News from Lisa
A Busy Opening of School
This has been a very exciting opening of school; many of you commented that we now look like a "real school" which, of course, makes me wonder what we looked like before!
It's also been an especially busy opening of school this year between moving into our new middle school house during the faculty work week, and helping our community adjust to the new campus layout. We have received mostly positive feedback on the new carpool line, including one parent who said, "Arriving here in the morning is like arriving at the Oscars!" It is true that there is quite the welcoming committee at the new drop-off area. Thank you to everyone for helping work through the bugs in the first few weeks of school. The new configuration is much less stressful for the staff (what a relief not to see cars backed up on McCall!), and I hope that parents are also experiencing a less stressful morning and afternoon. I've been especially excited about the number of students who are walking or biking to school everyday. This number seems to be growing – by my count, there are at least eight families who arrive by human-powered transportation and a few more families who walk or bike occasionally.
We are continuing to ramp up our STEM (Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology) activities, and this year especially so with a science night on October 12, a science theme for the annual October parade (i.e. the Halloween Parade), and several additional math competitions. In addition to the AMC-8 and PSIA, which we participated in last year, we will add the Math Olympiad and a Math Pentathlon. One of the unique features of The GSA is that we are committed to a high-quality and rigorous academic experience that is also fun—so while other schools might have a Halloween parade, our parade and festivities do double duty—tying back to an academic experience of some sort. Pretty clever, yes?
We had a good turnout for the Fall Celebration in spite of the occasional downpours. The rain did not seem to slow the students down, and a few needed to be hosed off at the end of the event (this is also something of a Girls' School tradition, which makes me think we may have mud wrestlers in our future). Our guests that afternoon included representatives from our construction company and one of our architects, and that made for a nice photo op. I also saw a few neighbors! Perhaps best of all is that the sun came out just after Genny Duncan cut the ribbon officially opening the Windsor House. Thank you, Genny!
Now that we have our cute new middle school building, we are on to the next thing – but what exactly is that? This question brings me to the work of the year: strategic and campus master planning. Over the past few years we have had many conversations about who we are and what we love about GSA, and we've also identified areas that could be improved. I have plenty of flipcharts on which we have recorded all of these thoughts. Strategic planning is the process by which we take into consideration what we know about where we are now and identify our most important goals, usually across a relatively short period of time (less than five years is recommended). Strategic plans should be flexible and revisited often. So here we are, at the beginning of the school's first strategic plan. Following that (and the Board hopes to compete the strategic plan this fall), we will be in a good position to begin a campus master plan—that's where we get to envision what this campus could look like and what it would take to get there. Program, people, and place are inexorably linked in schools, so it is really ideal that we do all of this work—in tandem or rapid succession. We are fortunate to be in a position to do just that, so put on your thinking caps and join the conversation!
Lisa K. Schmitt
Head of School
(9/2010)