February 26, 2024
Dear Parents and Guardians,
North Babylon High School is happy to announce that we will again be participating in the Challenge Day program March 11 – 14, 2024! The Challenge Day experience will help educate North Babylon’s Sophomore students, their teachers, administrators and staff members on the social, emotional, cultural and economic differences that contribute to navigating our school community and life in general. Creating a culture of tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and positivity is the desired outcome.
Challenge Day was created in 1987 as a response to bullying, increasing school violence, and declining academic success. The program is a proactive strategy to teens already experiencing crisis. With a focus on root causes and prevention, they created a powerful and transformative experiential workshop for students, teachers, parents and other adults. Challenge Day experiential workshop helps students overcome cultural, social, and economic differences and build a powerful, connected school community. Prejudice, bullying, violence, harassment, isolation, intolerance, emotional safety and social connections among youth are addressed through the Challenge Day curriculum.
“I’m not kidding when I say this is how we change the world.” (Oprah Winfrey, Oprah’s High School Challenge, November 5, 2006).
The Challenge Day program will be offered to all 10th grade students. Each 10th grader will participate in a day-long interactive program facilitated by Challenge Day staff members and will be assigned a specific day to participate. Lunch will also be provided.
We believe that the Challenge Day experience might help foster togetherness and a culture of respect and understanding of each others’ various differences. We are so excited to be offering this program to our current sophomore class. As Mahatma Gandhi reminded all of us, positive change begins with action: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” The North Babylon Challenge Day Committee hopes this program will be the impetus to bring about positive change in our school community! North Babylon’s Social -- emotional Learning motto is “Be the Change… Notice -- Choose -- Act.”
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Sincerely,
Dr. Jonathan Klomp
Principal