March 2017
What does the Steering Committee do? That’s a hard question to answer. The role calls for a lot of soft skills: contemplating the future, taking initiative, assessing risk, averting distractions, a willingness to abandon dead ends, building consensus, etc. That being said, people on the Committee should bring along certain hard skills as well. It is helpful to have professionals from education, fundraising, banking and finance, real estate construction and development, and law represented.
Once the mission and vision came into focus (as articulated elsewhere on this website), we turned our attention to identifying what was necessary to get to Opening Day and beyond. Five critical elements soon bubbled to the surface: a highly competent leadership and faculty, a rigorous curriculum, a suitable site, generous benefactors, and a wide dispersion of our message to families. We have made excellent progress on all five fronts. We have appointed Bob Sylvain as our Head of School and have amassed a list of very good candidates for our first faculty positions. Drawing heavily on the success of The Heights School in Washington DC and Western Academy in Houston, Texas, we have a strong curricular infrastructure from which to give free reign to our teachers to develop lesson plans that align with our fundamental mission. We have visited over 30 different potential sites and have developed a keen insight regarding the market for real estate in the western suburbs of Boston. We have made offers on a few of these locations, but for various reasons have not yet secured a definitive site. As I write, we continue to perform due diligence on a couple of potential sites. As one can appreciate, there is a balancing act involved in securing a site for an opening in September of 2018, a full 18 months away. Throughout these past many months, we have been amazed and heartened by the very generous response that a small group of people have shown when we ask for their financial support. Any undertaking of this magnitude needs to rest upon the help of many, many generous benefactors. We encourage you to consider ways that you can tangibly help launch this endeavor by making contribution of any size. The involvement of many people will lighten the burden on all of us! Without doubt, the most exciting dimension of this project is watching many young families come to the realization that our mission aligns with their hopes for the education of their children. Our children are given to us for only a very short amount of time. It is of vital importance to them, to their parents, and to society in general that we immersed them in the best environment we can find.
The Steering Committee continues to steer this project toward Opening Day in September 2018. We hope that you will join us in this truly exciting endeavor!