are guaranteed spots for the coming year, it is essential that those who are not maintain their connection to the school. Please take advantage of the extra hours on Thursday for registration, or come in during the day, but if you haven't, we need you to take care of this right away.