Lisa Bransten
PA News Editor
Call a gathering of the Day School community to generate ideas and there will be a lot of them!
It’s no surprise, then, that the strategic plan task force members now have hundreds of ideas to sort through as they develop priorities for the School going forward. The School hosted a series of “listening forums” over the past two weeks to solicit ideas from community members as it starts the process of creating a new strategic plan.
“The great thing about brainstorming is that you get a lot of ideas on the table,” said Tommy Battat, father of a 3rd and 5th grader who attended an evening session. Ideas that came out at his session included intangibles such as of promoting resiliency and concrete ideas about teaching foreign languages.
SFDS community members attending the sessions included parents, faculty, recent alumni and founding families. After short introductions for Board Chair Mike Halper and Head of School David Jackson, attendees were asked to split off into small groups and answer a series of questions about what SFDS can do to ensure students thrive in the 21st century, and about what SFDS already does well and should preserve.
The questions were intentionally left open-ended in order to inspire community members to think creatively about skills they find useful in today’s world and how a school might instill these skills in its students. At the end of the sessions, community members were asked to prioritize the dozens of ideas that had come up in their discussions in order to help develop a consensus of things the community feels are most important.
While the formal meetings are over, there is still time to submit thoughts about what the School should look like going forward. Next week, the School will launch an online listening forum for community members to provide their input about what is and will be important at SF Day in the future.
Christy Tripp, president of the Parent’s Association and mother of 2nd and 6th graders, helped facilitate group discussions at three different forums and said she was amazed at how different each discussion was.ns. “Each group has its own personality,” she said. And yet there were distinct themes that came through.
One of her groups focused on how to help students cope with the sometimes overwhelming onslaught of information they face in the modern world, Tripp said. Suggestions included teaching skills such as how to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information and helping students develop analytical skills to deal with a world where information is a commodity, but analysis is valued.
Another session also focused on information overload but the discussion centered on using the arts as an antidote to the fast pace of life in the information age, Tripp said. Despite differences there was certainly an underlying theme of thoughtfulness about how to make the best people out of the generation that is coming through the School now. “All [the discussions] focused on the human being your child ends up becoming,” she said.
Even at a school as young as SF Day, there were alumni on hand to offer insights about their experiences at school and after. At one session an alum talked about the importance of an institution maintaining an openness to change, according to Jenny Pearlman, mother of a 1st and a 3rd grader. The alum was at SF Day when the School moved into its current building and she recalled that, as part of the move, teachers asked every student what their dream was for SF Day. She said it was a great example for the students of how institutions have to be flexible and change over time and she hoped the School could continue to ask such questions of its students.
The School is certainly asking such questions of much of its community and many are pleased to have the chance to offer input. “I was blown away that the School would do something like this and involve the parents,” said Kip Fuller, father of a 1st grader.
Gathering thoughts from the community is but the first step in a process that should result in a draft strategic plan by this summer and adoption of a formal plan in October. Along the way there will be a study of how the facilities are used, a look at the School’s finances, and a seminar on educational thinking. The final step before developing the draft plan will be a strategic summit in mid-June that will address the topics of setting educational priorities, understanding financial and space limits and possibilities, and integrating educational goals with resources. Also at the summit, the strategic plan task force will begin drafting the strategic plan based on ideas that can be supported by attainable resources.
