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Reality Check and Hope

As a parent approaching a decade of residency in Guilford, never have I felt so proud of our town as I did on Oct. 18 watching the Guilford Human Rights Commission’s panel of recent Guilford Public Schools alums. What a dual dosage of reality check and hope!

As the speakers shared their experiences entering the workforce across various industries, story after story described unnecessary setbacks they faced as a result of overconfident ignorance learned at home. They thought their schooling had been world-class—and in many ways, it was—yet their worldview needed quite the tune-up in order to thrive, collaborate, or be included at all in the workplace. Generously, they shared how they did that, and many tools. Most important, they role-modeled real accountability.

That is the only starting point for the kind of healing and transformation that we so badly need. Now we know what it looks like, and how cheerful and graceful it can be. I encourage all parents, politicians, leaders, and adults around town to watch the video; I hope that spirit of constructive anti-fragility will be contagious. As a voter, my main takeaway was this: As the world progressively awakens and interconnects, we set our young up to be part of harm and to miss out on opportunity, unless, as these recent students unquestionably demonstrate, we expand our education towards understanding the full, complex future of our world and the skills of allyship.

I am thrilled to vote for the candidates on rows A and C who have the closeness to the needs of schools to be able to do that, and I hope all residents will join me in voting in the election on Nov. 2 at this critical moment in our town’s history.

Alexa Miller

Guilford