From the Desk Of Dr. Autumn A. Graves

What does the future look like? And how do we inspire students to lead and be exemplary citizens in that future? We’ll need your help in shaping our strategic priorities to fully realize our founding headmistress’ wish for our students to “become strong in body, broad of mind, tender of heart, responsive in soul.”

Fewer than two decades away, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan posit in their book, “AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future,” daily life will be revolutionized by a “human-machine symbiosis.” With the world advancing and changing at such an accelerated rate, we’ve perhaps arrived at a point where such a statement feels more of an inevitability than science fiction.

At this moment, we are the same distance to the year 2041 as we are to the year 2006. In 2006 — the year many of our Upper School juniors were born — I could never have imagined deep fake videos becoming mainstream. Casually talking to a chatbot about what to make for dinner or planning my summer vacation was the stuff of movies. Cryptocurrency was an alien concept (and honestly, this is one I still struggle to fully comprehend). And, as a historian, while I had studied moments such as the influenza pandemic of 1918 or the burning of the U.S. Capitol during the War of 1812, in 2006, I would not have imagined lead ing a school during our own global pandemic or the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In 2006, if you had asked me to lead a strategic planning process resulting in a plan that would be valid for five or even 10 years, I would have said “yes, we can do that.” This school has been successful in doing just that for many years, with the most recent strategic plan established for the time period of 2017 to 2022. Under the leadership of the prior Head of School David S. Lourie, great strides were made toward achieving the goals laid within that plan when the COVID pandemic, and a leadership change, required a massive pivot in 2020. With the 2017 – 2022 Strategic Plan now expired, many have asked me, “what is next for St. Anne’s-Belfield?”

Future visioning to the year 2041 with all the attendant unknowns, I am realizing that the best way to serve St. Anne’s-Belfield students isn’t to engage in another multi-year strategic planning process. Rather than a strategic plan, I believe that we need flexible, future-focused strategic priorities. Unlike a strategic plan, which follows a uniform process for soliciting community input and is summarized in one comprehensive document at the end of that process, strategic priorities may be developed independently of one another, and deployed in real time as soon as they are ready. Strategic priorities are also iterative and action focused, allowing us to adapt to emerging issues and new research that informs best practices.

You will find some already-identified strategic priorities in "Strategic Priorities for St. Anne's-Belfield School." Others, however, will require your input. Over the next weeks and months, the community will be invited into a process to develop a Portrait of a 2036 Graduate, with 2036 referring to the year our incoming Kindergarten class will graduate. The Portrait expresses our mission and core purpose in a small, defined set of outcomes that we want all students to master by the time they leave St. Anne’s.

I am very excited about this work we will undertake together. By focusing on strategic priorities that reflect the changing needs of children and the world, we can ensure that our students are prepared to meet every opportunity with integrity, curiosity, mindfulness towards diversity, creativity, agency, and impact. Together, we can help create a brighter future not just for our students, but for our society.