Collaboration – Page 2 – Thoughts Between Class

Standing on Shoulders

We have a plan!

At their final meeting of this school year, our Board of Directors approved a Strategic Plan for Cary Academy.

Putting it together

This plan represents the collective work of our entire community, and more specifically the efforts of 24 members of a core strategic planning committee and another 36 individuals who served on four action teams. These groups included board members, employees, students, parents, and alumni.

Our planning teams relied heavily on data collected from two big community surveys last year as well as focus groups that helped provide a deeper dive into the state of our school. In addition to school-centered data, the team had a broad reading list that included reports from the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), Independent School Management (ISM), the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Harvard Business School. They tapped the scholarly work of Clayton Christensen, Tony Wagner, John Kotter, Michael Fullen, John Hattie, as well as local experts from UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.

The writing of the plan took place beginning at a two-day retreat in October and ending with a two-day retreat in March. In between, action teams fanned out to research and write draft strategies and action items.

Five-Year Planning Cycle

The school has been working on continual improvement through strategic planning for the last 10 years, with plans beginning in 2005 and again in 2010. These plans did a great deal to help create the school that we have today. A quick look at the key goals from each of those plans can help us see how the school has evolved.

Our goals in 2005

Create an environment that attracts, develops, and retains outstanding educators committed to the mission of Cary Academy.
Nurture and grow a constituency that is emotionally connected to the school.
Support students and employees in establishing and maintaining a balanced life.
Better communicate Cary Academy’s admission philosophy, profile of the ideal Cary Academy student, and profile of the ideal Cary Academy class.

Our goals in 2010

To prepare students for their futures, Cary Academy will be a leader in teaching and learning enhanced by the creative and effective use of emerging technologies.
Strengthen the development and retention of outstanding employees who will uphold and advance the mission and values of the school.
Build the framework necessary to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the school.
Strengthen student development programs to include character education, leadership, ethics, global citizenship and commitment to respect, integrity, and compassion.
Strengthen multi-culturalism in an increasingly diverse school community through education, experiences, and meaningful relationships.

Our vision, goals, and strategies for the next five years

When moving into a new planning cycle, we do not abandon the old goals but instead pull those accomplishments and dreams into a new vision:

Cary Academy will create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant. We will cultivate self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

Our goals and corresponding strategies:

Create institutional flexibility to facilitate innovative and dynamic learning experiences by

Creating institutional mechanisms to strengthen and sustain a robust culture of innovation
Creating collaborative time for students and faculty to engage in nontraditional, bold learning opportunities within and across divisions
Reviewing and revising our academic programming to reflect our commitment to student-centered learning

Foster the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to adapt and thrive in the world by

Enabling community members to identify and delve deeply into areas of passion
Ensuring community members have opportunities to expand cultural awareness and develop cultural competence

Strengthen existing relationships and build new connections to embrace multiple perspectives and opportunities by

Improving access and exposure to Cary Academy news, events, and opportunities for participation in community life
Establishing an accessible network of Cary Academy community members to strengthen relationships and share expertise
Seeking out opportunities with other schools, organizations, and individuals to gather and share knowledge, inspiration, and innovations

Build the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our strategic vision by

Identifying and implementing enhancements to the school’s culture and operations
Identifying and implementing improvements to the campus
Designing and implementing a funding program

Implementation

The implementation of our plan also will require a broad community effort. The plan is designed to be a “living document” — meaning we have clear goals and strategies in place, but the action items will be determined each year as the plan and our needs evolve.

This spring and summer, our Leadership Team will be working to develop the first set of action items that will begin in the fall. These items likely will include:

Creating operational language and structures to promote deeper innovation at Cary Academy, which could include expanding the use of design thinking beyond our current implementation in upper school visual arts program;
Strengthening community by showcasing the breadth of creativity and innovation currently in practice at Cary Academy;
Implementing a formalized, cross-divisional curriculum review cycle;
Reviewing our communication structures within the school and recommending improvements;
Tweaking our academic schedule to enhance collaboration opportunities between and within divisions;
Moving forward with the development of a campus improvement plan to create more student-centered and flexible learning spaces.

The development of this new strategic plan also involved updating the description of our mission statement and the creation of core beliefs about learning, and I look forward to sharing more about these in a future post.

