It is with great excitement that we share our new Strategic Plan with the St. Anne’s-Belfield School community. We present this vision for our future on behalf of those who stewarded the planning process, the Board of Trustees, and the administration, faculty, and staff. We are excited to offer our enthusiastic endorsement of this plan and what it promises for our students, present, and future.

Over the past year, we have had the pleasure to engage in discussions about our hopes for St. Anne’s-Belfield School and have listened to and learned from teachers, parents, administrators, trustees, alumni, and students. We engaged with people who are 'all in' at St. Anne’s-Belfield and those who, for whatever reason, are not. Our goal was to ensure that every voice was heard. To that end, we engaged a consultant from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia to facilitate discussions, reviewed survey results, fielded emails and phone calls, and had conversations on sidelines, in stands, at School events, in pick-up and drop-off lines, and occasionally in the grocery store. We then compiled dozens and dozens of pages of notes with the feedback we heard, questions about what we do, and aspirations for your children and for St. Anne’s-Belfield School. This process has been, in our estimation, one of the most comprehensive and inclusive community dialogues in our School’s history, providing us deep and revealing insights into the present and hopes for the future. And while we would never claim to know what every individual thinks about the School, nor ever attempt to speak for all, we are confident that we have not just listened, but heard, the consensus of our community.

Before sharing the conclusions from this process and the plan itself, we wish to remind our community about the purpose of this process and the context in which we developed this plan.

Primarily, our charge was to create a new strategic plan for St. Anne’s-Belfield School, which, broadly defined, is a document aimed at articulating a desired future. Essential to this process is the need to establish clear, mission-driven priorities. Given that we cannot and should not do everything, we must prioritize based on what we value most as a community, and it is through this planning process that core values emerge. Thus the plan itself articulates a reasonably focused set of goals to guide the next five years at the School, informing how we will allocate resources and track our progress. Where appropriate, the goals will evolve over time in the sense that this is a living document; it is not doctrine or dogma. Nevertheless, the Core Purpose, Core Values, and Philosophy that we articulate on the following pages are rooted in the best of our community’s past and present and of what we aspire to be as a community in the future.

 

Please click here to view the full plan. Versions of the plan are also available in Chinese and Vietnamese.

 

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