Because I wrote a piece about starting a school I began thinking about school missions. Mostly about how alike they are and how so often completely hollow when you take a look at what really drives the school in question.
And then I thought back to all the hours over the years that I have sat with earnest, caring, dedicated school constituents – good people all – trying to thrash out mission language that is authentic, different, fresh and not weighted down with cliches.
Wosene Worke Kosrof B.1950 Ethiopian WORD GAME II
Coming up with an organization’s mission statement can be a really constructive process – so long as you can keep out there on the edge and not get drawn into the safe compromise of middle-of-the-road, where of course you will be surely run over. Unless of course, that is where you are. In which case you don’t really need a mission statement in the first place. Hours of work and collective thinking saved.
Scouting around the intertubes for mission statements, I found some outstanding examples that are – without knowing the school – inspiring. There’s quite a ferment in the world of school and lots of new thinking and distinct approaches.
Some schools have distinct cultures and aspirations that are not reflected in their missions. Others have the opposite problem – run-of-the mill places with missions that overreach and oversell. You might imagine that Weyward Academy and St.Etheldreda’s are quite different kinds of schools. With contrasting missions to match. Maybe.
Most missions – accurate or not – do not inspire.
I mashed-up a few – added a few (very few) elements and came up with this. Starting a new school? Your work is done.
Our School Mission
Our school is committed to excellence and the individual with a core curriculum. We teach risk-taking in a safe nurturing community.
Our school proudly promotes personal best, wellness and itself while informed by intellectual independence, creativity, and curiosity, and a sense of responsibility for the community at large. Mindful of adventurous intellects and diverse backgrounds we prepare students to belong and get engaged.
We are a progressive school in an innovative tradition of academic rigor and personal freedom. We are intentionally diverse, mindful of history, tradition, life-long joy of learning and we provide the best school food in town as an integral part of life. Even peculiar students can be at home in our rigorous environment that nurtures difference and strenuous shared values.
We inspire justice and we combat student prejudice in a democratic society and global community guided by our north star motto and dedicated adults.
In the spirit of the future we celebrate innovation and differences and look back with pride.
Our Values
We have major principles and value all dimensions of each student – intellectual, cognitive, spiritual, social, however annoying, emotional, aesthetic, and physical. Many disciplines are in the interdisciplinary curriculum of visual and performing arts. We inculcate all kinds of minds in a spirited engagement with odd people from all walks of the city terrain.
Our Community
Students transcend and are transformed by our program. Our just and fair community empowers them to have balanced personal lives, more excellence and social-emotional strength and resilience. Living fully in self-expression, students know right from wrong, playfully explore the city and do what feels good as they serve the neighbors right and become themselves.
Our Graduates
Our unique graduates are in the authentic world. resilient, generous, spirited, rooted with a love of self and learning for others. Ground down by fundamental skills they are entitled to feel powerful, confident of their superior leadership in the global community. In passionate exchange, they insist the world be a better place.
We Believe
We believe in academics, arts, athletics and alliteration. We are diverse, determined, dedicated and discerning as we teach transformational and transcendent talent to have courage, conscience, and compassion in a caring and collaborative community. In ourselves. Seriously.
Education empowers and emboldens equitably; inquiry inspires and instills inclusively; citizens contribute and create (collaboratively with conscience and courage of course); aspirations and agency advance, and learning is loved.
Child-centered and college-bound, our school has something for everyone the world needs.
Hindlip Hall: Abstract III Kay Harman c.2006
Of course – it’s way too long. I have to work on that.
Yes – There really was a St. Etheldreda – a perfect Anglo-Saxon name for a saint, But while there was a children’s home in Bedford named for her, I am not aware of a school. You can read more about Etheldreda – or Æthelthryth – and her two sisters Wendrada and Seaxburh – also saints – here.Quite the story.
Patron saint of throat complaints!
Left: Saint Æthelthryth of Ely from the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, an illuminated manuscript in the British Library
Featured image: Meeting of the first partisans Resisting The Occupiers, birth of the Carbonari, illustration from an album on the history of Risorgimento made for the chocolate Talmone, late 19th century (chromolitho) by Italian School, (19th century);
St. Etheldreda’s School joins the long list of distinguished New York City schools no longer with us. Founded by Anglican nuns in 1917 it separated from its Episcopalian roots in 1938. Now merged with Wayward Academy and much missed. Discere ad Vitam. RIP St. Eth’s.
Well I especially loved the embrace of “peculiar students” by one and the “ground down by fundamental skills they are entitled.” I wonder how hard it would actually be to slip a few of these choice bits into a mission statement and see if anyone notices.
Mind you, some of the real things have some really odd-sounding phrases than only need a little tweaking.
I used to work in a school where we used to proofread each other’s reports before they were finally typed up and home to parents. One colleague once slipped in something like “he is a diligent student like an avocado” in somewhere, just to see if we were actually reading them or just pretending. Don’t remember if it was found or not.
As ever, fascinating historical snippets to follow up. The mission statement seemed to encapsulate all I would have wished from my school as pupil or teacher…and perhaps had it been thus I may have developed differently…but how about the old adage of show me a child of seven…it really should be the mission statement for parents…but here we are in outer galactic missions..
