April 2009 Futures Meeting Notes

Futures Planning Begins

Notes from the first meeting of the Futures Committee, held on April 29, 2009.

The entire committee attended the initial meeting which was held in the late afternoon and early evening in the community room of Hargroves House. For this meeting and all future full committee meetings we will circulate summaries for review by committee members to ensure they contain the sense of the gathering and then share the summary widely with the GSFS and Green Street Meeting Community.

The first half of this meeting was devoted to introducing the committee members to each other and providing everyone a common view of the state of the school and the acquired property. After a brief supper the group spent the remaining two hours visioning the future of the school, as it relates to facilities and identifying some of the key queries we need to work on to evaluate such futures.  A summary of each element of the meeting follows below:

After a moment of silence, Koof began with a brief outline of the process. The committee members then took turns introducing themselves and articulating what connects them to GSFS and to education. Many committee members commented on the diversity of GSFS as a key reason for their attraction to the school. The committee is itself, quite diverse, with several alumni, faculty, administrators, meeting members and school committee members with professional backgrounds as educators, architects, community builders, philanthropists and retirees. Other themes included the role Ed has played in connecting members to the school, being a part of the neighborhood and pride in the schools accomplishments.

Ed, Teri and David Moos then updated the group on the acquired property. Ed provided some background about events leading up to the acquisition, including the visionary gift Emily Fisher made in the 1990's so that the school could act quickly if the opportunity came up for buying the property. Teri described the lease arrangements with the current tenant, Citizens Bank, which is long-term. She also summarized the existing status of the property and the school's discussions with the tenant. David summarized the charette exercise that was undertaken with a group of six parents who are architects. They considered the entire school property, and drew possible approaches to using the land as a way to broaden thinking about the use of space.

The administrative team provided an update on the status of the school. Leanne summarized the very positive state of admissions and enrollment, with strong enrollment next year. Wilson described some of initiatives that have recently been put in place or are on-going, including: new teaching technologies and new pedagogies; the School’s upgraded reading program; TORCH (middle school student government) and support to parents with children in their pre-adolescent “tween” years. Teri summarized the sound financial structure of the school and the relatively strong position GSFS is in relative to some other schools who are unfortunately experiencing  declining enrollment and/or financial pressures. Emily provided a brief history of development at Greene Street and framed several challenges we face in giving, while being thankful that we have not seen a drop off in support from the community in these difficult economic times.

After supper, Koof and Russ provided a more detailed description of the proposed process for the Committee’s work. They described a sequence of six full committee meetings to occur over the next twelve months. The process will start with visioning the future, followed by relatively intensive threshing of specific queries or issue areas in order to define potential pathways for the school to consider. Ultimately the Committee will construct in shared schematic (or set of contingent schematics) which can be communicated to the community and be used for initiating action oriented activities in the coming years. They described the establishment of four sub-groups: 

• Program - to describe the programmatic needs for educating students that could be met by facility options;
• Enrollment - to assess the size and shape of the school;
• Facilities - to focus on the options and costs of physical development of the new property and linkage to what already exists;
• Development - to identify resources and connections to the community that can assist us in achieving the direction we identify. 

Committee members will participate to varying degrees in one or more of these sub-groups which will be supported (and in most cases clerked) by the relevant administrative team member (Wilson Felter for Program; Leanne Clancy for Enrollment; Teri Buda for facilities; and Emily Harmar for Development.)

As part of this discussion several committee members brought up ideas around the sequence of work and when aspects of output from different sub-groups would make sense. It was agreed that foundational work in the areas of Program and Enrollment would, to some extent, precede that of Facilities and Development. Community input and interaction was felt to be of great import in all sub-groups, along with several queries that are likely to be more broadly relevant.

The committee broke out into two sub-groups with the charge of  discussing their vision for GSFS in the future (in the range of 5-15 years out) and to identify initial implications for facilities. The two groups came back with broadly similar perspectives, although with differing levels of detail and discussion about specific aspects of their visions or facility requirements.

The groups identified a series of needs relating to space and facilities. While not intended to be comprehensive, this included such things as community dining and gardening space, gathering space for kids and parents, pool, science labs, planned pathways, parking, landscaping promoting fee play, gym for PE and sports, auditorium for performing arts and/or multi purpose facility, space for a large gathering, the ability to have a ‘home’ sports game.

The discussions identified a series of concerns as well, including: How to maintain the meetinghouse as a focus of the campus, how to maintain intimacy and what creates intimacy (for example, is it the size of the school or of the classroom that is a bigger factor?). Additional concerns were expressed in reaction to the possibility that one outcome would be a larger enrollment, including outgrowing the meetinghouse and the dining room.

In the breakouts and the subsequent full committee discussion, the group identified a partial set of queries for the subgroups to work on. For the Program sub-group, such questions included identifying gaps in the current program with regard to specific subject areas that might be alleviated by new facilities and more space. For the Enrollment sub-group, questions were suggested regarding the potential for new programs.

For facilities the queries were more general and revolved around further sharing of the charrette activities and helping the group imagine ways to utilize space and to connect the new space to existing facilities (the group had previously discussed the desire to not overly specify the use of property prior to clarifying what the priority needs are.) We ran out of time prior to discussing queries for development, but previous discussion pointed to queries around fundraising potential, the opportunity to access community resources to support some of the development (particularly if community access to facilities or space was appropriate) and to explore ways to meet some of the needs with existing facilities nearby. Ultimately the work of the Futures Committee will provide important input to a campus and facilities master planning process.

Koof and Russ concluded the meeting with a summary of next steps, including the identification of sub-group membership, multiple approaches to communicating with the committee and the school community and the expectation that admin team members will begin working on plans for work of the sub-group. The meeting ended with a moment of silence.