Holiday Gatherings - Boston - December 2016
December Holiday Remarks 2016 - Boston
Thank you, Joe for that kind introduction and for all your work with our board of trustees and in particular leading our school’s building and grounds committee over the last many months.
Before I say a few brief words and introduce Mr. Kluge, I want to thank Polly Antol, Director of Advancement and Katie Wardrop, class of 2006 and the entire Advancement team for their excellent work to host us this evening and this past Tuesday in Hanover. I want to say a particular welcome and thank you to some special guests, Adam Black, ’85 former board chair who presided over the bicentennial, the campaign, and the strategic planning process, Allan Munro, member of the great class of 1955, trustee emeritus and KUA medal recipient, and former board chair, also a past trustee, Kathy Munro, Honorary Member of the Class of 2013, chair of the bicentennial committee, members of the Daniel and Hannah Kimball Society, parents, past parents, KUA grandparents, “experienced” and recent alumni, past faculty and current faculty, who made their way here from Meriden.
This is always a wonderful night to come together to celebrate the Holidays, and to celebrate our connections of members of this special school community and to thank you for your continued interest and support of our students and faculty and our school.
This is our year with the header or theme of Legacy, which the senior class selected and the entire school has embraced as much as reminder of those who have come before us and their influence on us, as a forward looking, direction setting view of our enduring relationships to one another, to the work of our school in preparing young people for today and tomorrow. The KUA legacy is vast and wide and extends into our third century and the world over as one of the oldest schools of our kind in the country.
Legacy has presented itself in a myriad of ways, through the ways our school and local community have come together this year, inspiring our sense of place and purpose. The students were reminded of our global reach and their legacy connection to the wider KUA family, brutally, as the news broke of our losing our student, Janie Chase Cozzi, and as we received messages from all over the world. More happily, I will share news with you this evening that I shared with our trustees and faculty just before the break, that we are the beneficiary of an unprecedented legacy gift by an anonymous donor to commit ten million dollars to the school’s endowment to ensure that a Kimball Union education will be available to students from all corners long into the future (applause).
I share that news with you tonight with great pride and enthusiasm as we begin again to meet the expressed needs of our newest strategic plan, to double our endowment so that we may pour our resources into the student experience. This first massive unprecedented gift is a new huge lift to our place and purpose.
Last year, thanks to robust enrollment and careful stewardship and financial management, our capital improvement plan led to the addition of new dormitory, initial renovations and significant improvements to the Akerstrom Arena, and ongoing improvements to our campus infrastructure, energy delivery, and campus landscape enhancements and student safety. Program and additions to faculty include bolstering our staffing, in math and science, the addition of, highly experienced faculty in student life and athletic areas, and in the curriculum, the addition of a global scholars diploma program, the formation of an international consortium called GAIL (Global Alliance for Innovative Learning). GAIL alliance with seven independent schools in India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Central America, and China. This coming fall, we will launch an Arts Scholar Diploma curriculum to further our current strengths in the performing and visual arts. In the fall of 2018, our goal is to expand the scholar program diploma track to the STEAM areas and to environmental science. In total, the additional coursework totals some 120 courses many of which are increasingly interdisciplinary and experiential in nature, and all of which are competency based, providing project based learning opportunities including K-Term. We also have launched a leadership institute and leadership programming in the areas of character development and community service. These are ways students can invest deeply in their own education and contribute to our community, allowing students develop their own passion and to delve deeply in areas of their interests and strengths. I couldn’t be more excited about the education we are providing today for all our learners.
These strategic initiatives, spearheaded by Tom Kardel as Director of Strategic Curriculum Initiatives, are driving our enrollment towards our largest boarding population ever, and our curriculum into advanced cause work. These and many important initiatives further position KUA as school that is known for being the best environment for 21st century learning for the emerging world we can envision. Frankly, during my time here has never been in a better place in terms of resources, distinctive programs and community values and investment. As we considering these challenges, I was speaking at a heads event a month or so ago in the aftermath of a fall of campus unrest in colleges around race, social issues, the sad death of our beloved student, the ongoing investigation into sexual misconducts, amidst election hysteria and uncertainty, and God knows what else, and I quoted the often used silver lining translation of the Confucius proverb, “May you live in Interesting Times”, which I suppose provided at least some relief for our heads group, wherever their school is today, and being at sea in a turbulent ocean feels deepening challenges for independent schools.
There will be more challenges on the horizon for independent and independent boarding school, which is why we can take some comfort in the relatively strong position as a school we are in today. Yet we are still experiencing sky rocketing costs against increasing demands for highly personalized “individualized” education, amidst significant competition for resources, technological changes, generational and demographic shifts, the age-old reality education as of preparation for the most competitive and expensive college landscape ever, threats that challenge the value of the liberal arts. The challenges and new educational emphases loom large for our most experienced teachers in particular, as the changing role for teachers and even students as learners in this environment, and the greater need for depth in subject areas and breadth in terms of serving all our student and parent needs is challenging our model.
As a boarding school we are seeing these changes far beyond the need for academic preparation, as our charge is also social and emotional growth in the education of the whole child, and competition writ large, from abroad, at college, and from less expensive options are honestly putting some of what we do at risk. Our curriculum has to be both market and mission driven, and that balance is crucial to “get right”.