You can follow the full planning process on our web site.

Creating Innovators

Cary Academy hosted one of the country’s leading voices in educational innovation, Dr. Tony Wagner, on December 15, 2014, for a talk on his most recent book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

In his presentation and subsequent question and answer session, Dr. Wagner, who is an Expert in Residence at Harvard University’s new Innovation Lab, highlighted the three big elements necessary for schools and parents to create an environment ripe for innovation:

Play
Passion
Purpose

Innovation, Dr. Wagner said, rarely happens from a single lightening bolt of inspiration. Collaboration between individuals and disciplines should be at the core of the work happening in schools — for both teachers and students.

An innovative environment promotes risk taking and the discovery of new connections between ideas. Schools should continue to look for ways to take advantage of students’ intrinsic motivation by giving them some flexibility in their learning and creating a failure-friendly atmosphere. Learning is an iterative process that is sparked when students understand their own abilities and can build upon skills in future work. Wagner’s thinking on the importance of iteration dovetails very nicely with the work of John Hattie on educational achievement that I wrote about earlier this year. Hattie says that one of the biggest factors impacting achievement is when students understand their own learning and give that feedback to their teachers, who can then adjust the next steps in the course.

You can hear a nice summary of Dr. Wagner’s presentation from a talk he gave at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, about a month before coming to visit us at Cary Academy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJbTFU99TAI[/youtube]

State of the School and Strategic Planning — AN INVITE

Dr. Wagner’s talk fits in nicely with many of the themes being discussed in our strategic planning process.

On January 21st at 7 PM in the Dining Hall, I invite all parents to come and hear the annual State of the School address and to participate in the mid-process feedback session regarding our strategic plan.

The State of the School is part of the PTAA Annual Meeting. It is an address by the Head of School containing all sorts of interesting information about Cary Academy. In my talk this year, I’ll share some highlights from the past 18 months and benchmarking data relative to admissions, financials, and student outcomes. In addition, I will talk about the school’s financial picture moving forward, including the tuition for the 2015-2016 school year. There will be a chance after the presentation to ask questions.

Following the State of School presentation, we will give an update on our strategic planning process. In October, I shared the four main goal areas for the plan:

Creating institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.
Fostering the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to thrive in an interdependent world.
Strengthening existing relationships and forging new connections to embrace fresh perspectives and opportunities.
Building the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our dreams.

On January 21st, we will share some of the strategies being developed to address these goals and give participants a chance to provide feedback and ideas that could be incorporated into the action items. The final plan will be put forward to the Board in April.

I hope to see many of you there.

The Change Business

Here at Cary Academy, we are in the change business.

I know what you are thinking: What organization isn’t in the “change business” nowadays? It has become de rigeur for leaders to say that their primary role is managing organizational transition. We’re bombarded with experts telling us to disrupt or be disrupted. As popular business writer Alan Deutschman has threatened: “Change or Die.”

At some point, when we all start saying the same thing though, it starts to feel less like innovation and more like imitation.

So, let me try to be more clear by what I mean when I say that we are in the “change business.” Perhaps an example or two will help.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to listen to a former Cary Academy student discussing his experiences at CA. This young man has gone on to get his PhD. in history and is now working in his dream job as a professor. When asked to elaborate on his career path, he drew a clear and direct thread from his current position back to a single genesis at Cary Academy — when his English teacher took notice of his interest in history and invited him to an off-campus reading and book signing by a local historian. Our young scholar was very clear about how that experience drew out his interest in history and helped him see where such a passion might ultimately lead. His teacher’s attention and acknowledgement, he articulated very clearly, gave him the confidence he needed to pursue this budding vision for his future.

While this young man’s story played itself out over years, there are plenty of others that span days, weeks, or months. I recently returned from a four-day backpacking trip with a group of students where we faced all sorts of hurdles, including below-freezing temperatures, pouring rain, challenging climbs, and steep, dark descents into camp with nothing but our headlamps to guide us. Upon returning to the school, the mother of one of our female hikers met us in the parking lot. Knowing that the weather had been brutal, she anxiously asked her daughter how the trip went. The young woman shivered, let out a “great,” and — looking over at me and then back again at her mother — smiled. Things were still too new for words, but the twinkle in her eyes betrayed a pride and self-confidence that had grown immeasurably over the previous four days.

