Changing the world

Shaping the minds and the hearts

CHANGING THE WORLD:

Redefining the Mission of SPA

BY LAURA BILLINGS COLEMAN | PHOTOS BY SCOTT STREBLE

Organizational mission statements are often generic and uninspiring. But the year-long process of redefining the school’s mission has given SPA a new focus.

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of the people who will change the world

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In many small ways, all schools are reinvented at the beginning of each new school year. Students anticipate returning to their classrooms with varying levels of excitement and nervousness, and even master faculty who have taught for decades know that every cohort brings its own questions and perspectives to the classroom.

The opening of school at St. Paul Academy and Summit School in the fall of 2013 included a reinvention of a different sort. The school introduced a new mission statement that was a year in the making and that will serve as a lens through which the school views itself and the ways in which it serves students.

The new statement, “Shaping the minds and the hearts of the people who will change the world,” is unusual for both its brevity and its scope. “It’s an audacious statement,” says Head of School Bryn S. Roberts, “but it’s an affirmation of our students, our teachers, and indeed the entire community here,” he says. “We’re saying we produce graduates who have the intellectual capacity and the compassionate understanding of the human condition—this blend of the mind and the heart—to do remarkable things after they’ve left SPA.”

Board of Trustees elected to rewrite the mission during the 2012-2013 school year, Tait was invited to take the lead on the effort. He created a six-month process that focused on discussions with students, faculty, trustees and alumni/ae to identify what defines SPA today.

“There were a lot of powerful themes that emerged in these discussions, and one of the messages we heard on many fronts is that this is a school where there’s no sense of entitlement,” says Tait. “It’s not a place where people come to be showy. There’s hard work going on here.”

Throughout the process, Tait asked each group to reflect on the skills SPA students will need in the future as they pursue college and careers, and contribute to their communities. “In these discussions, people also talked a lot about the need for creativity now and in the future,” says Tait. “America is a country that’s going to be depending on people who can work with ideas, and come up with

From the ISACS final report Blending the past and the future

Scott Streble

The aspirational element of the new mission statement has its genesis in the school’s 2011 re-accreditation process with the Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS). The ISACS team of educators that assessed the school for reaccreditation had universally positive reports about every aspect of school life—with the exception of the mission statement, which dates from 2000. That statement read: “In pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning, St. Paul Academy and Summit School educates a diverse and motivated group of young people for leadership and service, inspires in them an enduring love of learning, and helps them lead productive, ethical, and joyful lives.”

While the 2000 mission statement was perfectly serviceable, the ISACS report stated, it didn’t capture the spirit that set SPA apart from other independent schools. “What the ISACS team saw when they visited was an SPA that had moved well beyond that mission, and that now had a bolder, more energizing vision of what we were going to do,” says Roberts.

The final ISACS report recommended a substantial overhaul of the school’s mission statement. “Their report about the school was so glowing and positive that when they looked at the existing mission statement, they said, ‘You’ve already achieved this. This is a statement of fact rather than an aspiration for where you want to be,’” says Bruce Tait, an SPA parent and Minneapolis branding consultant who has worked with the school since 2010. When the SPA’s

“St. Paul Academy and Summit School’s current mission statement …was adopted by the Board in October of 2000, and has been in effect, without change or modification, since that time.

“The statement has the virtues of being brief and combining academic excellence with humane values, but it is not particularly reflective of SPA’s distinctive identity. No one would argue against the goals it espouses but it could easily be applied to many independent schools. It does not set SPA apart.

“In fact, the school already seems to have moved beyond its current statement, judging from the definition of SPA’s purpose contained in its 2009 Strategic Plan…where the school’s vision for the future and its role in the lives of its students is presented with compelling vigor.

“The ISACS visiting team recommends that the St. Paul Academy and Summit School: “1. Reframe its mission statement so that it more accurately reflects the new vision and verve of the school. Properly articulated, the mission can serve as an aspirational compass, a summons for how to learn and live for students and faculty, and the inflection point for strategic planning and fundraising.

“2. Use the recreation of the mission statement as a launching pad for the School’s efforts to develop a “curriculum of the future” for SPA, and as a rallying point for the Board and the faculty across the School to imagine what that curriculum would look like and how it could be put into action.”

Winter/Spring 2014 | SPA

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Shaping the minds and the hearts original thoughts, both individually, and in collaboration with others.” Other elements that arose from these conversations were attributes like resilience, innovation, and risk-taking.