At Kimball Union, the sun has been shining even since the dark days of the recession. We are fortunate. We are approaching a time when we have the “things” schools need to deliver on our promise – facilities and improving resources. Most importantly, there is no doubt in my mind that we have the people to execute – a tremendous faculty of diverse skills and talents and passions for education, a committed alumni and parent body, and more than anything, what the strength of an excellent faculty cannot bring alone, but can bring out, is a group of highly invested, engaged students, each unique in his or her own way, from thirty communities in the Upper Valley, 28 states, and 25 countries. Our investment and engagement fuels our…it is a simple as that. The other asset Kimball Union enjoys, beyond our history and reputation, is our location. KUA is a transformative place. Who knows how Daniel Kimball ever decided Meriden….in fact, it was originally to be in Orford……yet in any case, our surroundings we are provided a perfect environment for learning in today’s fast paced world – access to information at our fingers prints, and the aesthetic and what we might call “perfect distance” and a kind of “pedagogy of place”, and the benefit of our Upper valley culture and community, including our friends at Dartmouth, somewhat distant from metro chaos, and buffeted by our rural and beau-colic, aesthetic beauty of historic village peacefulness.
Market and mission in today’s world are inextricably tied to relevance. People decide to invest in KUA for a reason, and our job is to make all of what we do relevant and meaningful.
As a quick example, I share a story from a colleague friend, who wrote, “Under the constant pressure to change and adapt, I recall a dream, I was looking at a freshman transcript, I noticed something unremarkable – this freshman was taking English, History, Math, Science, and Latin. Had the student been in front of me, I might have counseled perhaps a modern language, but other than that, the curriculum looked fairly common, until I noticed that the transcript was not from 2016, but from 1916!” Change is indeed hard at school, we might conclude, yet the old adage that the fights in academe are so fierce because the stakes are so small could not be further from the truth in the current climate. If we are to continue to provide a transformational experience, we must adapt to transform.
Our strategic plan is designed to use these fundamental traditional + innovative learning platforms of a classical education blending the old with the new, as we discover within each student the capability and the confidence to be effective in the long run, as problem solvers - quite simply, to develop the aptitude and the attitude to be successful AND to contribute to whatever communities they join. While prep schools have been traditionally focused on admission to college, the rising cost of both private high schools and colleges may in fact be a gift of sorts to focus on the long process of learning rather than outcome driven decision making. What I love about KUA is that our education is for lifetime, not simply to make a living. Our best chances for another century of learning is to take the long view.
As a forward looking school, with our goal to prepare AND to inspire, as a faculty, we must model a kind of continuous progress or momentum around that very question of balance and specialization, process and outcome, depth and breadth, that is indeed relevant and that also can fit into a manageable school that simply cannot serve every need, and in the main, serve only the top one percent of income earning families, or, frankly, the relevance of what we are doing will surely cook our own golden goose.
It takes more than vision to design a school of the future….to be a school with a future. In order to do this, we must have vision and resources.
Sense making, social intelligence, adaptive thinking, cross cultural competence, computational thinking, media literacy and what the Institute for Emerging Thinking calls for “interdiscipliarity”, cognitive load management and virtual collaboration, effective communication. Well that’s a mouthful….and was not on the transcript in 1916, and hard to accomplish this in a public school as we have seen the push back in common core. It is hard to accomplish this in one school year, let alone a high school junior or senior year, or even demonstrate this on a college transcript. And further, if this is what our students truly need today for tomorrow, guess what, so do our teachers.
Faculty Professional development at Kimball Union is the cornerstone of our ability to grow and change with the needs of our students and our world. Effective teaching today goes far beyond the periodic table, the power play, and memorizing lines of Illead, these are simply not enough in today’s school, but rather, teaching it so that students can use what they learn, make meaning, so that what they learn and how they learn become part of a framework and mind-set of long term learning, application, and effectiveness. If a school that has among its stated objectives to prepare and inspire mastery, creativity, responsibility, and leadership “as we do, our value proposition is that student practice what they learn to create learners and “doers”, not just learners and not only people of good character and judgment, but people who are effective in the exercise of both, if even, let’s hope, to lead. So with that comes a mandate for us a school to produce long-term results. For KUA, to remain relevant and have an impact the investment in teacher education and professional growth are paramount. There is a requirement for us a school to develop evolving relevant curricula that comes from an awareness and understanding of needs of the world around us – the aptitudes and the attitudes of a learning organization and community – continuous progress, innovation that leads to progress, that leads the way. It may still look like English, History, Math, Science and Language on the transcript, but the experience will be, and must be far different, much sooner than in the year 2116.
Who leads this on the front lines every day and in every way are our teachers, and there are few better examples than the person who will share a few words with us about two colleague faculty who like him have dedicated themselves to inspiring learning of all growth and measure, through age old and tried and true pedagogy, using literature and science to engage and inspire students, the legions of which now in the world are the greatest lessons.
So I wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah as you join me in welcoming, Class of 1966, Lionel Mosher Chair, Faculty of Merit, recipient of the Mikula Award for Teaching Excellence, John Kluge.