Anybody who has worked around schools long enough has similar stories. Sometimes we see the impact of our work instantaneously and other times the payback is measured in years. We wish we could have better control of the outcomes: When we say this, assign that, or organize that other thing — that each of these efforts will have a direct and observable correlation to a desired outcome. This is just not the case. Because we organize school in a linear fashion, from grade to grade and year over year, doesn’t mean learning and development happens on our timeline. In addition, the truly transformative “lessons learned” may happen well outside our carefully thought out class syllabi.

But if you talk with enough parents, students, and alumni and you’ll surely understand that great things happen here at CA, in ways we can measure and in ways we will never really understand or appreciate. The Cary Academy diploma represents much more than the simple accumulation of credits on a transcript. The value of the experience is felt from much more than the mathematical calculation of homework grades and test scores.

So I do think we are in the change business.

We are in the life-changing business.

Updates and an Invite

This year’s late Thanksgiving leaves only a three-week window between our T1 break and our winter holiday break. As they say: so much to do and so little time!

Please do take some time to consult the Cary Academy web site regarding the busy calendar for the next few weeks. We hope that everybody will find an opportunity to come together and enjoy at least one of the many wonderful activities planned. Our Holiday Shoppe this weekend should kick off the season nicely.

Special Invitation for December 15

I’d also like to take this chance to extend an invitation to join us for a presentation by Harvard University professor Tony Wagner at 5:30 PM on December 15th in the Berger Hall Theater.

The presentation is for employees, parents, students, local educational leaders and invited heads of schools and board members from a selection of area independent schools. In a talk based on his latest book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World, Wagner will address questions vital to the future of our country.

Wagner serves as an Expert In Residence at Harvard University’s new Innovation Lab. His previous work experience includes 12 years as a high school teacher, K-8 principal, university professor in teacher education, and founding executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility.

Gift Guidelines

This is also the time of year that many would like to express appreciation to members of the Cary Academy faculty and staff. A thank you note is treasured most. If an individual or group wishes to recognize an employee by providing a gift, please be aware of the following guidelines:

Gifts should not be cash or checks; however gift cards to businesses are acceptable.
Individual gifts to employees should not exceed $25 in value.
Group gifts may not be solicited for classroom teachers.
Group gifts to extracurricular leaders, athletic coaches and other employees leading activities outside of the classroom may be solicited using the following guidelines:
- One request and one follow-up request is permitted.
- The names of donors should be kept confidential.
Group gift requests should not exceed $10 per student and the total value of a group gift to an employee should not exceed $150. If more than $150 per gift recipient is collected, the surplus must be used for a year-end celebration or donated to the program.

2015-2016 Draft Calendar

Below are some of the key dates for next academic year. The finalized calendar will be posted on the web site in early January. Questions or comments can be addressed to Kim Fogleman in the Head’s Office.

August 12, 2015 — First Day of School

August 7 — Labor Day Holiday (no school)

October 7 — Conferences (after school)

October 8 — Conferences (no school)

October 9 — No school

November 13 — Last day of T1 (start of break for students)

November 30 — Start of T2

December 18 — Last day of school before holiday break

January 4, 2016 — First day back from holiday break

January 18 — No school

February 26 — Last day of T2 (start of break for students)

March 14 — Start of T3

March 25 — No School

March 28 — 10 AM Start

May 20 — End of US T3

Sunday, May 22 — Commencement

May 23 — Start of US Discovery Term

May 30 — No School

June 3 — Last Day of School

Please note that commencement next year will be on the weekend due to the date of the NCISSA state athletic tournaments, which run through Friday and Saturday, May 20-21.

Best wishes.

The CA Blend

A few weeks ago, a bold group of Cary Academy students stood in front of a group of 80 public and private educators from across North Carolina and said: We have a voice.

We are capable of thinking deeply about our own education, they said, and should be a part of the local and national conversations about academic achievement and educational reform.

Rather than just complaining about the issue, our students exercised that voice by hosting their own conference on the subject, attended by teachers, administrators, policy makers, and scholars.

