Looking Forward

The Hill We Climb

The insurrection on January 6, 2021 was a stark erosion of democracy for the whole world to see. A mob of Donald Trump supporters attacked the Capitol Building. They attempted to stop formal sanctioning of Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Five people were killed. More than 130 police officers were injured. Four officers died by suicide soon after.

The failed coup was banal in its deadly chaos and ineptitude. What beggared belief, as it unrolled before the eyes of the world, was that it had been encouraged by an outgoing President. The insurrection will go down as an abysmal low in the history of the United States of America.

A few weeks later at the Biden and Harris inauguration, Amanda Gorman, the nation's first-ever youth poet laureate, read her poem The Hill We Climb. Her hope-filled, higher-ground counter to entrenched partisan division was to portray a “nation that isn't broken; but simply unfinished.”

Other notable events in 2021 included a spectator-free Tokyo Olympics, and a guilty verdict for the murderer of George Floyd. Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, became a federal holiday. In Afghanistan, the Taliban returned to power in the blink of an eye, following a hurried and harried withdrawal of United States troops.

The Covid landscape continued to shift in 2021. The Delta and Omicron variants surfaced. By the end of the year Covid had caused five million deaths globally, with 800,000 in the USA.

As these and other key world events unfolded we continued to address them age-appropriately and cathartically in classes with our students. Our educators never wasted an opportunity to encourage them to think critically about democracy.

Le temps retrouvé

Melinda launched the 2021 Rentrée with a set of resonant truths about the pandemic. “We had all learned to mask our smiles, to wash our hands, to stay apart when we longed to be close. We learned to live without restaurants and travel, museums, and live music. We learned to work from home, and then to come back to work. We learned to teach students online, in class, and both at once.”

We had certainly learned a lot from the Covid experience and now we were back! We were still masked, but classes were now sized normally and all students would be learning in-person. Another huge boost to faculty and staff morale was the return to a full calendar of in-person community events.

Things kicked off with a swag-adorned, highly demonstrative crowd—oozing school spirit—at the Fan Jam at

Kezar Stadium. Songs for Senegal also returned, with its rapt audience filling the bleachers in the gym. Jaguar athletes competed fiercely against peer schools in three seasons of sport. Team sports were thriving again and resulted in league and play-off successes.

The Back à Dos ensemble had a triumphant year that culminated in a meta-cognitive, thought-provoking, jarringly beautiful musical based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf. The opening night performance was staged audaciously on the Oak Yard play structure.

Live Lower School theater also returned with three high quality productions. Contes sens dessus dessous, a raucously costumed, Cleopatra-themed Asterix! and Le Petit Nicolas were performed by Grades 3, 4, and 5 respectively. Our teacher director, David Valyre reminded appreciative parent audiences that “theater is a fantastic tool to socialize the children, develop their imaginations, help them overcome their fears, and teach them to internalize a foreign language."

One-on-one Conservatory music lessons resumed. Large and small instrumental ensembles and the faculty/parent choir were back. Concerts were performed live. Both the Lower School Art Show, with its Earth-themed monoprints and stop-motion movies, and the Maternelle Festival des Arts, were attended by hundreds of appreciative parents.

Other community events included but were not limited to: the Progressive Dinner, the Moveable Feast, multiple Parents of Students of Color (POSOC) gatherings, and, of course, Hollywood Nights–a rollicking live auction that broke attendance and fundraising records in support of our school.

High school students were able to dress in their idio-syncratic finery for the Winter Formal and Prom. Faculty and staff partied at Melinda’s home at Thanksgiving. The year ended with en masse Athletics and Back à Dos banquets, and the return of the Senior Walk, and a restorative, “old normal” High School graduation at historic Herbst Theater.

For the 2021-22 academic year international travel was still covid-restricted, nevertheless, students were able to enjoy Washington D.C., New Orleans, Hawaii and a music tour in New York.

Soon after the Rentrée the Admission folks worked closely with a professional film company to make an International High School recruitment movie consisting entirely of student voices. The script was edited down from more than 15 hours of candid interviews conducted over two Saturdays. The students stand together at the very end of the movie and declare, "We know who we are… we are International!"

