Imagining Our Future: Strategic Planning at Stone
Laying the Groundwork
How can we design a process that puts all seven of our stakeholder groups on the same level?
In true Stone fashion, we entered the 2024-2025 school asking ourselves a very Big Question: “How might we imagine our future?”
In truth what we meant was, “How might we design a strategic planning process that feels like Stone?”
What we do know is that, after 8 years, our community is ready to grow: in program, scope, footprint, and impact. What we also know is that, approached from the wrong perspective, strategic planning can feel like an exhausting (and sometimes frivolous) exercise in arbitrary brainstorming. Because it is very much the case that this “curiously different” institution has been developed as a rich partnership across all levels of the organization, we have been working with real intention over the last 24 months to prepare, align, and engage as many different elevations of our institution as we can to the work of envisioning our future.
Two years ago, our Board of Trustees embarked on an intensive and introspective process to align itself with the coming work of a strategic plan (and a potential move). Around the same time, Abby Kirchner initiated our accreditation process with Cognia, a company that deeply understands our kind of education and can help us assess and benchmark our progress.
Last spring, the Board of Trustees officially commissioned the Strategic Plan Steering Committee, updated our SWOT analysis, and approved the planning process for the 2024-2025 school year. We also took tangible steps toward program growth by hiring Becca Goebel to develop our performing arts program and strengthening our administrative team by hiring Eileen Beckman. Just after commencement this past summer, our academic team, led by Abby Kirchner, completed our Cognia accreditation, a milestone that further solidifies our foundation for growth.
Meanwhile, our academic teams worked diligently to align our Humanities and STEM practices across all six grade levels, including launching the Humanities Honors program. This fall, we also began internal work on key program vision documents focused on experiential education, arts, and athletics, ensuring that we are designing for growth in a way that reflects our ethos.
A student at Community Design Day lists every word they can thing of to describe Stone.
In September, we surveyed 500 stakeholders—students, parents, faculty, and alums—to gather extensive qualitative data, deepening our insight into our strategic strengths and opportunities. These voices played a crucial role as we approached a defining moment in our planning process: Community Design Day.
A Community Approach to Design
In October, 50 representatives from all seven of our major stakeholder groups—current students, guardians, faculty, alums, parents of alums, Trustees, and community supporters—gathered on campus for Community Design Day. They spent the better part of a Saturday tackling collaborative challenges to generate responses to four key strategic questions:
What is true about Stone today?
What is the ideal future state of Stone in ten years?
How can Stone get from "Here" to "There"?
What must be true about education in 2035?
This January, about 30 of those 50 stakeholders are meeting in subcommittees to refine the thinking from Community Design Day into focused frameworks that will be shared back with the Strategic Planning Steering Committee (Scott Qualls, Tim Keeler, and me).
Key Takeaways from Community Design Day
Here, I’d like to pause and reflect on the October Community Design Day.
As we continue to think about how we can do this work our way, I’ll share that it was an inspiring day, and indeed a very Stone day – one that generated thousands of ideas captured on post-it notes, scrap paper, and easel pads. I’ll also share that afterward, Tim, Scott, and I had the real honor of picking up, reading, and processing every single artifact the designers created. What we discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that there is remarkable consistency in the way we see ourselves – our community designers described Stone as “innovative”; “unique and bold”; “thought leaders”; “creative”; “funny”; “student-led”; “stewards of the Earth”, and a “tight-knit community”. There was also remarkable consistency in the hard edges of the future we are pursuing – our designers repeatedly used words like “campus”, “green space”, “flexible design”, “performing arts space”, “sports fields/facilities”; and even “k-12” to describe our ideal future state. Our designers shared the values they want to amplify – “real world experience”, “need blind”; “experiential”; “learning by doing”; “accessible”; “inclusive”; “diverse backgrounds”; they also shared what they hope to see less of in education writ large – “curriculum silos”; “transactional learning”; “sage on the stage”; “testing”; “rigidity”; “busy work”.
One of our favorite questions was, “What 10 things do you want more of in education?" What 10 things do you want less of?”
While there isn’t perfect consensus on who we are or where we are going, there is a deep and shared understanding of what today looks like and what tomorrow could be.
The Work Ahead
As we enter the second half of our strategic planning year, it’s important to remember that brainstorming isn’t the same thing as planning. The next step is a big one: transforming the very best of our ideas into a public, actionable, measurable, and achievable strategic plan spanning the next 3-5 years.
Subcommittee work should conclude by mid-February. From there, the Strategic Plan Steering Committee will synthesize all the insights and inputs we’ve gathered over the past two years into a formal strategic plan. We aim to present a penultimate draft to our Board by the end of the month, followed by a community-wide meeting to discuss our progress and vision for the future. Ideally, the final plan—one that takes us from the remarkable (and sometimes remarkably small) community we are today to the campus, the STEM labs, the arts spaces, the soccer fields, perhaps even the Lower School—will be made public this spring.
And then? We get to work.
Imagining Our Future—The Stone Way
So, how might we imagine our future? Pretty much the way we do everything at Stone: creatively and collaboratively, with a lot of intention, a lot of ideation, a lot of prototyping, and a lot of iteration. Our school is founded on a rich partnership between students, faculty, parents, and supporters who care deeply about this kind of education, and it is the honor of a lifetime to collaborate with each of you on our school’s future.
If you have any questions about our strategic planning process, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Otherwise, know how grateful I am to each of you for all that you do for our students. I can’t wait to see what we do next.
Mike Simpson
Head of School