Mid-Year Impact Report February 2019
FROM THE
Head of School
You are making St. Andrew’s an exceptional place for our students. Through your generosity, you empower outstanding faculty who are thoughtful and engaging. You ensure we have the resources and technology that opens doors for meaningful and experiential learning. Most of all, you strengthen a community that sees and supports each student as a valued individual with something unique and powerful to contribute to the world. Our St. Andrew’s core values are Community, Spiritual Foundation, Caring, Celebration, and Humor, and High Expectations. In this report are just a few examples of how you are helping put these core values into action for students this school year. Thank you for your generous investment in our school and our mission. Faithfully,
Sean Murphy Head of School
952 $1,080 $250
OCTOBER
was the most popular month to give, with 450 donors who gave $571,199
n
OCT 2018
$1,027,777
Par e
Participa nt
TOTAL raised TOTAL donors AVERAGE gift MEDIAN gift
summary
tio
CAMPAIGN
LEADERSHIP GIVING made up
6%
of donors
55% &
of dollars
WHAT you our MAKE HAPPEN values Community in action
In November, the entire school and their families are invited to our St. Andrew’s Day service, a celebration of the Holy Eucharist with special music, awards, and a sermon. This tradition brings grades K-12 together to celebrate those who have gone above and beyond in service to the St. Andrew’s Community. The kindergartners participated this year with the song, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” a nod to our football mascot, the Saints. Middle School students served as acolytes, carrying banners highlighting our pillars of scholar, artist, athlete and servant, and seniors paired with first graders to process in and out.
After the service, students headed out to Nazro Green for a picnic lunch with parents and friends. Thanks to the Upper School Coalition for the Environment, this was the third year that the event produced zero waste. St. Andrew’s Day is a celebration of the school’s commitment to keep community a central part of each student’s experience, giving him or her a network of support as they work to reach their potential.
Spiritual
foundation
Jonathan Lim ‘19 is a member of the Upper School Chapel Advisory Board.
What’s your role on the Chapel Advisory Board? I help our school chaplain, Mother Whitney, with daily chapel proceedings; this includes officiating, ringing bells, and reading daily biblical passages. Additionally, I help her organize services for special events, such as St. Andrew’s Day. As a part of the Chapel Advisory Board, I hope to create a space that is loving and accepting of our school’s wide range of belief systems. How do you feel like chapel fits in to your experience at St. Andrew’s? Chapel is the only time during the school day where the entire Upper School community gathers together. Through these daily meetings, I’ve bonded with peers whom I otherwise would have never met. Furthermore, during chapel, I’ve listened to amazing homilies and contemplatives from other students and teachers. Through these offerings, I learn more about the people that make up St. Andrew’s. In truth, chapel has become an essential part of my St. Andrew’s experience. What impact do you think chapel has had in your life? Chapel has allowed me to deepen my Christian faith. In response to Mother Whitney’s homilies, I am more conscious of how my actions affect others. I now try to implement her lessons of love in everyday life. Additionally, through listening to senior offerings and contemplatives, I’ve learned more about my wonderful peers and teachers. I now better understand the experiences that shape those around me; this has allowed me to grow closer to my school community.
