Letter to the Community Harvest Board of Directors
I a former student of the family of CHCS can remember when I first started attending Community Harvest. I spent my freshman year bouncing around from two different schools whose vision wasn’t based around the needs and concerns of the people in the community, whom they were supposed to serve! In only a year’s time in high school, my future seemed very dim, based on the opportunities I was given to excel as a student. I felt as if I was a number being counted on a daily basis to fulfill some quota, but when I first stepped foot onto our old Community Harvest campus, I felt an atmosphere of love. Although I didn’t know how to accept it, because I had never experienced an environment such as this.
A group of educators and staff members whose sole objective, was to mold young people into the next great minds characterizes CHARV. Coming from inner city schools in Los Angeles, and considering how the educational system is set-up, it seems impossible with the tools we are given that we could amount to anything. Community Harvest educated individuals whose grand view of their world, community, and themselves is more than what everyone else told them it could be. And we believed them! I see it as a blessing that I was able to attend CHCS, because there was something special about that small campus, that we occupied and the way it was run. Whether there was enough funding or not we made it work, and as a member of the family I never felt l was in a position of lack. Looking back on it now as an adult I have been able to reflect on the opportunities afforded to me by CHCS, and I feel sorry for those who didn’t have opportunity to grow up in such an environment.
It’s very difficult to put into words exactly how the original C-Harv was and how it affected me as an individual, but it is easy for me to say that without C-Harv I wouldn’t be the person I am today. Looking at the current state of the school, how we carry the name, and what we are doing to each other, I am saddened. That as a family we have lost that zeal of having each other’s best interest at heart brings me pain. Families fight and disagree, but this has gotten to a point where we have let foolishness and pride over-ride sensibility and integrity. We have lost the right to still claim the words of our mission statement “What we grow, the community harvests”. With the movement out of the community we have stopped serving the people of the community, and moved into a foreign area. The busing and change of venue has become a distraction from the student’s success and the stability of the program.
I pray and have faith that as these meetings go forth that we would strive to work towards bringing the school back to where it belongs in “the community”, and having the children’s best interest at heart and not continue to make decisions based upon false pride and ill-informed research. We created something special together. I hope we can reformulate the genius of the original campus, and as the details of how the funds has been spent and the direction we are moving towards I don’t believe it would be conducive to continue on with the current board of directors. I can only say this from a place of love, because speaking it in any other form or fashion wouldn’t be representative of the values that were instilled in me at Community Harvest Charter School.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Gooden
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