The Cary Academy Blended Project

A strong theme throughout the conference had to do with taking advantage of pedagogical strategies that enhanced student learning. One group of students who had a lot to say on the subject were those taking some of our new blended classes this year. A dedicated team of upper school teachers has spent the last six months developing and launching eight new courses that “blend” online and face-to-face teaching strategies. The key components of the Cary Academy blend are that the courses must involve some student choice in time, pace, or place of instruction.

During their panel presentation, our students spoke very enthusiastically about what they called the “time shifting” that is going on in their blended courses. They report a great deal of satisfaction in having some control over when and where they do parts of their coursework. You can see this flexibility exercised in the library, the hallways, outside, or at home.

This may sound insignificant at first, but in reality it is a very big deal.

Don’t believe me? Take a few moments to read the sobering account of the experiences of a teaching coach who shadowed students in her school for two days. Her major takeaways:

“Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.”

“High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.”

“You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.”

Now, at Cary Academy we like to think that our students are not quite as passive as the norm. Walk into any random class at CA, and you’re likely to see students working individually and in small groups. The teacher is likely moving around and supporting students as they need it. Much thought is given to group and individual learning opportunities. However, within this context, students still have limited choice. By the very nature of our current system, there is an element of control in a traditional classroom that can contribute to students “feeling like a nuisance.”

When we began development of our blended classes, we started with the assumption that the rigor and quality of work would be at the same or higher level than our standard courses. But with students having more control over place, place, and time we expected they might be more engaged in their learning and able to perform at a higher level. Early anecdotal evidence across all of our courses is positive.

This year I am co-teaching a blended Global Leadership class with Upper School Principal Heather Clarkson. We meet our students once a week in a traditional class setting. We also use the flexible time to meet with each of our students individually once a week, to check-in on their personal goals and development as leaders. Each student has chosen an outside “leadership coach” and they meet with them several times over the course of the semester. Coaches are business leaders, academic leaders, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs. By leveraging the flex time, we are able to break down the classroom walls and get our students connected with others in the real world. In addition, our leadership students are taking the online portion of the class with peers at schools in Brazil and India. This week they began an online simulated climb up Mt. Everest to practice some of the teambuilding and communication skills we’ve been working on in class.

We are still early in our blended pilot project. While we are encouraged by the positive feedback from students, our Blended Learning Team is still refining what we do. We are supported in this effort by experts at NC State’s Friday Institute of Educational Innovation. They are helping us develop blended course standards and evaluate our classes against the Cary Academy mission. Importantly, and in line with what students said at their recent conference, student feedback is critical to the evaluation of this new model for instruction.

We are very proud of risk that our student took to host their own conference this October and exercise their voice in an important social issue. In December, Cary Academy will play host to another conference on blended learning, and students will once again be an equal partner in those conversions.

Strategic Plan Update

Thank you to everybody who shared thoughts regarding the next big opportunity for Cary Academy — via Twitter, directly with me through email, or by talking with members of our Leadership Team.

Let me take a few moments to update you on our strategic planning progress.

A few weeks ago, 24 members of our community gathered for two days of thought, discussion, and planning regarding Cary Academy’s future. To ensure the widest possible viewpoints, the Strategic Planning Committee consists of three representatives each from the board, administration, faculty, staff, parents, students, and alumni. The board chair, board vice chair, and head of school round out the team.

The committee: Monica Udell, Ann Goodnight, Mike Ehrhardt, Laurie Mesibov, Jeff Kenney, Jim Johnson, Martina Greene, Heather Clarkson, Marti Jenkins, Palmer Seeley, Robert Coven, Alicia Morris, Joselyn Todd, Leya Jones, Sheila Rademacher, Lisa Mathis, Andrea Weathers, Kristin Murphy, Vera W, Ava R, Kendall B, Alex Wilson, Andy Walsh, and Sharice Chandler.

The weekend included some deep discussions about the school mission and our core values. We spent considerable time unpacking our mission: what it means to be a learning community and the concepts of discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence. Our mission statement has been our guide for the past 18 years, and we believe that it has never been more relevant in shaping our work than it is today.

We examined the strengths and the weaknesses of Cary Academy, looking for those big opportunities or the significant threats that should be addressed in a strategic plan. We talked about how to improve our programs, but many of those ideas were put into a “parking lot” for consideration by the school’s leadership team as part of CA’s continual improvement plan. Important, yes, but not at the level that they required inclusion at the strategic level.

