2020
2020
T h e H a r k e r S c ho ol Pl a n : 2012 – 2017 T h e H a r k e r S c ho ol V i s io n & S t r at e g ic P l a n to 2 0 2 0 A Strategic Reflection on our Four Cornerstones of Success
A Reflection on our Four Cornerstones of Success
The Harker School Plan
Foreword No two children are alike, and each needs inspiration and encouragement to flourish. What will your child become? What is – or will be – his or her passion? Does he love to make forts? Does she love to write poetry? Will your child be the next Einstein, Rembrandt or Madame Curie? What does your child absolutely love to do? As parents, we all strive to understand each of our children, and discover each one’s true gifts. At Harker, we share the journey of discovery with you and your children. Our community encourages – and provides the opportunities for – the pursuit of a wide range of interests to help children discover what they love, and to flourish in a safe and supportive environment. Our passionate teachers engage students, inspiring them to reach their intellectual potential. Success brings children joy and confidence. We provide learning at a pace ideal for each child, so each is inspired, happy and motivated to reach his or her full potential. Character and integrity are instilled in the Harker culture and permeate everything we do. A shared commitment to these values creates Harker’s dynamic community. And Harker students are Diana & Howard Nichols, 1995
the true embodiment of these principles.
—Diana Nichols - Chair, Harker Board of Trustees
Our Commitment to You In 1893, The Harker School was founded as Manzanita Hall in Palo Alto, Calif., “in response to a steadily growing demand for a preparatory school ... which should have for its principle object the preparation of students for university work,” as described in the school’s early historical documents. In addition to preparation for college, Manzanita Hall emphasized character and broad programs for its students. More than century later, The Harker School sits in the center of Silicon Valley as a preschool-grade 12, multicampus, coeducational school. Throughout Harker’s history the school has adapted to a changing environment in the Valley while remaining committed to the following core values of quality academics, well-rounded programs, character education and community.
While the future will bring changes in how the school delivers on its promise, our commitment to the core values upon which the school was founded in 1893 will remain unshaken.
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The Harker Plan The current Harker Plan is the result of a community-wide effort to reflect upon the school’s academic and extracurricular offerings and to contemplate its future direction. This document serves as a framework for our ongoing planning process. The Harker Plan focuses on the four areas that we believe are the cornerstones for Harker’s success.
Students and family experience
Faculty, staff and learning
Curriculum and programs
Facilities and infrastructure
Building Upon Our Four Cornerstones Students and Family Experience Students are at the heart of everything we do, and our academic and extracurricular programs are designed with the goal of bringing out the best in our students across all domains. We are highly motivated to take our students as far as they can go in their personal academic and personal growth. Studies show that cognitive development is enhanced when supported by a positive emotional and social environment. Students learn best when they are in the zone of proximal development, challenged without being stressed. Student engagement is highest when there is real intellectual curiosity, interest and enjoyment in the learning process. Performance grouping is key to being able to accomplish this objective, and continuing parent education about performance grouping is critical in helping each student thrive. Silicon Valley attracts families from all over the world who value learning, engagement and innovation. These families find Harker’s program to be a good match. Into the future, Harker will continue to seek out well-rounded students who are intrinsically motivated to achieve their best and love learning for its own
Great programs begin with excellent faculty and staff collaborating with motivated, engaged and hardworking students.
sake. We will give priority to admitting children who, along with their families, not only value academics, but also seek nonacademic opportunities for personal growth with their choice of extracurricular activities. As the largest independent school in California, Harker places importance on and strives towards having a student population mirroring the demographics of the community it serves. The school’s future depends upon attracting a community comprising families of diverse backgrounds, talents and perspectives who can find common ground among our core values. As the school’s general endowment grows,
The Harker School Plan
we will continue to enhance our socioeconomic diversity through commitment to financial aid programs and other forms of outreach. Given that The Harker School is now a multicampus community serving families across several counties, the school will continually examine the best ways to foster community and connection among its various constituents, including students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff. As more and more alumni families seek admission for their children, and current families seek admission for their sibling children, Harker will keep its family traditions strong by giving special consideration to current families and alumni families who: • have been shown to be philosophically in sync with the school’s mission; • have demonstrated their belief in the school’s core values through their interactions within the school community; • have embraced the school’s culture of philanthropy and support the school’s programs.
