As we look to the future of our program, we began sketching out our new strategic approaches for working with not just our students, but to our parents and community who have braved the challenge to support our district’s mission to improve literacy across the district from pre K to high school. I am very excited that an enterprise such as the Richland One school district has recognized that in order to take on such a monumental task, we need a variety of people at the table at the same time. I believe that technology has made the world a smaller place to inhibit and therefore increase our interconnectedness throughout all nations. If the children in South Carolina are going to have a better than average chance at competing for their place in the world market, we must give them every imaginable competitive edge. What this means to our educational world is that our children’s dreams are no longer distant illusions of grandeur, but reality etched in time where examples of hard work, steadfastness, and determination can produce this nation’s first African American President or where street corner entertainers can become music moguls or Pop Warner athletics can produce owners of professional sports teams. How powerful is that! In the days since the great depression, there were several questions asked in rhetorical satire and prose that our nation would never heal until we right the ills of many years of wrong. But the most important question of all came from Langton Hughes who asked:  what happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run. Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

I sincerely believe this question and many others just like it are being challenged through our interconnectedness. There are so many extraordinary things happening in Richland One, the Olympia Learning Center, Where Opportunity Leads To Change is and will continue to be extraordinary.

Thank you for your continued support and good luck to everyone for a very successful school year.    

Nathan White, Principal

Olympia Learning Center