The Board of Trustees is excited to share The Little School’s new Strategic Plan with you in summary form (the full 34page plan is available upon request). The strategic planning process is an important one for the health of the school and is entered into by the Board of Trustees every 5-10 years. Last September, a 16–member crossdisciplinary committee that included faculty, staff, trustees, current parents, alumni parents and alumni began a process of data collection, analysis and strategic thinking about our future. This included a review of our strengths and weaknesses in internal areas such as resources, approach and performance. Also, it included identifying the opportunities and obstacles externally such as market forces and trends, customers and stakeholders, collaborators and competitors. Through this process emerged four key initiatives with eleven supporting pieces of work planned for the next several years, including the current year. It is a robust and ambitious plan meant to guide the school’s work and help us track our progress toward an even brighter future. Noel Murphy Board Chair
At The Little School, we will look inward at our educational program and ensure that it best meets the needs of our current families as well as the knowledge and practices of our faculty. We will look outward as well to incorporate the best new thinking in education and child development research. The Little School seeks consistency in our educational program, not conformity with the rest of our competitors. The school will hold tightly to its progressive education approach, finding ways to codify, clarify, communicate and hone it along the way. This work is critical to the success of the other initiatives and therefore will be completed in years 1-3 of the plan.
Improve the Continuity and Clarity of Curriculum and Instruction
This effort will expand on our current curriculum map to improve the continuity and clarity of both our curriculum and our methods for teaching it. In the process we will identify the core academic skills and social and emotional skills students will learn and the methods by which the established content and skills will be taught. Core content is taught in subject areas such as language arts, science, math and social studies. We also believe that our curriculum of social skills, emotional intelligence and habits of the mind such as perseverance and resilience are critical to healthy academic growth and child development. The Little School has a rich progressive education tradition of teaching social and emotional skills. We hope to codify and preserve the rich traditions we have in this respect. We also plan to enrich our common understanding of the tenets of the progressive education tradition. Because our curriculum is emergent and responsive and able to adapt to individual students and classrooms, this is a particularly important and challenging endeavor. We do not plan to define specific lessons and topics to be covered in each class but rather to define a continuum of learning aligned with child development. This process will involve three critical pieces. The first is ensuring that the instructional methods and pedagogy is consistent and exceptional across classes. The second is to agree upon learning goals for students at each grade. And finally to identify the curriculum materials used to achieve them. The curricular mapping will offer a high-level look as well as an in-depth look at what is taught at each developmental level. As it is linked to the progress report and other assessment tools, students’ progress will be better tracked student-to-student, class-to-class, year-to-year, ensuring a full preschool-5 experience and middle school readiness.
Consider New Program Offerings
To better meet the changing needs of the market, we plan to think about the programs families are looking for and consider modifications to better meet market demand where it is aligned with progressive education goals. With help of outside market research, we plan to identify the core program differentiators in the market. In addition we will scan current educational research for the programs and that suit our approach to learning. Then in consideration of our mission, vision and resources, we will determine whether or not to add or change program offerings as well as any changes to our marketing approach based on these findings.
Our goal is enrollment consistently at desired capacity with a waiting list and retention supporting the long-term health and sustainability of the school, with a look to overall future growth. This will take place in how we sell ourselves and communicate about what we do, improving the flow of our preschool into our grade school and overall retention, and in stemming the flow of 5th graders to independent middle schools as well as considering expanding our preschool program to serve two-year-olds.
Marketing and Communication Strategy
With the goal of improving enrollment and retention, the marketing and promotion efforts will have an increased emphasis over the next five years. With the work that has already been accomplished over the past several years (new vision, logo, tagline and positioning statement), we have clarified who we are and how we are different from our competitors. It is now time to hone that message, map it throughout our communications and create a technology platform that will support a more dynamic web presence and efficient internal communications.
Consider Specific Improvements to Increase Retention of Families Moving from Preschool to Grade School
Eleanor Siegl founded The Little School as a place for early childhood education. She started with classes for the youngest children and eventually added older classrooms, to become a preschool and grade school in one, as we have now. In our data analysis, we discovered that, in fact, the preschool not only stands alone as an outstanding preschool but also that it feeds children to our grade school. Unfortunately we lose a significant portion of our families along the way from preschool to outgrowing. The plan will involve researching potential solutions to keep more families funneling through the school, to the outgrowing class.
Evaluate Expanding the Ages We Serve
This plan provides us an opportunity to consider adding programs to serve children younger than three by evaluating the addition of a program for two year olds as well as a chance to serve students older than eleven by evaluating the addition of a middle school. Many of the independent middle schools are offering 5th grade programs and over the last two years, we have seen several TLS students leave for these schools before outgrowing. As independent middle school admissions can be competitive, parents are using 5th grade as an early admission opportunity. If this becomes a trend or increases in incidence, it may threaten our viability. We believe that The Little School provides a superior educational experience for 5th graders that middle school/high school options cannot provide and allows students to experience being the oldest in the school instead of the youngest at this critical and impressionable period in their lives. In addition, families are finding it increasingly difficult to find a desirable solution for middle school and are inquiring about a 6th grade program at The Little School. We understand that there is interest and opportunity to extend our program to serve not only our current families but also other families attracted to a progressive education solution to middle school on the Eastside. We plan to fully evaluate the opportunity and the middle school market to determine whether or not it is a beneficial business for The Little School to enter. Determining whether or not to expand the ages we serve requires research, analysis and thoughtful consideration. Defining what is best for kids is at the heart of this decision. We are in the business of preparing children for the future. At what point students best transition into and out of The Little School toward their future is important to us. Also important is doing it well. Although we will consider options to speed the process wherever possible, we will also take the time necessary to create curriculum, staffing plans, admissions processes and other elements needed to do it right. Therefore, this process is estimated to take anywhere between three to seven years from evaluation to fruition.
