Message from the Head of School

We welcome the exciting launch of our “Strategic Plan 2011-2015,” available on this website.  The plan, developed by Trustee Mike Branon in concert with our leadership team and employing organization research made possible by the Stuart family, included powerful data from many school stakeholder groups as it identified the core values and core features that bind The Grauer School community together.  The plan also calls for board expansion and the completion of the school campus, far-sighted visions.  Our biggest work going forward, and well under way, is providing the inspiration and role modeling necessary to enable all our stakeholder groups to embrace, work, and live in accordance with our values.  Of course, turning theory to action has always been the forté of The Grauer School.

Pedagogically, we are asking our teachers not only to teach State curricula and skills, but to teach qualities we believe that our students, and our nation and world, will need later in the century, qualities that will set them apart in the future as they assume the leadership roles they are bound for:  a passion for the process of discovery, a natural sense of communicating collaboratively in class and in online groups, an ability to organize and present complex portfolios and exhibits, and a sense of the connectedness of their daily work with its impact on the larger world.  These are “millennial skills,” and our small school organization is better positioned to convey them than any other model we can find.

To this end, we have launched the Coalition for Small Preparatory Schools (CSPS), a membership organization responsible for leading the way in research and communications as our region and nation learns about the power and effectiveness the small school model has in promoting student development and scholarship.  Developing this larger network will enable The Grauer School to stay in forefront of what’s best about secondary education.

Also with an eye to the future, we have taken the year to build and broaden the leadership capacity of our faculty as I prepare for a sabbatical leave over the first semester of the 2011-2012 academic year.  This is truly a strategic sabbatical, as it enables our whole administration and our department heads, 5 of them new this year, to “step up.”  With energetic and far-sighted leadership coming from our student ASB, our leadership team, our programming team, our department chairs, our Board of Trustees, our Parent Association, the new Green Grauer Association, as well as the most solid, experienced, passionate staff and faculty we’ve ever had, our students and families are in very good hands.

The school now has full enrolment and long waiting lists, attracts passionate and compassionate faculty members, and holds a powerful mission and vision to support us as we approach the next year, united in a single, simple credo:  Our students mean the world to us.

Enjoy our website, and come by for visit!
Stuart Grauer, Ed.D.