Faculty, Staff and Learning The Harker School believes that great programs begin with excellent faculty and staff collaborating with motivated, engaged and hard-working students. While many attributes are necessary to be successful in an educational setting, the school searches worldwide for professionals who excel in their subjects and who understand how best to work with children. This combination helps bring out the best in students. Of critical importance to the school’s future will be to continue attracting faculty who are not only experts in their fields but who are eager to contribute
The decisive factor in a school’s excellence is a faculty and staff who have a deep passion.
to the entire school community. The decisive factor in a school’s excellence is a faculty and staff who have a deep passion for their areas and who understand that a comprehensive approach to schooling ensures the success of the students.
To attract and retain the best faculty and staff, the school will ensure the quality and diversity of our student population and the provision of world-class facilities to support our exceptional curriculum. We will also support our faculty and staff by promoting wellness initiatives, offering a variety of professional development opportunities, and providing competitive salary and benefits packages. Our tuition remission benefit has been among the most successful programs in attracting and retaining experienced faculty and staff and fully engaging them into our community. Strong emphasis on promoting a culture of reflective pedagogy will allow for the most effective teaching methods to flourish. This will include thorough study of what constitutes deep and enduring learning and student engagement as well as what constitutes effective pedagogy. This process shall include the evaluation of our own and others’ models. Harker has always realized that the value of an education is in teaching students how to learn: how to be adaptable and globally minded, how to develop the skills necessary to identify problems, how to access resources and gather data and how to work both individually and collaboratively to develop and
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share solutions. Students now have unprecedented access to information, and due to the accelerating rate of change in our society, students are likely being prepared for jobs that do not exist today. We as educators must continually reflect on how optimal learning is attained in a rapidly changing landscape and how best to prepare our students to be the well-rounded, resilient learners who are most likely to find success in the 21st century. In 2013, faculty and staff across departments and campuses gathered to articulate the school’s core values. These five values influence the way all constituents of Harker go about their day, and they are prominently displayed for faculty and staff to reference. As members of the Harker community, we are proud to: greet cheerfully, seek to understand, lean in, discover daily, and make a difference, all with honor and integrity.
Curriculum and Programs Now is an extraordinary time for independent education. While the public schools in California continue to struggle with funding for essential programs, alternative models of education continue to proliferate. Charter schools, online schools, for-profit schools and various other models rush into the gap created by the challenged public sector. Also, given the wealth of information and instruction available online, some question the value and future of location-based, brick-and-mortar schools. We believe that the total school experience is more than simply knowledge transfer. We focus on students learning from each other and their teachers in an experiential, community setting. Also, while the school believes that it is important for students to pursue a passion and have a purpose, having a broad, diverse education will serve our children best for the future. The life of the school has to reach the whole child. We use technology as a means to enhance our students’ learning experience, and we monitor changes in educational technology closely. Though future developments in online learning, learning management systems, streaming video, electronic readers, tablets and more may shape learning in unforeseen ways, Harker believes that its focus will always need to be on enhancing the learning itself. To better serve the busy lives of our families, the school will continue to deepen and broaden its offerings both during the school day and after school. As no one can predict what specific skills or knowledge will be most valuable in the future, we are dedicated to emphasizing deep learning across a variety of domains and providing many options for our students to pursue. Pressures on the modern student from a variety of societal and global sources make it imper-
Challenge Success, a program based out of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, provides families and schools with the practical, researchbased tools they need to raise healthy, motivated kids.
ative that schools continuously review what is best for optimal learning and student engagement. Challenge Success, a program based out of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, provides families andschools with the practical, research basedtools they need to raise healthy, motivated kids. Harker’s involvement in Stanford’s Challenge Success program and the time management tools the school uses will help students be successful and
The Harker School Plan
mitigate the stress that high performing students can experience when they choose to take a rigorous schedule. The school’s wellness program is vital to helping our students thrive overall. While known for its strong academics, The Harker School believes in all aspects of its mission as the fullest expression of a complete education.