The Little School has 55 years of alumni, alumni families, former board trustees, faculty and staff in addition to our current community. Being a small community has always meant that a student can know everyone and be known by everyone—the same holds true for the adults in the community. It will take a concerted effort to find ways to continue to bring our current community together as well as wrap the extended into connection with the school. This is particularly important leading up to a capital campaign (See Initiative #4).
Improve Overall Sense of Community Connectedness
After many years of high attrition, and the last few years of many changes and teacher turnover, it is time to regroup and re-energize our community. This includes connecting our families to one another as well as to the faculty, staff and the board to create an overall sense of community well-being and connectedness.
Attract, Retain and Support Great Teachers
Over the past five years, we have had a significant amount of change occur with quite a bit of turnover in our faculty and staff. This amount of change in a short amount of time can be unsettling and affect the level of collegiality and community the faculty and staff, new and seasoned, feel when coming to work. We hope to improve the collegiality and well-being of our faculty and staff as well as find new ways for teachers to work together, share best practices, give and receive mentoring, and get support in the way of curricular materials and continuing education. In addition we will continue to improve the teacher evaluation process and track employee satisfaction rates.
Better Define Our Diversity Strategy Our current diversity statement is as follows:
To further our children’s understanding of the pluralistic world in which we live, The Little School seeks to purposefully build an environment that reflects and honors society’s rich diversity. The school welcomes and respects socioeconomic, racial, family, religious, sexual orientation and ability differences. Our community is committed to ongoing dialogue and selfeducation to develop appreciation for and inclusion of every member. A poll of the faculty by the diversity committee revealed a wide variety of opinions concerning where we are as a school community. Our ideas vary about how diverse we are and how openly we support and encourage students, families and adults to share diverse and inclusive experiences and histories. Presentation of this poll led to casual and ongoing discussions around the question of how strongly we live our diversity statement and if the ways we participate with students make us true allies, or if we could do more. The three items that
came up most often in discussion were creating community discussion and training opportunities, class and school participation in on and off-campus events, and gathering samples of different culture and anti-bias curriculum sets. Integrating into the community at large is an attractive possibility, particularly throughout the older classrooms, as is developing partnerships with diversity and leadership organizations in the area. This year’s community input survey findings also suggested a need for more focus on diversity in our community on the part of the faculty and staff as well as the parents. These results were mixed as were the faculty polling results regarding where and how that should happen and what areas were most concerning. An overall strategy needs to be developed to address classroom curriculum support and approaches, community-wide discussion and training opportunities, community partnerships, as well as admissions strategies of students/families, and recruiting strategies of employees and board members.
Develop a Fully Supportive and Engaged Alumni Network
The Little School alums are remarkably loyal given that we are not talking about a college or a high school but instead a preschool and grade school. It is a wonderful thing to have 55 years of alums and alum families that share a gratitude for their Little School experience. Unfortunately, over the years, we have lost touch with most of them. A board-level effort has been made over the last couple of years to collect the alumni contact information and reconnect with them. There is much more work to be done in this area including creating social media networking opportunities, events that reconnect them to the school, contacting them for fundraising, and collecting and sharing their stories with our current and potential families. When we are able to reconnect with our alumni network, we will not only be richer in community, but also benefit in our fundraising and marketing efforts. Access to the success stories of the lives of our alumni can feed the market’s need for proof in a school that does not believe in grading and standardized testing of our students. A broader community will help build a strong and lasting reputation, and extending our fundraising will relieve pressure from our small current community.
The Little School, originally renting space from a church in Seattle, moved to Bellevue when it was gifted this beautiful 12-acre plot of land on which it now sits. These 12 acres have become an integral part of our philosophy and approach to teaching. The campus provides students a natural setting in which to actively learn and explore. The facilities themselves were built to create a sense of community and provide developmentally appropriate spaces to grow and learn. Our overall goal is to maintain and expand the campus and facilities to continue to reflect our mission, vision, core values and philosophy.
Improve the Campus Appearance and Experience
In our evaluation of resources, we found that the campus’ functional capacity is stretched well before its classroom spaces have been filled. This includes issues with parking and traffic flow, and a lack of space for specialist classes and community gathering spaces. Secondly, our competitive analysis suggests the campus is in need of a good polish and a facelift to improve our first impression to the public. Lastly, with potential future growth, we are in need of a master plan that includes the creation of additional spaces for more gathering spaces and classrooms.
Raise the Capital Necessary to Fund Campus Improvements
Expansion of facilities will require capital resources beyond the school’s current reserves. We have funds reserved from the 1990s capital campaign and the ability to borrow money as the school currently holds little debt. However, depending on the scope of the expansion, a multi-year capital campaign will likely be required. This will necessitate tapping resources beyond our current community. In coordination with the Alumni Committee and the Board Trustees, we will reach out to our broader community of alums, alum families and friends of the school. A feasibility study, a full capital campaign plan and continued relationship building will be necessary to fundraise at this level.
MISSION The mission of The Little School is to keep alive each child’s natural curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, to support balanced social and academic skill development and to foster community-minded, compassionate and intrinsically motivated students.
VISION We imagine a world where education inspires children to develop a strong sense of self and the courage to become innovative and empathetic leaders.