The Blacktop Blog

Our Head of School, Dr. Olaf Jorgenson, shares his thoughts about cherishing and protecting childhood in his November 2021 letter. "At ACDS, we protect children from forces that threaten their childhood imagination and innocence. We collectively resist the sorts of media influences, risk behaviors and peer pressures that creep into other schools as early as third or fourth grade, affecting clusters of eight- and nine-year-olds suddenly contending with adult ideas and images they’re not ready to understand, and forcing a sudden self-conscious end to the “childish” behaviors we revere and nourish at ACDS. We strive to provide a childhood that allows our children to experience, in the words of Neil Postman, “a series of revealed secrets,” rather than exposing them to pressures and expectations and influences beyond their developmental readiness."