Welcome From Ed Marshall, Head of School

Throughout its life Greene Street, like any school, has always taken on challenges. In its earlier years, many challenges came from operating near several other great independent schools and competing for enrollment. But somewhere in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, Greene Street changed direction. The biggest changes involved coeducation and increasing racial diversity. In one sense these were easy decisions, because they meant staying connected with the community, admitting the children of our neighborhood. No longer were we competing with other independent schools for students, because we began to cast a wider net. But doing so also changed Greene Street’s challenges. With this new vision, we began to compete with the barriers to a more public version of a Friends school. Here is the essence of this vision, a current statement of our day-to-day intent:

Every day, we will welcome our students into the community of learners, and we will ensure they know our goal is to help them succeed. Every day, we will lift up kindness and promote individual and group responsibility, especially toward the ethical and courteous treatment of all people. Everywhere in our program, we will teach children how to be successful students and how to take pleasure in academic, social, physical, and spiritual accomplishment. And in every institutional practice, we will be financially accessible and sustainable.

This vision, it seems to us, is not only the right vision, but it is also practical, the best kind of a vision for a Friends school. We have high academic expectations. We base our decisions on spiritual values. And we are ambitious, wanting our students to negotiate and succeed in a bigger world. Hence our graduates are good people, competent people, and at Greene Street they have learned, as one of our alumni said, “that people who are different from me are interesting and worth getting to know.”

These three things – strong academics, spiritual values, and multi-cultural competence – form the core of our vision. The first two items have always been part of the school’s vision. But the third one is new. I asked an alumna of the 1930’s how she felt about her school becoming so diverse, much more diverse than Greene Street was when she attended, and much more diverse than most schools (see photo below). She said, “In those days, I think we all wanted to mix people together, we just didn’t know how.” With this perspective it is not a surprise that Greene Street’s biggest financial supporters hail from classes in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s.

I invite you to join our community – as a student, a parent or family member, as a member of our teaching or administrative staff, or as a volunteer. We are a school that is on the move, living its mission, and thankful for our many supporters.

Below is last year's photograph of the girls in the class of 2014.