Engaging with the Surrounding Community

As we embark on strategic planning this year, I am thinking a lot about the commitment in our mission statement that we “engage with the surrounding community.” There are many ways to think about the deeper meaning of those values and how we engage with them. Our schools have often related this work to service learning, but there is also a broader and impactful way in which we connect our program, our values, and our community to the world beyond Farmers Lane. 

This happens when our teachers and students move beyond our campus and when they connect with different communities. These can range from different professional communities and other school settings to issue-based gatherings and unique learning environments. 

And these new settings can often be unpredictable, sometimes in the best possible ways. For example, on the recent trip to Washington, DC, Nancy Metzger-Carter and some of the Student Sustainability Leaders had some expected and semi-predictable results: our students utilized their advocacy and speaking skills, gained more confidence in approaching challenging conversations, and trained a group of middle school students to participate in their own version of climate action. But there are also moments of magic that occurred—a deep conversation with a peer on the flight home; the new perspectives and insights that come from talking with people who hold different views and come from different backgrounds; and, of course, the resilience and self-knowledge that comes for our students when they travel in real world environments with their peers and teachers. 

There is also the powerful return to normalcy that field trips and other outings are providing our students. When students have the chance to encounter real-world examples of concepts, artists, and places that they have studied, their learning is expanded in a deeply meaningful way. 

Here are a few of the many examples of this engaged learning over the first quarter of our school year: Hillary Younglove has taken two museum field trips, one with the Foundation Arts students to the di Rosa collection in Napa, and one with her Studio Art class to visit the Diego Rivera exhibit at SFMOMA. Rodney Fierce’s Mythology students traveled to San Francisco to see a performance of The Firebird, Igor Stravinsky’s piece inspired by Russian folktales. Our Speech and Debate teams have traveled to (and had resounding success!) tournaments in Long Beach and New York City. And yesterday, Drew’s AS Constitutional Law class took their annual trip to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco. 

Similarly, our staffulty engages in professional development throughout the year, and this work provides so much of the inspiration, refreshment, renewal, and excitement that fuels our innovation, new programming, and the dynamic environment we strive to create and sustain at SA. 

I recently attended my first “5 Schools” gathering, an annual meeting of five California schools that were all founded in 2000 — Blue Oak in Napa, Vistamar in El Segundo, Sage Hill in Newport Beach, Pacific Ridge in Carlsbad and, of course, our school in Santa Rosa — after Covid halted our meetings over the past few years. Our meetings include Heads of School and 2-3 board members, and we focus our meetings on institutional issues and collaboration that are common to schools at our stage of development. This is a great opportunity to connect and collaborate with a small group of schools and we are able to witness the different stages of growth and development for each school. We will host the 5 schools gathering at SA next year and they are all incredibly excited to see our campus and how far we have come as an institution. 

Fortunately, conferences are returning to a full in-person model, and we are finally able to travel with a team of peers and colleagues as we explore and engage in the most pressing topics in education. This year, we will send teams of staffulty and students to attend the Student Diversity Leadership/People of Color Conference—this year’s theme is “Reunited in Purpose: Elevating Our Worth, Our Agency, and Our Excellence” This winter, we will send a team of staffulty to the NAIS Annual conference, which is focused on “Cultivating Community.” Later this year, another group will be the first SA team to attend the SXSW Education conference in Austin, TX  as they explore the possibility of our students submitting their work and participating in future SXSW conferences. 

In addition to these upcoming conferences, our staffulty has attended professional development seminars/training in topics ranging from Beyond Inclusion and Support: Racial Equity in Learning Services and Social Media Marketing to Gender Spectrum Inclusion training to Health and Wellbeing workshops.  

Getting out in the world—that proverbial change of scenery—provides so much to us as students and educators. We gain new ideas and insights, we meet and interact with new people (including those who may not see things in the same way), we engage with novel concepts, and we become immersed in new and unfamiliar settings. We miss SA while we are away, but getting off campus—even for a conference or debate tournament—generates creativity, enlivens our work, and broadens our perspectives. While we have enormous opportunity to more deeply “engage with the surrounding community,” the seeds of these experiences will no doubt lead to a more authentic and meaningful engagement this year and beyond.