I put the text through the google translator a few times and it picked up some interesting themes. Getting ready to marry with rigid flexibility in selfish harsh conditions while taking risks taking in safe shelters.
The Etheldreda stories are quite something. Apparently, there are a host of body part relics stowed away in East Anglia.
It truly is a mash-up of about five actual school mission statements. So not so inventive really. But fun to play with. I think I’m going to put in through google translate a few times and see what happens.
I love this! So helpful at the end of a long week. I don’t think I ever met a school mission statement that I didn’t like.
But I thought St. Blaise was the patron saint of throats? He saved a boy who was choking on a fish bone. And you can get your throat blessed every February 3 on his saint day. (I once, and only once, taught in a Catholic school for a short time. This fish bone story is what stuck.)
Well – apparently there are enough throats to go around to have more than one saint. St. Blaise is better known but he is not the only otorhinolaryngology saint.
St. Etheldreda died of the plague on June 23 in 679 A large painful tumor had appeared on her neck which she believed was divine punishment for her youthful pride when she wore decorative necklaces. A doctor removed her tumor but days later it returned. Apparently, this led her to prophesize the coming of the plague and predict her own death.
Story has it that when Sexburga exhumed her sister’s body in 696 it had not decayed and her throat scar had disappeared. Lots of opportunities for relics in the body and the linen cloth with which it was wrapped. And hence her patronage of throat ailments.
Part of the hand relic of St. Etheldreda was given to St. Etheldreda’s church in Holborn. London where it is kept in a jeweled casket in the niche to the right of the altar.
Another interesting factoid: Over the centuries her name was shortened to Audrey. There used to be a St. Audrey’s Fair in Ely (so named for our saint) where necklaces of silk and lace were sold. They were called “tawdry laces”—a corruption of “Audrey’s laces”. Sometimes they were of poor quality and so the word “tawdry” came into the language to mean cheap and shoddy.
Saints can be so interesting! Wayward Academy doesn’t stand a chance in the heritage stakes.
We do work very hard. But look at what you have achieved.
Not sure I understand what you mean here. Sorry.
Well I especially loved the embrace of “peculiar students” by one and the “ground down by fundamental skills they are entitled.” I wonder how hard it would actually be to slip a few of these choice bits into a mission statement and see if anyone notices.
I wonder too.
Mind you, some of the real things have some really odd-sounding phrases than only need a little tweaking.
I used to work in a school where we used to proofread each other’s reports before they were finally typed up and home to parents. One colleague once slipped in something like “he is a diligent student like an avocado” in somewhere, just to see if we were actually reading them or just pretending. Don’t remember if it was found or not.
As ever, fascinating historical snippets to follow up. The mission statement seemed to encapsulate all I would have wished from my school as pupil or teacher…and perhaps had it been thus I may have developed differently…but how about the old adage of show me a child of seven…it really should be the mission statement for parents…but here we are in outer galactic missions..
I put the text through the google translator a few times and it picked up some interesting themes. Getting ready to marry with rigid flexibility in selfish harsh conditions while taking risks taking in safe shelters.
The Etheldreda stories are quite something. Apparently, there are a host of body part relics stowed away in East Anglia.
Ah, if only…
I know. Dream on.
Very inventive, especially the alliteration:)
It truly is a mash-up of about five actual school mission statements. So not so inventive really. But fun to play with. I think I’m going to put in through google translate a few times and see what happens.
I love this! So helpful at the end of a long week. I don’t think I ever met a school mission statement that I didn’t like.
But I thought St. Blaise was the patron saint of throats? He saved a boy who was choking on a fish bone. And you can get your throat blessed every February 3 on his saint day. (I once, and only once, taught in a Catholic school for a short time. This fish bone story is what stuck.)
Well – apparently there are enough throats to go around to have more than one saint. St. Blaise is better known but he is not the only otorhinolaryngology saint.
St. Etheldreda died of the plague on June 23 in 679 A large painful tumor had appeared on her neck which she believed was divine punishment for her youthful pride when she wore decorative necklaces. A doctor removed her tumor but days later it returned. Apparently, this led her to prophesize the coming of the plague and predict her own death.
Story has it that when Sexburga exhumed her sister’s body in 696 it had not decayed and her throat scar had disappeared. Lots of opportunities for relics in the body and the linen cloth with which it was wrapped. And hence her patronage of throat ailments.
Part of the hand relic of St. Etheldreda was given to St. Etheldreda’s church in Holborn. London where it is kept in a jeweled casket in the niche to the right of the altar.
Another interesting factoid: Over the centuries her name was shortened to Audrey. There used to be a St. Audrey’s Fair in Ely (so named for our saint) where necklaces of silk and lace were sold. They were called “tawdry laces”—a corruption of “Audrey’s laces”. Sometimes they were of poor quality and so the word “tawdry” came into the language to mean cheap and shoddy.
Saints can be so interesting! Wayward Academy doesn’t stand a chance in the heritage stakes.