Dr. Grauer's Column - Blessings at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast

Blessings at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast (May 7, 2026)
By Stuart Grauer

The following remarks were presented at the annual Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast which I was invited to address this year on behalf of local education. Please enjoy these brief blessings!

Discovery is the process of letting go of certainty.

I have a prayer for you this week. Last week, the Encinitas Mayor Bruce Ehlers and staff invited me to represent an educator’s perspective on their beautiful day of reflection, The Annual Encinitas Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. We gathered around the theme: “How We Share Our Wonderful Deeds Among All People.” I come to a prayer event about as qualified and ready as for a calculus 2 final exam. All the same, these are my blessings, for sharing with all of you:

At The Grauer School, we invite discovery-based learning onto the campus every day, the point being not to fulfill a predetermined checklist of what someone else thinks needs teaching and learning, even if there is a modicum of teachings and learnings we pass along to our children.

And it turns out, “I don’t know where to begin” is where I have begun with almost every major issue we share with one another. A perfect prayer: the prayer of openness.

So when a teen has done an outlandish, hard to comprehend thing, leaving junk food wrappers around the campus, saying an incomprehensibly cruel thing, getting 5 hours of sleep a night, or crushing a silver Argiope spider beneath their boot back in our school forest, my secret to what has felt like success in these matters has been not to reprimand, correct, or even teach in that moment. My best response has been the notion: “I don’t know even know where to begin.”

And leave it there—on faith that I would continue to reflect, and perhaps respond more fully next time… or maybe that was exactly the right response. Because usually what happens is the student has a notion where.

That “who knows” moment has stayed with me as a symbol of how much work we have to do—as teachers, mentors, and leaders who are best when they live with questions, not answers.

The original point of education, I believe, and why we are at a mayor’s prayer breakfast, is this:

the search for universal values that apply to the whole of creation.

At Grauer, we began many years ago with the single core value of resourcefulness. Over time, we have expanded that search to include compassion, perseverance, gratitude, and others—values we pursue not only professionally, but personally, alongside our students. We see education more as shared questions than top-down answers. As a search. Hence, our founding motto, “Learn by Discovery®.”

Spearheaded by community legend Pastor Bill Harmon, and master teacher Clayton Payne, our students visit places of worship across San Diego as part of their studies. They adopt and share our deeds with nonprofit organizations throughout the community. We are connected.

Equally spiritual: We just became the first school in California to be recognized as a California Green Business. We use recycled water on our fields, generate 100% of our own energy from solar power supplying our LEED certified buildings, and we engage in gardening, recycling, conscious purchasing, and composting.

But none of these accomplishments are more important than our ongoing search for universal values—the largest values we can find in sharing our deeds. Those values are the real curriculum—we talk a lot—too much—in education about “standards.”  Well, those values are our standards. And most important of all, those don’t start with benchmarks or theories or requirements. They start with not knowing where to begin, with the simple option of being as open as we can be.

Lastly, I want to note that sometimes I think what we give to our community is not as important as what we observe of it.

We don’t judge or even claim to know our community’s culture and vibe so much as we observe it—we are place-based. We are local. We are coastal sage scrub.

We simply spend time in our native ecosystems—we observe our living landscapes, our students and teachers, our spiders.

That is what can happen when a campus borders a preserved forest rather than asphalt. It is alive—with bees that are wound into our fate, the owls, bobcats, snakes running or slithering or flying through the coastal sage, the butterflies in our monarch waystation, and the native scrub oak that we call the Encinitas tree, our namesake.

We serve, conserve, and preserve the natural world around us. And just like those ecosystems, we preserve traditions and compassionate culture through the daily practice of values as old as civilization itself, studying the giving economy of the Indigenous Kumeyaay of this land before us, the sustaining use of our descendants.

And so, as we reflect on our theme — “How We Share Our Wonderful Deeds Among All People”— I find myself arriving here: How we share our wonderful deeds among all living things.

That sharing is my wish and prayer for all of us today and every day.

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