The film crew quickly became quite enamored with the school; especially the authenticity and the smarts of the students. The very same professional crew later collaborated with Advancement to produce a Financial Aidthemed movie for the Auction. Sometimes a Values-driven crew and cast ensemble artistic project just gels and really works. We think this is evident in the final cut of both movies.

Further empirical evidence that our sixty-year-old, venerable institution was alive and well included robust enrollment despite a hybrid Admission season, terrific Brevet, Bac, and IB results, and yet another impressive college endgame.

The Advancient team, led by Director Stephen Dini, had an excellent year. Total annual giving has topped $2 million for the past four years, setting a new record in 2022. This includes #GivingTuesday and an auction that raised $350,000 and $850,000 respectively.

60th Anniversary

At French American + International, preparations were underway to celebrate its sexagennial. Festivities were set to kick off on August 27 with the 60th Anniversary Back-To-School Picnic at the Civil War Parade Ground at the Presidio. This would be followed by a 60th Anniversary Party at the Four Seasons Hotel on September 24. The third and final opportunity to honor the 60th would be the Cercle du Proviseur gathering at the St. Francis Yacht Club on December 8.

Documentation of the 60th Anniversary would include the very book you are now reading (which, of course, complements Dan Harder’s A Look Back, written for the 50th); as well as an interactive timeline on the school's website.

Sexagesimal numerology

The school’s sexagennial is a worthy landmark. Sixty years is a long time–several human generations in fact. Certainly long enough for a school to come of age and go from good to great.

But what of the number 60 itself? It feels a certain way. It has a symmetry and austere beauty all of its own. It is conveniently composite with its 12 perfect factors. The ancient Sumerians appreciated this and adopted a sexa- gesimal number system five thousand years ago. Sixty is a familiar friend for counting minutes and seconds and–especially in the cerebral cortexes of budding geometry and trigonometry students–for manipulating equilateral and standard right angle triangles.

And you don’t have to be a chemistry nerd to appreciate the structure of buckminsterfullerene, the sixty carbon atom C60 allotrope. Every soccer ball has a similar truncated icosahedral, Archimedean configuration.

Whatever next?

Soon the dust will settle on 60th Anniversary celebrations and French American + International will launch the first stage of its next Strategic Planning process.

The following big picture call to action was written by Melinda for the 2020-21 Rentreé. It was used verbatim to conclude our recent CIS/WASC and CAIS accreditation

Self Studies. In this author’s not-at-all-humble opinion it should be required preliminary reading for all Strategic Plan stakeholder participants, including students of all ages.

As we begin this new school year, it’s important to pause and think about what beginning school again means—despite, and perhaps especially because of, these strange circumstances. At this historic moment, as we witness the fight against Covid and the fight for racial justice in this country and across the world, what does it mean to be a school—and what does it mean to be this school, French American and International, in particular? A school community is defined not by its circumstances, not by its buildings, nor even by its curriculum, but by its ideals. They make us who we are, and they guide us toward who we can be. They explain our past and they point to our future. They tell us what we must do, and how we must do it.

Best and worst of times

The relevance and urgency for what education means at French American and International–“in particular”–is glaringly obvious. There can be no let up in preparing our young citizens to make a difference in the existentially-threatened world they did not create but will inherit.

If this sounds like scaremongering or hyperbole–especially in the context of Stephen Pinker’s reminder that “we live longer, healthier, safer, wealthier, freer, more peaceful and more stimulating lives than those who came before us”–reflect for a moment on recent events. This 22nd year of the third millennium has already been a year of living dangerously.

On the 26th of February, Russia invaded Ukraine. On the 14th of May in Buffalo, NY, ten, mostly elderly, Black people buying groceries at their local food market were massacred in an overtly racist shooting. Ten days later the Uvalde Elementary School shooting left a child body count second only to that of Sandy Hook. At the end of June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Extreme weather events continue to raise climate consciousness. The now familiar catalog of wildfires, droughts, floods, storms, and soaring record temperatures provide an in-your-face foreshadowing of climate catastrophe. These events are not just inconvenient; very often they are deadly truths. It remains to be seen whether this year’s COP27, climate crisis conference–hosted in Egypt in November–will shift ongoing carbon and methane emissions pledges to meaningful action.

