Welcome, everyone. Thank you all for taking the time to be here. Before I go any further, I have to note how different this Back-to-School Night is—with all of us outside on a warm evening under the sun setting—from my Back-to-School Night last year, in the basement auditorium. I remember it distinctly, not just because it was my last one but because the AC was on the fritz and it was one of those hot and humid evenings in NYC.
That said, I need to stop talking about the weather because there’s something else I’m appreciating even more about Castilleja these days. To explain it fully, I need to let you in on a little secret about new heads of school: we’re all a bit worried that our leadership roles will draw us away from students. Since most of us started in the classroom and really love working with kids, this presents a problem.
However, I can now say for sure that at Castilleja, that’s not going to happen because from my office, I have a front row seat to daily life on the Circle, I see students running to greet each other in the morning, tossing the football at break, and reviewing papers with their teachers under the tree outside my window. They’ve even started knocking on my door to say hello—though, full disclosure, I think they’ve figured out that I have snacks.
Either way, all of this proximity to students makes it easier for me to sit down beside them when I visit classes.
- The 6th graders passed me a pair of goggles and offered a detailed explanation of how they applied their math skills to real-life when they built planters just like the ones you can see behind me.
- In 8th grade science, they had sophisticated conversations about the body of knowledge that scientists have amassed and how new information is added to the collection- testable facts backed by data and the large body of evidence that leads one to make conclusions. Not just whims, feelings, and opinions.
- And when I joined an 11th grade history lesson about the Puritans and we reviewed a primary source from John Winthrop's 1630 speech, where he likened the Massachusetts Bay Colony to a City Upon a Hill- a model of protestant Christian success– I was blown away by the depth of analysis and questions between the students and their teacher.
Because I’ve been meeting with our faculty since I arrived in July, I already knew that they had ambitious goals for their students, but there’s nothing like seeing our teachers in action.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been seeing many of you in our Betty’s Circle gatherings. So far, I’ve met with about 85 parents and heard about everything from your last Google search to your hopes and dreams for your family. It’s been so rewarding and exciting to get to know you and learn more about your hopes for your daughters.
From all of these experiences—sitting with students in classes, talking with our faculty about their craft, and hearing what matters most to you—I’ve come to better understand our collective hopes for Castilleja and have developed five key goals that I want to share with you tonight. This year, I will work to:
- Engage with the community in order to establish and strengthen relationships with students, employees, families, alums, and the broader community
- Understand and advance our enduring academic program and our commitment to educating women leaders
- Support the student experience, celebrate traditions, and cultivate community to foster lifelong connections
- Work to complete our campus modernization, including the garage, the main campus, and leadership fundraising
- Ensure that school finances are optimized in support of the program, the mission, and the institution’s long-term success as we transition to a new CFO
These goals are mission-aligned, mission-driven, and mission-critical, and throughout my first year as Head of School, I will continue to help our community realize them. I’m hoping that as I’m listening, observing, learning, and leading that we are laying the groundwork for us to think about a vision and roadmap that can guide us as we look to the future and usher in the new campus to house our wonderful program.
I imagine that as parents, you are most curious about my approach to understanding and advancing our enduring program, so I want to offer more specifics on that point. To do our very best for our students, we need to ensure that they are:
- Encountering complex questions that lead to other questions
- Thinking critically to develop nuanced answers
- And learning from teachers who expect a high level of discourse
- And support them to level up to new challenges
As the product of a girls' school, I know what this education can become in the arc of a lifetime, and for me in addition to everything I have listed already, there was one other simple but essential thing that my teachers did to help me achieve new respect for my intelligence, my courage, and my capacity—they always showed me that they had faith in me.
When you move around to the classrooms tonight, listen for the complex questions, the critical thinking, and the ambitious conversations, but also keep an eye out for that faith. Your daughters’ teachers believe in them, and you can trust these teachers to help your daughters believe in themselves and surpass their own expectations. That is what a girls’ school can do at its very best, and I look forward to seeing it for myself through a new lens tonight as I visit my own daughter’s classes.
Welcome to Back-to-School Night. It might just make all of us wish we could go back and be students all over again.