FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL Dear Frederick Gunn School Community, As I write, we are days away from opening the 2021-22 school year, the 172nd year in The Frederick Gunn School’s history. While always exciting, I wouldn’t typically comment on it here. What makes this so special is that it will be the first time that we have had all students, faculty and staff on campus since early March 2020 — and we are thrilled, despite the myriad variables of the year ahead. Our responsibility to each of the 315 students in our care this year, and every year, is to provide an excellent learning environment, one that leverages the many advantages of being a boarding school in Washington, Connecticut, by integrating the classroom, cocurriculars (outdoors, athletics and arts), and residential life into a transformative, holistic growth experience in line with Frederick Gunn’s educational mission to create engaged citizens. To do that as a school, our next responsibility is to the faculty and staff who do that work with students day-in and day-out — the people who, in my phrase, create the ecosystem conditions for student flourishing. Alongside these responsibilities — in fact, undergirding them — is the long-term responsibility for the school to take the right posture to risk. To succeed as an institution requires that we imagine a future that is better than the present, no matter how great the present is. This carries inherent risk: What are we not doing that we need to start doing? What are we doing that we need to stop doing? What are we doing well that we need to do better? Risk means making choices in line with our Core Values that are intended to result in an even more dynamic, transformative environment for students and the people who teach them.
Our core values > Integrated Humans > Hopeful Faculty > Learning Ecosystem > Moral Character Development > Active Citizens
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The Frederick Gunn School Bulletin
To succeed as an institution requires that we imagine a future that is better than the present, no matter how great the present is. This carries inherent risk: What are we not doing that we need to start doing? What are we doing that we need to stop doing? What are we doing well that we need to do better?
