Listening to All the Voices

At its January 2009 meeting, the George School Committee—the school’s governing board—approved a five-year strategic plan that will guide the school’s strategic initiatives for the next five years. The six key strategic areas that the school will focus upon are educational program, diversity, environmental stewardship, facilities, financial aid, and financial sustainability.

The plan is a product of the efforts of many—alumni, faculty, parents, staff, and students—such as the 185 people who attended focus groups in spring 2008, the 85 people who responded to an electronic survey, the 65 people who attended a two-and-a-half day Strategic Planning retreat in June 2008, the teachers who considered it at faculty meetings, and the entire George School Committee. (Learn more about our planning process.)

Gretchen Castle, clerk of the eleven-person Strategic Planning Oversight Committee, summed up our efforts in creating a five-year strategic plan with this statement, “This has been a particularly important time for us to be engaged in planning. Though we are blessed with a strong endowment and a diligent, frugal, and engaged board and administration, George School, like all other institutions, is and will continue to be affected by the turbulence that is gripping the world economy. We will have hard choices to make in the months and possibly years ahead. Our new five-year Strategic Plan will be critical in guiding those choices.” 

Generally, when an institution begins the process of strategic planning, it starts by grounding itself in the school’s mission statement. In looking at the 1999 mission statement, the Strategic Planning Oversight Committee realized that while the mission itself has remained constant, the language of the mission statement no longer felt sufficiently visionary. To bridge the gap, Head of School Nancy Starmer asked English teacher Terry Culleton and Director of College Guidance Nancy Culleton, a former English teacher, to tap into their many years of history as George School faculty members and their gifts for memorable phrasing to create a new mission statement that would inspire the greater community. Their statement, with few edits, was gratefully received and approved at the December George School Committee meeting in December 2008.