The Future, At Stone (Notes On the Strategic Planning Process)
As a problem-based school, we design our work around “Big Questions”. Entering our 8th year of operation, we find ourselves fortunate to be challenged by a question of such scale that engagement across our entire community is essential to formulate a response:
“How might we imagine our future?”
Chad Taylor, founding guitar player of Live, prepares to join Stone students onstage at Zoetrolis in May, 2024.
We are in an era within our school’s life where we are ready to grow: in program, in scope, in footprint and in impact. We want to design for more of what Stone already does so well – more inquiry, more STEM exploration, more research, more entrepreneurship, more exhibition work. And, we want to design for growth, too. We want more athletics opportunities, more performing arts opportunities, we want to continue to develop our experiential education experiences, we want more authentic experience and more play, we wonder if we need more space to do all of it (and we wonder if we need to get younger to do it, too).
At the same time, we are very much living through historic times in education. We are all grappling with how best to serve “The Anxious Generation”, we are doing so in the context of global and technological changes which each outpace the work we do to mitigate them. In 2024, “school” must navigate a polarized political landscape, the after-effects of a global pandemic, the real-time effects of multiple existential problems, and the changing nature of reality itself as artificial intelligence changes in capacity and usage.
And it’s within these contexts that we must ask again: how might we imagine our future?
Stone students explore Patagonia, Chile in March of 2024.
For us, it has taken a period of introspection and discernment just to prepare to respond to that question. Over the last year, our Board of Trustees and our Academic Leadership Team have looked inwardly: re-examining our Mission and our core values, our current state and our imagined future state, our academic practices and design. We have examined the challenges facing education in 2024 and the challenges facing Stone in 2024, we have considered the many opportunities in front of us to grow, to thrive, to evolve, to serve. We have written vision statements, we have written SWOT analyses, we have written drafts of strategic frameworks, we have even engaged something called a “turbo turtle”.
All so that we can prepare to imagine our future.
Stone students explore Patagonia, Chile in March of 2024.
This Fall, the work we are doing will shift from facing inward to outward. We will spend this Fall sharing our contexts and our ideas (and our turtle charts – they really are real things!) to large and small groups of stakeholders who know us and understand the work we are doing. We will seek input, insight, and ideation from our community, we will want to hear what must remain true for Stone forever, we will want to hear how Stone can more fully execute its Mission and vision, we will want to hear how we all envision what that looks like in future practice. It is our intention to spend our Fall listening and writing so that we may ultimately publish a strategic plan this Winter which will represent our shared vision of who we believe we are today, and who we must be tomorrow.
Our shared vision of “The Future, At Stone”.
We must continue to empower our students in their present, while also preparing them for an unpredictable future; as our students’ world changes, so must we continue to change, evolve, and grow for them. I am excited for the work which lies ahead, and I am excited to hear from different members of our community as we enter into this design process. It is the honor of a lifetime to serve this community – we have accomplished so much over our first eight years, and I can’t wait to see what we accomplish next.
Mike Simpson, Head of School