Caring,
Celebration, and Humor
One of the many ways St. Andrew’s promotes caring, celebration and humor is the Middle School House System. Each year, new MS students and teachers are assigned to a House named after a significant person in SAS history—Nazro, Wilson, Bailey or Henry. Houses convene monthly to do fun activities and have goodnatured, inter-house competitions. Earning points from these as well as from other activities (such as service hours, acts of kindness (AoKs) and more), the winning House is recognized at the Four Pillars Banquet each May. The MS House system makes school fun for SAS students as they enter the chaotic waters of hormones and increasing social angst. The younger kids especially get excited to join in the fun, bonding with peers and faculty in a more meaningful way than the classroom can provide. These teacher-student bonds have a huge impact on even the most analytical aspects of learning. Yale Professor David Brooks explains research shows that “a key job of a school is to give students new things to love — an exciting field of study, new friends. [W]hat teachers really teach is themselves — their contagious passion for their subjects and students. It reminded us that children learn from people they love, and that love in this context means willing the good of another, and offering active care for the whole person.” (New York Times, Jan. 2019) So while these activities may seem at first glance to be strictly social, neuroscience is increasingly emphasizing the need for positive social bonds to facilitate learning. While students are experiencing caring, celebration, and humor, they are also laying a foundation for a strong connection that brings empirical results. eighth grade House Captain Morgan Harrison says, “The House system helps students work with people they don’t always talk to, and creates a fun outlet for us. With the House game every now and then we get with other students to compete in friendly competition. This is a great break from school while still strengthening friendships with people we see almost every day.” It also gives eighth graders great leadership opportunities, and bridges the gap between the sixth and eighth grades. Eighth grade Captain Andrew Farmer says, “I wanted to become a House Captain because I wanted to get experience as a leader of a large group of people and also talking/presenting to larger groups of people. Also when I was in sixth and seventh grade I remember how I looked up to the House Captains and I always wanted to be one.” Caring, celebration, and humor develop organically through the Middle School House system in a way that supports students and keeps their experience the central focus for faculty. This underscores the emphasis SAS places on the whole child, finding new and thoughtful ways to reach students that make a huge impact on their learning and development.
High expectations
What does it mean to have high expectations of our youngest students? At first glance, it seems contradictory to other values at St. Andrew’s. We strive daily to create a warm and supportive environment in which students can explore and grow in a holistic, child-centered way. How do high expectations fit in? Lower School art and project-based learning teacher Brianna Berkowitz says that it “starts with knowing each child as an individual.” This keeps expectations very individualized and therefore more achievable. Brianna explains that in this environment, “students gain confidence and a belief in themselves,” a key ingredient to a student’s willingness and aptitude to engage with new ideas. Fourth grade teacher Janice Gray agrees, noting that high expectations “will not look the same in everyone.” With that in mind, she also knows that “students will rise to any occasion when it’s presented in a manageable way with scaffolds, passion, and guidance.” Through those positive relationships, high expectations manifest themselves through project-based learning, such as the kindergarten cityscape project, which culminated the kindergartners’ studies of how communities work together. It includes simulated “archaeological” digs in the fourth grade, when students learn about the science and practice of Archaeology through an experiential learning model, and the third grade publishing party, a culmination of weeks of storycrafting and revision. It includes the second grade research projects at “Pollinator Palooza,” and the fifth grade Ancient Egyptian museum with original works of art. Importantly, the high expectations at St. Andrew’s are not solely academic. Social and emotional learning (SEL) makes frequent and significant appearances on campus, whether in a specific class or exercise designed to strengthen peer interactions, or in the way that students are expected to interact with their teachers and with each other on a daily basis. Lower School Head Kama Bruce, who is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying Educational Change and Policy at UT Austin, sees relationships as the key to high expectations, saying, “Every student is an individual here. To be honored and understood as an individual is huge. There’s not an opportunity to fly under the radar. I think about the 340 students in the LS; each one is known to us, from teachers to the admin team. That connection is what allows students to understand the roles they want to take on, to think about the risks they want to take to discover who they are, and it gives them the opportunity to try those things on in a very safe and nurturing environment. It’s not easy professionally to do that with every child every day, but it certainly is our charge.” When high expectations center around children being supported in a way that helps them to see and own their potential as learners and as people, students flourish. These crucial skills give kids the ability to meet and exceed expectations not only today, but every day as they enter a world filled with rapidly increasing change. Mr. Bruce expands, “Often, schools operate like machines, and they just run kids through. I think education at its root is about change management, giving children an opportunity to understand themselves through change and to be able to find resilience and agility and adaptability in the face of change.”
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