Strategic Planning - The Road Ahead

The energy that flows through Fayerweather in the fall is truly a thing of beauty. The return to the classroom is a time of integrating, storming, and norming; teachers and students work together to set the terms of their journey for the next year, and build the relationships that will guide them through the months ahead. 

Those of us who are stewards of Fayerweather’s mission are engaged in a similar process. When the board met in person in September, we were excited to have an opportunity to connect, brainstorm decision-making approaches that will support our work, and set some goals for what we’ll focus on this year. 

As a board, we were most eager to start work on our most important goal for this year: the creation of a strategic plan that will ensure we continue to deliver on that mission well into the future. We (Kim and Courtney) wanted to give our broader community visibility into that initiative.

Folks who’ve been here for more than a few years will remember that in 2017, the school developed a five-year Strategic Plan, drawing perspective and input from all the possible categories of Fayerweather stakeholders. The consensus the strategic planning effort generated on our school’s most important priorities was a key factor driving decision-making over the years.  Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our priorities and trade-offs as a school have been intimately connected to the goals we set at that time.

Now, 2017 is more than five years ago and it feels like a million in COVID years. We’re moving into an education landscape irrevocably altered by the pandemic and its attendant economic stresses, and we have big questions for Fayerweather's future: questions about demographics and demand and how they impact enrollment; questions about the affordability of an independent school education; questions about deepening our relationships with the Cambridge community even as our specific North Cambridge neighborhood changes around us.

In response to these questions, challenges, and opportunities, we will develop a five-year strategic plan that will build on the school’s new mission statement, outline key strategic goals for the school and the actions required to achieve them and serve as a guide for decision-making and resource allocation moving forward.  

We’ll run this process with a partnership between a steering committee drawn from the  Fayerweather community - chaired by Lauren Stewart, a longstanding board member and Fayerweather parent - and an external consultant, who will not only support the overall management of the project but also provide detailed and actionable market analysis.

There will be many opportunities to participate for parents, faculty, and staff. The entire community should be involved throughout the process, either by working on a subcommittee, which will begin to meet in the very beginning of 2024, or by providing perspective in a survey or a focus group, which will take place over the early spring months. We’ll take time throughout the project to share our progress with you, and our goal and intention is to finalize our priorities over the summer and share both those priorities and action plans to achieve them at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year. 

Strategic planning can trigger some difficult conversations. When you set priorities, you also determine paths not to pursue, and courses of action you will deprioritize. 

That said, we’ll be doing the work in a deeply inclusive and collaborative process that engages our entire community - much as we did for another recent and important piece of work: re-writing our mission and values statement. 

A school’s mission statement is its fundamental guiding light, offering its Board, its leadership team, and every community member a vehicle to clarify priorities and evaluate and steer decisions. Reviewing and revitalizing a school's mission statement is an important and necessary process that independent school boards follow regularly; it’s a key part of stewardship of the school’s mission to make sure that the language we use accurately and fully reflects us as a school. We accordingly set out to create something that would state, in the boldest terms, both to the public and to prospective families, the school’s reason to exist, and articulate a shared identity within and for the school. Following the board’s approval in February 2023, we’ve taken every opportunity to share this mission with our community and the world: 

Fayerweather’s mission is to cultivate a joyful and collaborative learning community that honors every student’s unique story, promoting growth through intellectual exploration, creative thinking, and meaningful engagement with our world and each other.

We believe:

We, as a school, know who we are. Now, we need to look externally to figure out what our future should hold based on what’s in the environment around us. That’s what strategic planning is: the intersection of market and mission.

We are confident we’ll come out of this process with a lot of clarity and energy for the road ahead, and we hope you’ll join us in this exciting work.

In partnership,

Kim Ridley, Head of School

Courtney Quinn, Board Chair