Children’s day celebration in San Diego

ATASC-San Diego Turkish School present 5th annual celebration of international children’s day…

ATASC-San Diego Turkish School had a hildren’s day celebration this year with participation of a large Turkish American society here in San Diego. ATASC President Vega Sankur also attended to this celebration from Los Angles and made a speech congratulating all TS board members and teachers as well as ATASC-SD chapter board and ATASC-SD’s outgoing president Dr. Tuba Ertas.

And I had a chance to talk with the president of ATASC-SD Turkish School Murat Ertas about this event and more for Turkish Journal…

“I personally received a lot of complements about our school from many parents and there were two families asked me how they could enroll their children to the school during the celebrations. During my opening speech, I saw the happiness in the eyes of our community with TS successes” he says and explaines why we celebrate April 23th as children’s day in Turkey: “ I know that it is very well know by all Turkish decent community members but it is important for us to explain it to our American decent community members the importance of this holiday. Our founding father M. Kemal Ataturk announced the opening of Turkish Parliament as a state holiday and dedicated this to specifically Turkish Children. Turkish Children was not a random choice for getting this day as a holiday. Turkish Parliament is the most important symbol and the element of Turkish democracy and freedom of Turkish people. After a long monarchy, Turkish people know how important it is to have a right to say something about how they are governed, choose their representatives and even have the right to be chosen to represent people and be even the president of the country. This is the most important inheritance we can pass to our children.”

He also thanked to all students to come to the school in a week-end day instead of having a long sleep or some other family activities during that day, to their families to bring their children to the school. It is a pleasure to serve our community and our children for all ATASC-SD Turkish School Board members and teachers.

This has been 5th year of ATASC-SD Turkish in San Diego. School is in La Jolla, “La Jolla is a very central location for most of our enrolled students. We know that there are families in Chula Vista (in south right at the Mexican border) and up in north in Temecula area can’t send their children to the school because of the long commute. Therefore being in a location in the middle of these two extreme distances gives us the chance still to be able to attract those students and keep our enrolled students in our school who are densely located in the neighboring locations to La Jolla” Ertas says.

After his first year service in school board, he run for the school principle position in the beginning of 2008-2009 school year. “We had a great school board and made some decision in the beginning of our term knowing that we can’t possibly make all families happy with our school location but we can still attract them to take this long commute with better offerings” he says and wants to give their decisions to stick with were:

-We wouldn’t force our students with hard activities like challenging stage performances and make the education our first priority.
– We would work hard as school board and teachers to get our students the highest support with accreditation and funding to increase the quality of our education.
-We would gain the highest parent support by answering every request without leaving anybody out.” ATASC-SD Turkish School made a very good use of some opportunities offered them by SDSU LARC department which were being offered to the school for some time but were being ignored thinking it would be impossible to achieve those goals.

They first gained very high support of a large number of families. Those were skeptical in the beginning were also kind enough to keep their children in the school and give them a chance. After a very productive work year with school board and teachers who all believed in these goals, they succeeded achieving their goals with getting complete support of all families.

Ertas wants to significant successes this year:

-We brought the number of our enrolled students to 30 from a number as low as 17
– We received our first equivalency approval from San Diego Unified School District in our Turkish Education. This means our students in this school district will be able to show in their high school transcript that they had Turkish as a foreign language and they know this language
-We are pursuing same type of approval in two more school district here in San Diego
-We received a grant from SDSU LARC to organize a two week full day Turkish summer camp.

For more information please contact: www.sdturks.org