Jane's Corner

Laying the Foundations:

Understanding a deep and sustainable value

In the opening pages of her short book, The Measure of Our Success, Marian Wright Edelman wrote: "I was fourteen years old the night my Daddy died. He had holes in his shoes but two children out of college, one in college, another in divinity school, and a vision he was able to convey to me as he lay dying in an ambulance that I, a young Black girl, could be and do anything; that race and gender are shadows; and that character, self-discipline, determination, attitude, and service are the substance of life".

These powerful sentences from Edelman contain the very depth and richness that encapsulate the mission of The Cambridge School of Weston, in particular, those words that ascribe the potential of success on personal strength within a family, or school, that believes in you, tells you that you can do anything and provides the fertile ground for trial and error, challenge and learning.

Members of the CSW community are involved in a number of exciting initiatives at the moment. These initiatives, which stem from the deep thinking and planning that characterize our institution, will sustain and enrich our school, ensuring our students will continue to find their own voices. As head of school, I have the privilege of both watching and participating in many of these ground-breaking activities.

For the past three years, a collaborative group of tea chers, students and trustees have met and discussed our goals and desires for a new building, culminating this past June with the preparation of the land our new building will occupy. When you visit the campus, you will see the foundation and the wood frame construction of the Garthwaite Center for Science and Art. This building is a sign of our health and commitment to providing innovative academic programs, and inspirational spaces where ideas can grow.

Using a similar time frame and inclusive approach, another group has met to discuss our goals and desires to create a strong multicultural institution that embraces, and is willing to engage in, the necessary and healthy struggle throughout this process. This process will ensure the susta inability of our diversity goals and desires. As our first step toward building the richly diverse learning environment we seek, CSW hired Eric Polite II, director of diversity at the Gordon School in East Providence, Rhode Island, to manage and consult in our Cultural Diversity Assessment (CDA).

As the physical transformation of the campus demonstrates the intentional steps the school is making to improve our facilities, I consider how the groundwork we laid for our new science and art center parallels the foundations we constructed for the diversity assessment that we embark on this winter. The core value of laying groundwork and inviting collaboration enables CSWto be the best progressive school it can.

So what will a CDA do for us? How will it work? How does it lay the foundation for what's to come? In Eric's proposal to the Diversity Action Group, he outlined the following reasons for this assessment: It will allow our school community to affirm the progress that has been made; it will surface specific concerns and remove any sense that the leaders of the work are ignorant of the issues; and it will provide us with the data to build a plan of action specific to the needs of our school. While most independent schools focus their diversity efforts on the goal of increasing the number of students of color, a comprehensive diversity assessment will allow CSW to define and create meaningful diversity by examining the culture and climate through the experiences of its constituents. In the end, Eric showed us, that an assessment will help our institution see an alignment of purpose around the very broad topic of diversity.

While defining the topic further, we will engage everyone in our strategic goal to define a mission-based direction for unselfconscious, institutional diversity. All of this while several faculty and staff are reading about and discussing the roots of progressive education, and the board of trustees is piloting a new approach to strategic planning by focusing on the school's core values. At a recent event to publically launch Changing Lives: The Campaign for CSW, we honored a number of alumni, current students, trustees and faculty members. Our campaign's theme, resonated throughout the evening, as indeed, it resonates throughout our days and weeks together here at school. We are engaged in the deep and sustainable change for which CSW has always stood. True to our roots, and always ensuring that we circle back to them, that is our "substance of life."

Jane Moulding, Head of School