BOARD OF DIRECTORS UPGRADE

breaking ground in the 2023-24 school year, with a construction end date in 2025, which would allow us to be ready for the 2025-26 school year.

Please see pages 34-35 in this publication for new building designs by our esteemed architect, Michele Zini, who truly shows the role of the environment in our pedagogy. This will be a building like no other in San Francisco, and we can’t wait for our students, faculty, families, and community to experience it.

Nurture And Grow

We continue to Nurture and Grow as we consistently prioritize attracting, retaining, and growing the best faculty and staff possible. This year we continued to focus on training our faculty and staff, including a trip to Reggio Emilia, IB training, a mentorship program for new teachers, and more. We ensured more competitive compensation, enabling our amazing faculty and staff to afford living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Heart And Mind

When we started on the Heart and Mind pillar of the strategic plan five years ago, we did not yet have any middle school graduates, which we have now. The outcome of La Scuola’s brilliant combination of Reggio Emilia and IB pedagogical approaches is no longer theoretical, it has become a proven success!

We graduated our fourth Grade 8 class who will be off to more great high schools in San Francisco and Italy. Our graduates will be attending Sacred Heart, International, University, Mercy Burlingame, Saint Ignatius, Mission High School, and schools in Milan and Rome, Italy. This past year, our Grade 8 class went on the inaugural Italy Trip and completed their IB-MYP Community Project Presentations. One of the things that makes us most proud is to see how our high schoolers are thriving academically and socially across the very different schools they are attending. They are the best La Scuola ambassadors and continue to pave the way for our up-and-coming high schoolers. It was also wonderful to see them coming back to La Scuola and engaging in our admissions events, Summer camps, and other activities, as well as marketing their high schools to our current eighth graders during campus visits.

Community

On Community, we have come a long way to realizing our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging goals. La Scuola’s DEIB Committee, a group of parents, faculty, staff, and Board members, successfully facilitated seven events this year across all three campuses, which included restorative yoga sessions and other activities. The committee, in tandem with the Board, expanded the current Sliding Scale Tuition offering for our Summer program. Our focus on DEIB remains at the center of who we are as a school.

We also want to acknowledge the wonderful work by our PALS (Parents Association of La Scuola) leader, Melissa Ippolito, and the PALS team to support our community; your work is truly remarkable. Next year, we encourage and challenge each of you to join Melissa and find ways to get involved at La Scuola.

Thriveability

Lastly, on Thriveability, we have been working on ensuring a strong financial foundation for La Scuola, and exploring different growth opportunities to make it even more sustainable in the Bay Area’s highly competitive education market. As you all know, we secured a generous gift to open our Silicon Valley Campus, and look forward to achieving our goals, including the addition of a K - 1 combined class this Fall. If you haven’t yet had a chance to visit that campus, we would be delighted to welcome you anytime.

We continue to forge ahead on our Milan expansion opportunity in order to strengthen our connection with Italy, enable compelling opportunities and movement of faculty and students across campuses, and attract new faculty and students in order to strengthen ourselves as a truly international school. We have narrowed down campus locations, established a separate Board of Directors, and remain on track to open for the 2024-25 school year. This campus will be independently funded and managed locally with oversight from San Francisco.

In conclusion, a lot has happened to be thankful for this year and there is so much more in the coming years. We will continue to move forward on our Embrace Campaign goals including to build our masterpiece building at our Mission Campus, renovate San Carlos Hall, and further establish our school in the Bay Area and in Italy. We would like to give thanks and say goodbye to two amazing pedagogical leadership team members — Sally Peterson and Douglas Lowney — and welcome Carmen Gomez. Sally will continue to support La Scuola from abroad. From the Board, we would like to give thanks and say goodbye to Aaron Harms, and welcome Nicholas Errico. We look forward to seeing you in the Fall and hope you enjoy a wonderful Summer.