Noticeably absent from the conversations were many of the typical words often included in school mission statements—“excellence in education,” “life-long learners,” or “leaders in the community.” One specific example Tait cites: a statement about “leadership” is often included in school missions, but the SPA group made a deliberate decision to go in a different direction. “We elected to stay away from that because the idea of producing ‘leaders’ is a relatively unsubstantial concept,” says Roberts. “We know that sometimes in life you need to be a leader, and at other times you need to be part of a collaborative effort. ‘Leadership’ is not the goal; understanding the nuances of a situation and taking appropriate action—that is the goal.”

As the conversations around the school’s mission moved away from laundry lists of individual qualities and towards a holistic sense of graduates’ role in the world, SPA’s long history and traditions began to move into the forefront of the discussion. Looking at the century-long thread that connects one generation of SPA graduates to the next proved more helpful as the group settled on a working mission statement, says Roberts. “There’s a historical argument that the education and the culture of SPA, going back to the early 1900s, has produced men and women who’ve gone on to do extraordinary things in an array of fields that have literally changed the way we think about the world, or the way people live their lives,” Roberts says. “Supporting our students in becoming those men and women is and always has been the true mission of this school, and our mission statement needs to reflect that.”

This process of discussion and discovery concluded in the spring of 2013, when Tait presented the final, fourteenword mission to school leadership and the Board of Trustees. Roberts considers both the process and the outcome an unconditional success. “The entire process from start to finish was a very healthy exercise for the school,” he says. “The new mission gives us a better sense of direction that I think has been very energizing for SPA.” Roberts expects SPA’s new mission statement will inform the school’s choices about the future of the curriculum and the classroom experience. “In my mind we need to use the mission statement as something that serves as a filter or guide against which we measure programs and aspirations and conversations within the school,” he says. “Whenever I’m thinking of a program or significant change, the question I ask is whether the choices we make are consistent with our aspirations and our definition of who we are.”

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A new mission in motion With the opening of school in the fall of 2013, the new mission was introduced to the community. The statement was a topic of conversation at opening meetings for teachers, “Back to School” events for parents, and most importantly, at opening assemblies for Middle and Upper School students. During the first days of the school year, Roberts visited with students to introduce them to the new 14-word mission statement, and to encourage them to think about what “changing the world” means to them as they pursue their studies.

“I’m not sure I even knew what the old mission statement said,” admits Nick Cohen ’14, a Carleton College-bound senior who didn’t think the new mission would make much difference to him during his final year at SPA. But Cohen changed his mind after Roberts’ presentation to Upper School students about the new mission, which included an overview of the statement and how many graduates of SPA have already “changed the world.”

“It was cool to see SPA alums who have gone on to do some amazing things in their fields,” says Cohen. “The idea of ‘changing the world’ is a pretty big one, but I think the lesson we got was that, big or small, there are lots of ways graduates go out to make the world a better place.” Madeeha Rizvi ’16 agreed: “I think it gives the school a clear goal, just having it there. It helps the school focus on what’s important,” says Rizvi, who is one of several students interviewed about the new mission statement in the fall issue of The Rubicon, SPA’s award-winning student newspaper. [Read an excerpt from The Rubicon story on page 17—Ed.] The wording of the new mission was also inspirational to SPA’s Middle Schoolers, says Middle School principal Jill Romans.

“When Bryn rolled this out at the beginning of the year it was fascinating to me to see how the Middle School students and teachers responded,” she says. “There was a lot of excitement about it because people feel like it captures what they do here every day.”

Throughout the year, both students and faculty have been encouraged to think about ways to apply the ideals of the mission to their learning at school. The Middle School yearbook’s student staff decided to use the new mission statement as the theme of its 2014 yearbook, and Middle and Upper School faculty have developed several new courses and programs this year that are reflective of the ISACS team original directive to “use … the mission statement as a launching pad for the School’s efforts to develop a ‘curriculum of the future’ for SPA.” When SPA parent and Trustee Tim Welsh hears that the school’s new mission is inspiring students and teachers, “I am ecstatic,” he says. “I think an important part of what we do as trustees is to raise the aspirations of our students. They are incredibly capable young people who will indeed change the world, and who have received an extraordinary education that’s prepared them to do just that.”