Facilities and Infrastructure While excellent programs are always at the heart of The Harker School, it is clear over the past decade that our programs can be greatly enhanced when quality facilities and infrastructure exist to support them. Consider the benefits that the two-story classroom building, pool, gym and additional kitchen brought to the Bucknall campus. Imagine the Saratoga campus still housing grades 7-12 without the additions of Shah Hall, Nichols Hall, Davis Field, Singh Aquatics Center, our library or our college counseling center. The impact these facilities have had on the school experience of our students and, indeed, the entire community has been astounding. The Saratoga campus served as the home for the school’s K-8 program from the time Harker relocated to San Jose from Palo Alto in 1972 to the time we began our upper school, in 1998. Now as the upper school campus, Saratoga is in need of a few final upgrades to complete the current master plan and better serve our upper school students, families and programs. Great strides have been made, but the campus still lacks a theater, regulation-size gymnasium, and student center to complete its transformation into a world-class upper school facility. In order to be financially sustainable for the 21st century, the school will be focusing on a few key infrastructure areas, including efforts to increase the endowment, strengthening our culture of philanthropy, controlling costs, pursuing alternative sources of revenue and lessening our environmental impact. Your support will have a major, positive impact on our students by exponentially increasing our ability to meet the needs of tomorrow’s great leaders.
Harker’s Four Strategic Financial Priorities Sustaining Harker’s core values will require prudent use of the school’s resources. During our recent comprehensive self-study, as a part of the school’s successful reaccreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and the California Association of Independent Schools, four strategic financial priorities were identified and serve as the foundation of Harker’s strategic planning process and the school’s “Case for Charitable Support.”
1) Ongoing program excellence The school’s annual giving program provides financial support to help make our programs excellent. The annual gifts provide the Margin of Excellence to our programs which has helped engage our students and foster their enjoyment in the learning process. The Margin of Excellence represents those programs and program enhancements that round out the students’ educational experience, such as the library, arts, athletics, technology, and much more.
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2) Purchasing a third campus In 2013, Harker successfully acquired a third campus on Union Avenue in San Jose, which will eventually become the home of our K-5 students. In the meantime, we have added a preschool and transitional kindergarten program on that campus. When we are ready to move the K-5 students to the Union campus, we will then look for a few smaller strategically placed properties to house our preschool and transitional kindergarten programs.
3) Building out the master site plan The school currently leases the middle school campus on Blackford Avenue. While this has proven to be an excellent facility for our needs, we have always desired the permanency and security of owning all of our campuses. With the purchase of Union, we are now primed to unwind from the leased campus. It is most economical to use our resources to enhance facilities that we own, not lease. Therefore our next goal is build out the master site plan on the Saratoga campus, adding the much-needed theater, regulation-size gymnasium and student center, which will greatly enhance the student and family experience on the upper school campus. Our Bucknall campus will need to have some renovations made to the science labs to prepare the campus to house our middle school students in a few years, once we are ready to transition the lower school students to the Union campus. The Union campus will need to have a multipurpose building constructed along with a pool to properly meet the needs of the lower school students.
4) Increasing our endowment and reserves Finally, we are at a point in the school’s history when we require a strong endowment to control tuition growth, sustain trademark programs and enhance diversity within the community. We must build the general endowment and continue to establish restricted endowments to provide the financial security that comes along with having endowed funds supporting these initiatives in perpetuity. All of the student programs, both inside and outside the classroom, are affected by the breadth and depth of philanthropic support from the community’s constituents. Philanthropic support will have a major, positive impact on our students and will help build Harker’s global citizenship by educating those who will lead tomorrow.
The Harker School believes in all aspects of its mission as the fullest expression of a complete education.
Dear Friend
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Chris Nikolo
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The Harker School | San Jose, CA | K-12 I Preschool | Summer | www.harker.org OofC: 11/13 (BHDG-JQ)