Dear Friends,

I hope that the 2008-09 school year is off to a very successful start for you and your families. We open this year with a full school and much enthusiasm for what lies ahead.

Schools have the wonderful opportunity of being able to start anew each September while building on the traditions and customs from previous times. As we begin this year, we do so with a commitment to focus on our mission and our vision, and come together as a school community to serve our students to the very best of our abilities. At the end of last school year, we sent to all of you a copy of our newly revised Strategic Plan. The following Vision Statement was in the plan:

St. Margaret’s Episcopal School is a diverse community dedicated to developing the whole child. We nurture spiritual growth, an appreciation for lifelong learning, the courage to lead and a responsibility to give to others. Our graduates are independent thinkers of integrity and compassion who reveal their resilience and collaborative nature in the face of challenge and opportunity.

At our opening faculty and staff meetings this year we devoted a considerable amount of time discussing this Vision Statement and our collective calling to come together as a school community to make this vision a reality. As we welcome all of you to Back-To-School Nights this fall, it is our intention to bring you into this conversation, as well. There is much to this statement and our success in achieving this vision depends in large part on our partnership with all our school families. Gone are the days when schools could operate in isolation from the homes of their students. As Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot says in her book, The Essential Conversation, “Families and schools are overlapping spheres of socialization, and the successful learning and development of children depends, in part, on building productive boundaries between and bridges across them.”

As has been our custom for several years now, we have scheduled a series of Tartan Talks to come together and share thoughts about important issues. We would like to make the focus of the first such gathering, Thursday, Oct. 16 at 6:30 p.m. in Highland Hall, a discussion of our Vision Statement and the ways we can work together at school and at home to strengthen and deepen our commitment to this vision. In this regard, we are eager to examine in close detail the manner in which we identify and then build into our curriculum and into our partnership with you a shared understanding of what the various components of our Vision Statement mean. For example, what does it mean to “nurture the courage to lead?” As you know, leadership is one of the three pillars of our mission statement, and we realize that we must be more intentional in developing a plan to strengthen this key component of our program. More importantly, we need to take a close look at our own leadership styles and the manner in which we model those characteristics we wish to nurture in our students.

This is exciting and important work, and we look forward to our collective efforts to prepare our students for lives of learning, leadership and service in the 21st Century. All the best to you and your families for a happy, healthy and productive school year.

Warm regards,

Marcus D. Hurlbut