II. SCHOOL SNAPSHOT

School Snapshot

MISSION STATEMENT

Cannon School nurtures relationships at the heart of learning and engages the learner in a journey of growth.

CANNON SCHOOL CORE VALUES

Courage, Integrity, Passion, Respect, Teamwork, Kindness

CANNON SCHOOL’S FUNDAMENTAL VISION

Cannon School envisions a world of wholehearted and adaptive contributors .

Each of our learners—student and adult—is unique and gifted. The ongoing realization of our whole selves, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually is a building block to productive engagement and citizenship. Cannon envisions all of its learners showing up in their relationships and in their communities with confidence and a deep understanding of themselves.

Each of our learners—student and adult—will face increasingly complex, open-ended, and ill-structured challenges. These problems demand that one applies prior knowledge to new ill-defined situations with flexibility and imagination. Cannon envisions all of its learners bringing a deeply developed set of critical skills and learning habits to their relationships and communities.

Each of our learners—student and adult—will choose to observe or to engage, to accept or to improve, and to consume or to produce. In our learners’ academic, professional, civic, and religious communities, and with families and friends, the opportunity to contribute will always exist. Cannon envisions all of its learners choosing to better the relationships and the communities to which they belong through their contributions.

BRIEF HISTORY

Established in 1969 as Cabarrus Academy and renamed in 1998, Cannon School originally occupied the historic downtown Concord residence of textile entrepreneur J.W. Cannon. In the early years, as the school established its student body, it was known primarily for serving grades K-6. In 1994, the school relocated to its current 65-acre campus on Poplar Tent Road, one mile east of Interstate 85—a major step toward regionalization and growth. In addition to its name change in 1998, Cannon School added Upper School students, beginning with those in the ninth grade. Today, under the leadership of Head of School Christopher Jones, Cannon School serves approximately 1,030 students in Lower, Middle, and Upper School divisions. In addition to serving students from the Concord area, Cannon families hail from Charlotte, Cornelius, Davidson, Huntersville, Mooresville, Kannapolis, and Salisbury. In the five decades since it was established, Cannon School has transformed itself into one of the Charlotte region’s top independent college-preparatory schools.

Leadership: Cannon School has an organizational structure that includes separate entities to carry out the distinct functions of governance and day-to-day management. Cannon School is governed by a Board of Trustees, numbering from 18-25 members, which focuses on responsibilities associated with governance to identify respective charges, policies, and relationships with management. Cannon’s Board of Trustees has established policies and procedures that recognize and preserve the executive, administrative, and leadership prerogatives of the Head of School. The Head of School acts as the Chief Executive Officer and the official advisor and executive agent of the Board to exercise the general management of all the affairs of the school. The Board delegates the general management responsibilities for the school to the Head while maintaining general oversight of these activities.

The preliminary work of our 2020 self-study process began in the late summer of 2018, with the administration of the SAIS Value Narrative Survey to all school constituencies including students, faculty, staff, parents, trustees, alumni, and alumni parents. Reviewing survey results led to the creation of The Summit @ Cannon School, which took place in October 2018. The focus of The Summit @ Cannon School was on finding the right questions the school needed to be asking moving forward. Qualitative, quantitative, and anecdotal data from The Summit @ Cannon School led to the development of questions centered around three main areas: • growing our people • growing our learning programs • growing our place in the community

We spent the 2018-2019 academic year funneling data discovered during this event and gathering more data from constituent groups to explore mission-aligned growth areas for our school. The strategic vision was then developed from five findings discovered: Community, Students, Educators, Wellness, and Sustainability.

COVID-19 disrupted our scheduled SAIS visit in 2019-2020 and delayed the accreditation process to a March 2021 through October 2021 timeframe.

By August 2020 the Head of School, in conjunction with the Board of Trustees, and working from the self-study findings, developed five strategic drivers to govern the next five-year strategic vision. These five drivers have also allowed us to build initiatives for a school improvement plan based on what we commit to as a school:

Cannon School commits to Community: Belongingness, Engagement, and Access Students: Developing Critical and Confident Learners Educators: Distinctive, Personalized Professional Growth Programs Wellness: Structures that Promote a Culture of Health and Balance Sustainability: Mission-Responsive Resources and Partnership

Once we had these five commitments melded within our strategic drivers, we engaged a two-pronged (short-term and long-term) approach:

1. (Short-Term) We developed a set of initiatives to move us forward in the 2021-22 year. Those were executed and finalized this year.

Here is the document that contains the initiatives.

2. (Long-Term) We engaged in an inclusive process with students, parents, administrators, and board members during the 2020-21 academic year to develop initiatives for the next 3-5 years. The goal of the process was to deliver a set of initiatives as a growth plan to move forward as a school based on our five drivers. We formed one task force per strategic driver and from January 2021-May 2021 each task force created and delivered a set of initiatives for the school’s leadership team to consider.

In May 2021, and during a two-day off-site retreat in June, the school’s leadership team both reported on the completion of the shortterm goals (above) and discussed the set of initiatives proposed by each task force to move forward long-term.

During this retreat, five long-term initiatives were chosen for the school’s improvement plan. These initiatives are fully

explained under Part IV of this School Report. Here they are in brief:

Community: Belongingness, Engagement, and Access

Enhance Cultural & Community Engagement

Cannon believes and lives out its motto: “You belong here.” We believe that your identity, as well as your richness of experience and background, improves our academic community and our school culture. Cannon reinforces the skills and habits that allow us to engage productively and grow in the context of differing opinions, real stakes, and intense emotions. Cannon seeks avenues for you to engage fully, to know that you belong wholly, and to access the educational experiences we offer without barrier.

Students: Developing Critical and Confident Learners

Study a Revision of Educational Philosophy—Adaptive Expertise 2 .0

Our goal over the 2021-22 academic year is to revisit and revive the Adaptive Expertise (AE) model for all learners at Cannon. This endeavor holds critical value in that AE is our educational philosophy supporting all of our ideas around good teaching and learning from JrK-Grade 12. We are seeking to amend the model to make it more useful and applicable in all learning situations.

Educators: Distinctive, Personalized Professional Growth Programs

Enhance the Overall Educator Experience

Our vision is to enhance the experience of our educators throughout each school year. We want to reconnect faculty and staff with school goals and objectives by making sure that they are provided with opportunities to become engaged within our community. We want to be more intentional about connecting, rather than separating, faculty and staff professional growth programs and helping each employee view themselves as an “educator.”

Wellness: Structures that Promote a Culture of Health and Balance

Align and Balance JrK-12 Schedule and Space Use

The growth that our school has experienced, both in enrollment and in infrastructure, over the past five years, as well as all the progress we have made in bringing grading and assessment to a more mission-aligned model, has created the opportunity to develop JrK-12 schedules (both divisional and school-wide) that prioritize the learning needs of students, and that support our mission, vision, and our strategic drivers around critical thinking and inquiry-based exploration.

Sustainability: Mission-Responsive Resources and Partnerships

Consider Expanded Enrollment Model

Both Cannon’s enrollment and retention health suggest that we are in a position to explore increasing our overall student population. Our vision is to grow Cannon’s overall enrollment over the next 5 years to a sustainable and market-driven level that maximizes our ability to deliver our mission.