Microcosm

No need for a spoiler alert. Predicting even the chapter headings of the 2023 Strategic Plan is performatively impossible. The Strategic Plan will be Mission-, Values-, and Commitment to Equity-driven. It will prioritize the long term sustainability of the institution and the sustainability of our shared planet. It will build both on the legacy of the past and the momentum of current projects. It will be aspirational, but doable. It will be the foundation of our yearly action plan for the foreseeable future.

There is much more to say about the Strategic Planning process than merely listing these best practice prerequisites. Strategic Planning is an inherently creative and emergent enterprise. It will be puzzling and intriguing. It will be argumentative, tense at certain junctures, but also positively uplifting. It will cultivate delight. It will be a safe, discursive coming together of invested, connected stakeholders who will bring a hybrid, vigorously diverse portfolio of perspectives. In short: a microcosm of the school itself.

Reflecting on the return to school after lockdown, Assistant Head Julie Strong declared that, “change is still with us, as we move not back to our old ways of doing school, but forward towards a new reality, one which takes the best of what was created this year and adds the human interactions that we have all been craving.”

And, as we move forward in this spirit with the 2023 Strategic Plan, Melinda’s call to action is that “our tra-

Rendering of the street level for the proposed new high school campus dition of critical thinking requires us to examine the gap between our aspirations and our actions, and our mission and values call on us to do more.”

Fusion of horizons

It is a fair wager that some of the big picture themes emerging from this slim sexagennial history will feature in the Strategic Plan. It is highly probable that we will be invited to engage our signature critical thinking to address gaps between aspirations and action in curricular and school life domains such as: the balance between urban and global engagement; the relationship between grassroots attitudes towards sustainability and what it means to be internationally-minded; evolving blended learning and design thinking post-Covid; the ongoing holistic wellbeing and mental health of all of our students, and, not least, a renewed vision for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

There is more to crafting a visionary Strategic Plan than developing a soldierly action plan for implementation in the medium term. The Board of Trustees know they must adopt an unblinkered, longer-term view. What will be their vision for the school for the looming semisesquicentennial in 2037, and the fanfare centennial of 2062?

Long-game Board thinking will be imaginative, but rooted in the real world, pragmatism in service of the long term sustainability, and the kudos, of San Francisco's premier international school. How might this be diluted, or even usurped, by existential threats from up and coming peer schools? It is wisdom, not sacrilege, to take stock and do some meta-thinking–to critique and, perhaps, hone the mission and values, and even reassess how the school should be named?

98 Franklin

Shifting now to firmer ground, the one Strategic Plan item that is punningly concrete (rather than merely speculative) is moving forward on building the new stand-alone high school.

We own the large corner parking lot adjacent to our main building at 98 Franklin Street. In 2020, the San Francisco Planning Department altered their zoning map to allow substantial height increases on select parcels close to public transit in the Market & Octavia Hub–98 Franklin was serendipitously included. The Board of Trustees responded with its characteristic boldness and vision, designing a plan that will shape our school’s fu- ture, and our city’s as well. The plan for 98 Franklin was initially developed under Josh Nossiter’s leadership. New Board Chair Amy Baghdadi has continued to advance it and the Capital Campaign, while stewarding the school through the pandemic.

As a consequence, we will soon build a pristine, distinct International High School. In partnership with our architect, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; our developer, Related Companies; and the City of San Francisco, we will construct a mixed-use tower project that will house our new high school on floors 1-5, and apartments on the 31 floors above! The project will dramatically enhance our visibility in the city, and will strengthen our prominence as a global leader in international education. The project will enhance student recruitment and retention.

The capital campaign for this project has been hugely successful. At the time of writing Campaign for a Bold Future stands at $14.4 M, the largest campaign in school history. The campaign’s remit also includes providing expanded space for our middle school students at 150 Oak Street. This campaign will also serve future generations of students. It enables the school to retain ownership of the 98 Franklin building, extend a ground lease to the developer, and receive a revenue stream for the next 99 years!

The new high school design is “spatially dynamic… inspiring and surprising–with 86,000 square feet of community spaces and flexible classrooms that are easily reconfigured.” A 4,000 square feet auditorium will serve as a marketplace of ideas–a focal gathering and events place. These innovative architectural spaces will support current and future advancements in education.