At the end of the retreat, we identified four major goal areas to explore over the course of this year.

Creating institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.
Fostering the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to thrive in an interdependent world.
Strengthening existing relationships and forging new connections to embrace fresh perspectives and opportunities.
Building the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our dreams.

The language of these goals has not been finalized, but we have enough of a working draft to put teams on the task of identifying strategies and action plans to make them a reality. The strategic planning committee seeded this process with many of the ideas that came up through our discussion over the weekend.

We have now turned over the work to action team leaders, who will be pulling together new groups to develop strategies and action plans. Those team leaders are: Robin Follet, Dawn Bates, Michael McElreath, Nicky Stewart, Kristi McGauley, Meredith Stewart, Laura Werner, Debby Reichel, and Michael Hayes.

Our committees will be reaching out for more thoughts and ideas through the winter. They will report their first draft of strategies to our Strategic Planning Committee and our Board in January. The final strategic plan will be approved by the Board in April.

In addition, we have launched a search for a new position at Cary Academy: Director of Technology and Innovation, to begin in July 2015. This individual will be key in helping us achieve our goal to be a leader in technology innovation and a model for schools in North Carolina and beyond.

This is such an exciting time for our school, and I’m looking forward to sharing more as the year unfolds.

#CABOS

As our Strategic Planning Committee prepares to begin their work this weekend, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time thinking about the future of Cary Academy. Over the past months, I’ve been working with our board members, leadership team, and employees to identify the big opportunities that are available to CA at this particular time in our history.

The phrase Big Opportunity was coined by retired Harvard Business School professor John Kotter in his most recent book Accelerate. In many ways, I’m attracted to Kotter’s ideas here because they connect so well to research on strengths-based leadership. For an organization to thrive today it needs a special combination of consistency and innovation, which involves building on its strengths and unique characteristics to take advantage of new opportunities.

As Kotter would say: A big opportunity describes a window into the future that is open or about to open. A big opportunity statement (BOS) is both rational in light of available data and emotionally compelling to people inside the organization.

A BOS appeals to the heart and the mind.

This isn’t to say that the new Cary Academy strategic plan will not help us address shortcomings. Continual improvement is a part of the school’s DNA, and our new plan will need to address some things that are holding us back. However, at its core our strategic plan should point us in the direction to an even brighter future.

Over the last few months, I’ve run several exercises with different groups to write some big opportunity statements. These were exercises to help us better identify and understand our strengths and to think about where they might lead us next. To help with this process, we used the following template for a BOS:

Because of contextual factor X or our special capability Y, we have a very real and exciting opportunity to offer service Z or do thing ZZ.

Kotter believes that a big opportunity statement must be rational (why us, why now, why bother), emotionally compelling (a sincere and positive appeal to the heart), and clear (no jargon).

After our employees reviewed our most recent community survey data, they wrote many big opportunity statements. Here are just two:

Because we do well in fostering character development, we can give students more opportunities to exercise authentic leadership.
Because of the strength of our world language program, we have an opportunity to broaden exchange opportunities in other disciplines.

We’ve been doing a lot of data gathering over the past 12 months to help inform our new strategic plan. We’ve had focus groups and surveys designed to help us understand our strengths and gather suggestions for improvement. I like big opportunity statements because they attempt to connect the two things in a short and pithy way.

At this time, I’d invite all of you to share some of your ideas for a great BOS for Cary Academy. The challenge for this exercise is to do this in the 140 character limit of a Tweet. Share your BOS with the hashtag #CABOS, and I’ll make sure they get included on the list of ideas that go to the Strategic Planning Committee this weekend and the Action Teams that will begin soon afterwards. I’ll share out a few more of the ideas that have already been generated from my Twitter account @mike_ehrhardt.

Happy Tweeting.

Welcome to a new year

August 1, 2014

Dear Cary Academy Students and Parents,

Hope you and your families are enjoying these fabulous days. Lovely cool mornings during a summer in NC? Enjoy it while it lasts.

