Broadening Our Reach

Stephen Gaynor School is a recognized and respected leader in special education. Our curriculum is designed to unlock each child’s potential and to address who each child is as a unique learner. Over the next five years, we will undertake several initiatives designed to broaden our reach to prospective families, faculty and staff, and the wider community.

Goal 1, Expanding Employee Recruitment and Retention, will focus on collecting and examining data to quantify employee satisfaction and identify measurements for retention, recruitment, and the restructuring of resources, as well as to recruit more diverse faculty and staff.

Expanding Access, Equity, and Belonging is the theme of Goal 2. Over the next five years, the school will examine opportunities to expand access, equity and a sense of belonging in all areas of a family’s experience at Gaynor, with a focus on reducing barriers to application and engagement.

Goal 3 focuses on Developing Strength in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The school will evaluate the ways in which Gaynor can create and maintain a community of belonging and then implement consistent DEI standards.

Goal 4 is Onboarding New Families and Engaging Alumni Families. A key initiative will be to develop a formal onboarding process that fully encompasses each family’s needs. Other initiatives include developing programming for Gaynor alumni and their parents and formalizing the Gaynor alumni internship program.

Helping parents stay current with important topics relevant to their children’s education is the theme of Goal 5, Creating and Implementing a Parent Education Curriculum. The goal is to create, formalize, and communicate a comprehensive parent education curriculum and toolkit based on current educational offerings and needs, and to highlight the courses and workshops that all Gaynor families should take.

A review of all of the SMART goals made clear the importance of comprehensive outreach. Goal 6, Improving Outreach in the Greater Community, addresses this need. There are families who may never become part of the Gaynor community through matriculation, but who could benefit from the school’s expertise and experience. Over the next five years, the school plans to define the roles and responsibilities of a new Office of Outreach and Innovation which would be tasked with finding opportunities to extend our faculty’s professional expertise as well as the school’s reputation as a leader in the field.

Finally, Goal 7 focuses on the Board of Trustees: Increasing Trustee Visibility and Community Engagement. The next five years will see an analysis of the composition of our community and outreach initiatives in order to facilitate a more diverse Board of Trustees, with the ultimate goal of helping to build a faculty, staff and student community that better reflects the New York City population. Board leadership will continue to focus on education and tools to increase the board’s awareness of DEI issues. The aim is to increase the visibility of the board, educate the community about the board’s role, and improve broader board connectedness to fundraising and advancement in order to better support these efforts.

Dr. Gaynor said, “This plan is deeply rooted in our mission, seeking to improve upon our already stellar educational model for teaching students with learning differences. Emerging from the plan are goals that strengthen that model and aim to broaden our reach so that the elements that make Gaynor so unique can be shared with the greater community. It is an exciting time for Gaynor, and I look forward to working with our entire community on implementing this plan.”