Head's Address To The Student Body On the First Day Of School

Today on Stoneworks, we are pleased to share with you Head of School Mike Simpson’s address to the Student Body on the first day of school.

Real Problems Demand Real Solutions

Today, I’m going to start with a request.

We need your help.

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now, and I’m not sure how else to say it so I’ll just say it like that: we need your help.  We are, as a nation, as a world, facing more significant and more urgent problems than we have faced in my lifetime..  For example: in my entire life, I have never witnessed our local and community political landscape as divided as it is today. And here I’ll add that I mean local, not national.  Even as a kind of dysfunctional normalcy settles over Washington, the frustration and hyperbole and anger in our local politics remains.  We are a country of people who are quite literally living separate realities from one another and those separate realities color nearly every aspect of how it is that we individually see and experience the world in 2021. 

For another.  We are living within a repeating and interlocking system of injustices which are designed to perpetuate racism and poverty, which weaponizes itself against identity -- a system which, through denial of its own existence, perpetuates and accelerates itself and in so doing perpetuates and accelerates the extraordinary harm it creates.   

For another.  The Earth is on fire.  In some ways literally.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear on this point -- right now, today, the Earth is hotter than it has been in 125,000 years and things may only get worse without immediate and dramatic action.  Here I’ll add, by the way, that the IPCC requires 195 countries to sign off on its reports and because it does the IPCC is notoriously conservative in its assessments of climate change.

Put differently.  Things might actually be even worse.

So here’s what I’m saying on the first day of school -- we need your help.

We have very real problems.  And we need you to help us solve them.

Today is that most remarkable day -- the day when we return to the work of The Stone Independent School.  This work that once began in a field on the southend has now grown in size, in heft, in weight, in impact.  Today, we open the school with 115 students, with 19 faculty members, with hundreds of parents and supporters and admirers.  We aren’t a start-up school any longer; we aren’t a tiny school in a funny house on Lime Street.

We are a known entity, and we are known for our work.

Because here at Stone, it has always been about the work.

Here at Stone, we believe that real work creates real impact.

And in fact, here I might argue that at its heart Stone has always been about that nebulous and also tangible relationship between real work and real impact.  From its inception we have been in a near constant conversational cycle about how it is that we can design school life around the process of making real things -- real business ideas, real solutions to real math problems, real siege machines, real papers that a real audience might really want to read.  

And because we have, we have been in a near constant cycle of conversation about what it is that you -- our outcomes, our purpose, our product -- what it is that you will be able to do after taking our classes. 

What impact you will create. 

We were only a few months old when Jacob Ruzow, Class of ‘18, lead thousands of middle and high school students to walk out of their public and private schools in protest of violence in schools.  It was only a few months ago that we worked across schools and philanthropic organizations and local corporations in order to plant 5000 trees in 53 trees.

In between, we have been in a relentless and obsessive cycle of designing, creating, and exhibiting real things.  Of pursuing the solution to nearly unanswerable questions in the Senior Defense; of creating knowledge, insight, beauty, and function in the Junior Workshop; of designing solutions to problems in our entrepreneurship problem and designing responses to “big questions” in each of our classes and even puzzling out the game theory of Stonehunt and Stonesprint.

Everything we do aligns.  From the first tower-build at Middle School Orientation to the final Senior Defense at 4pm on the final day of Exhibition Week.  

Everything we do aligns to one simple belief: we are here to solve problems. 

We are here to make the world a measurably better place.

So today I will ask the same question of the Class of 2022 and also the Class of 2027: what are you capable of doing?  What can you do now?

Because my generation, and my parents' generation -- the generations that designed and created so many of the problems that you are grappling with today -- we need you to do more.

And that “more” begins today.  It begins in your advisors meetings and grade level meetings and your House meetings, where you learn how to speak to each other, where you practice Mission and purpose, where you consider what you are capable of, where you set goals, where you align, where you begin the practices of 21st century thinking, collaboration, ideation, and design..

And it extends outward tomorrow -- when this extraordinary faculty challenges you with big questions, with skill work, with complex outcomes, with deeply purposeful work. 

And it carries on throughout the long story of this school year, during which the problems will only gain in complexity, and difficulty, and -- yes -- urgency.

We began this story in 2017 in a field south of Lancaster City.  Today, we are indeed 115 strong and we are still growing.  We have more students, more parents, more Trustees, more faculty members, more resources, more vision, more purpose.  

And we have more problems, too.

I couldn’t be more proud of what we have accomplished together so far, and I can’t wait to see what we accomplish next.  But I will ask you each to consider again: what else can you do?

What else are you capable of?

What can you do now?

And I’ll expect you to spend the next 170 days showing me.

Because -- we need your help.

See also: Notes On The Upcoming School Year For the Stone Student Body