Throughout June and July our many Summer Quest campers kept the energy level high on campus, but we do miss our students. Now the time has come to turn our full attention to the 2014-2015 school year. Our faculty began their work together on August 4, joined by 12 new teachers from North Carolina, Germany, Bulgaria, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida, and New York. You’ll learn more in upcoming communication from the divisional heads and a piece in the fall Access Newsletter.

The early highlight of the new school year will undoubtedly be the distribution of our Lenovo Yoga tablets. Thanks to the record-breaking success of last year’s annual CA Fund, we were able to double the RAM in the new tablets before placing the final order this summer. Couple that with the switch from a disk to a solid-state hard drive, and I think our students will be blown away with the responsiveness of their new machines.

This summer has seen several smaller but significant changes to our campus:

Our multimedia classroom in the top floor of the library has been converted into a makerspace design lab. This is the new hub for the design studio that is part of the Upper School art and design classes as well as the home base for our new robotics program, which has both in-school classes and an after-school component.
Thanks to a gift from the PTAA and our CA Fund, the student lounge in the SEA has been updated with new paint, carpet, and furniture. It looks wonderful.
Those of you entering the Upper School next week will notice a reconfigured front office, with new windows greatly increasing visibility to the parking lot entrance. We hope this space makes getting in and out of the office easier, and we know it will help with our security profile.
Field House construction will begin shortly, after a slight hold up in the planning process. Once begun, it will last six months. Our athletic teams and PE classes will still have access to the tennis courts, track, and stadium field during construction. We do anticipate the new building being ready to go for the spring sports season.

While summer presents an important opportunity to take a break and spend time with family, many of our faculty do use this time for significant professional learning experiences. More than 30 of us participated in multi-day courses, conferences, or workshops. They included institutes for biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer programming, US history, and foreign language instruction. Some covered other topics such as diversity leadership, athletics leadership, assessment, the teaching of writing, and current research on the most successful pedagogical practices. Ten of us spent two weeks together in June to start development on seven technology-rich blended courses in the Upper School. After getting feedback from each other and a host of invited outside experts, we worked individually the rest of the summer to pull our courses together. We will continue our collaborative efforts throughout the year to provide feedback to one another and fine-tune our work.

As you can see, “camp” is not just for kids!

In any given school year, there are many targeted initiatives taking place. This year we see two additional big areas of focus: technology conversion and strategic planning. In addition to the launch of the new laptops, we are transitioning to Windows 8, adding some Apple computers into the mix, and moving everything into the cloud with Office 365. The latter will represent a big change for the way we work and collaborate, and I ask everybody for patience as we go through the inevitable ups and downs. In a separate letter at the end of the month, I will outline the process for both strategic planning and accreditation. I also will be sharing out information from last year’s brainstorming and data collection exercises in a variety of forums throughout the fall and culminating at the regular PTAA State of the School presentation in January.

On August 13, we will open our 18th year with 753 students. Our attrition rate (the number of students who leave before their senior year) is at its lowest point on record. We are thrilled about what our new students and employees will bring to our community, and we can’t wait to get the year started.

See you all very soon,

Best wishes,

Michael Ehrhardt
Head of School

Makers

It was duct-tape wallets at my house. I got them for my birthday, for Christmas. Heck, we even hunted for them at Easter.

Living in apartments in Brazil and in London, space was always at a premium. Our family learned to live modestly, but we always found room to carry the Legos back on the plane after a trip home to see the grandparents. One year it was a full Thomas the Tank Engine set. Suitcases always had room for more two-sided tape and glue guns (both harder to get overseas than you might imagine).

Those are magical years as a parent — when things get torn apart, inspected, put back together (often resembling nothing like the original object). Art is created from found items in the back of the cupboard or under a tree in the park. The box is always more interesting than the present inside.

It is a shame that the “maker years” of curiosity and discovery have to end.

Or do they?

A walk through the classrooms at Cary Academy quickly demonstrates how intellectual curiosity is alive and well even as students mature beyond the duct-tape years. (OK, scratch that, we never really age-out of finding new uses for duct tape.)

Our 6th-grade scientists are developing their own hypotheses about how things work and doing a bit of reverse engineering on everyday items such as styrofoam cups or refrigerators. Our high school students are programing robots to test concepts in physics class or building scale models of the Cary Academy campus using a 3D printer.

I am proud that in a school so dedicated to the use of computers, we place such strong emphasis on hands-on learning as well. These are integrated, not competing, modes of learning.

