October 2002

The year has begun with vigor and gusto! Your children are engaged in the myriad of challenging activities that characterize their lives at PDS. Teachers, refreshed by the slower pace of the summer, have returned with good ideas to help them learn. It feels good to be in school.

The board and the administration began its new academic year a little differently. Our annual planning retreat was conducted last weekend rather than last spring. This enabled us to not only draw on the knowledge of our experienced members, but also to encourage new members of the board and administration to move directly into action, to help us identify the challenges ahead and to make concrete plans to meet them. This year we were joined by members of the PDS Parents’ Organization (PDSPO), a welcome first and an important acknowledgement of the role this group will play in the life of our school.

Two and a half days of intense thinking and planning is pretty heady stuff! And it is important that we share that thinking and planning with you, as we must develop a common vision and engage you in its implementation. This letter is a first step to that end. We will continue the process this fall in discussions on both Founders’ Day and during the first PDSPO parent event on October 17.

Prior to the retreat, the board asked me to identify my vision for the school now and over the next five years. I began by reviewing our history and our mission. These were my thoughts:

Poughkeepsie Day School strives for educational excellence within a progressive tradition. Its central mission is to support the growth of young people as creative and intellectually curious individuals who value integrity, self-worth, love of learning and commitment to their community. In its quest for academic excellence, PDS has remained true to the principles of student-centered education. Within the context of a core liberal arts curriculum, our students become independent learners who take responsibility for their own life-long learning.

We promote understanding through discovery, analysis and dialogue. We lead each student to ever-increasing knowledge of the complexities of self, society and the universe and commitment to their improvement. Our students become thinkers and leaders in a world marked by continual change. Instilling independent habits of mind in harmony with selfless habits of heart may be the school’s greatest and most consistent accomplishment.

These precepts remain as true today as they were when they were first developed. However, the world has evolved and the school has grown. As educators and as parents we need to understand those changes and honor our mission by addressing new needs fully and with integrity. We must be a well-managed organization, undaunted by rigorous self-scrutiny, constantly examining and evaluating current practice and needs and creatively planning for the future. We must celebrate our strengths and recognize our needs, even as we confront the difficult choices facing independent schools in this decade and beyond.

To do this, we agreed upon six broad goals. We must:
1. Meet the curricular needs of the school and the intellectual, physical and personal needs of our students and faculty;
2. Develop, maintain and access academically demanding programs that enable all students to develop areas of individual strength;
3. Assure all graduates opportunity for entry into challenging and appropriate colleges and universities and careers;
4. Attract and retain gifted and diverse teachers and effective administrators;
5. Attract and retain diverse and talented students;
6. Provide and maintain the facilities for these purposes.

We then examined the implications of these goals, their consequences for curriculum and classroom practice, their intellectual and financial prerequisites and their ethical and moral implications. It is impossible to capture the thoughtfulness and richness of those discussions in a single page! However, let me summarize key points:
1. We agreed that we must fully examine our practice to assure that all of our students experience the most challenging opportunities to develop their existing strengths and explore new interests.We must consider ways to further individualize the program to enable each student to reach his or her potential. It is not enough to ask what our children need today and, accordingly, we must prepare them for what they will need in the future.
2. We agreed that we must compensate our faculty and administration more equitably and more fully. Matters of direct and indirect compensation must be thoroughly explored and analyzed and resources for doing a better job in this area must be found.
3. We agreed that current resources are inadequate to meet our objectives. Each of us must shoulder a larger load in defining our responsibilities to all of our children. We need to expand our pool of resources and network of support into the larger community. We need creative thinking, careful analysis, hard work and generosity from every member of our community to make our vision a reality.

Enough! More to come! We need one another! Let’s talk!

Sincerely,

Mary Jane Yurchak