A new space for makers

As we make continue efforts to improve opportunities for our students, you will have heard about several new or growing initiatives at Cary Academy:

The creation of an integrated Art and Design program for all 9th- and 10th-grade students.
The phenomenal growth (and success) of our Science Olympiad program.
The introduction of a new robotics classes in the upper school, which will support our growing after school teams.
The creation of a new digital film studio and introduction of new film classes.

All of these new efforts require the right kind of equipment and spaces to foster discovery and collaboration. To support this, we are excited to embark on the development of a dedicated “makerspace” for students and teachers at Cary Academy. The space will occupy the current programming classroom in the second floor of our library. Students in the art and design classes will cycle through the space and it will also be a home-base for our Science Olympiad and robotics students. It will be open and modular, hopefully reflecting the flexible needs of thinkers and tinkerers.

Made possible by you

The development of this new space fits directly in with new focus areas in our curriculum, but it would not be possible without the generous support of the Cary Academy community. Funds for equipment are coming directly from proceeds raised from this year’s Cary Academy Fund.

Like the movement we are supporting, our new makerspace will evolve through a process of discovery and collaboration. We look forward to sharing progress reports throughout the next school year.

I still have a few of those duct-tape wallets, and I’m looking forward to seeing what our students can do with even more tools at their disposal.

Welcome

This time of year can feel crazy. In addition to planning for end-of-year activities, trips, and graduation, we are also working on setting the stage for the next school year. For those returning next year, let me thank you all for your timeliness in meeting our recent deadlines for re-enrollment. It has been a very busy time, but this early planning goes a long way to ensuring a smooth start in the fall.

As we near the conclusion of this admission cycle, I have also reached out to our new families to welcome them to Cary Academy. They also were invited to our annual FunFest held on April 11, which is always a fabulous introduction to the positive spirit and energy of our community.

In the spirit of transparency, I thought I might also share with you a letter that I sent to our new families recently as a way of introduction and welcome. I do believe the message is relevant to all of us at CA.

April 2, 2014

Dear soon-to-be CA parents,

Let me be among the first to welcome you to Cary Academy! We are so delighted to have your family as part of our community.

I had a chance to introduce myself to many of you during our open houses this past fall. As you may recall, I am completing my first year as Cary Academy’s head of school. I joined CA along with my two children, one in middle and one in upper school. We cannot imagine having made a better choice for our family.

Let me also congratulate you on having successfully navigated the admissions process. This has been the most competitive year for seats since our school’s founding in 1996. Our admissions office and their committees worked tirelessly through snow days and ice storms to review applications. Individually, each one of our new students is outstanding. Collectively, well … wow. Let’s just say that we cannot wait for your child(ren) to join us in August.

Just this past week, at an event celebrating our graduating seniors, one parent commented on the impressive qualities of the CA student body. During a time when society seems to celebrate a lack of intellectual engagement, it is wonderful to see Cary Academy students lift each other up in pursuit of academic excellence.

I’ve seen the spirit of the Cary Academy student in a variety of settings this year. When I joined our outdoors club on a four-day backpacking trip, I listened to them around the campfire talk fondly of their teachers and passionately about their experiences at CA. While driving a group of debate students to a weekend tournament near Washington, DC, I listened to them argue the merits of immigration reform for hours. When observing a world history class in our middle school, I watched as the class dismissed and each student in turn thanked the teacher for his efforts as they left the room.

In my first week on the job, I had the good fortune to meet with our new alumni board. When asked why they wanted to serve, most said that it took them a few years after college to realized just how formative Cary Academy had been in their lives. This is where they learned to be a student, a citizen, and a friend — and they could draw a direct line to their success in college and life to their experiences at CA.

Of course, this doesn’t happen by accident. Our students are products of great families. We expect you to be involved positively in the life of your child(ren) and the life of the school.

And our promise?

I wish we could promise four to seven years of smooth sailing, a straight line to happiness and success. Well, actually, I don’t wish for a straight line, because that would be short changing our students some of their most important learning opportunities. Instead, we promise to model the very same things we want from our students. We will work hard. We will engage each other with kindness and optimism. We will take risks and learn from our mistakes. We will say thank you.

Let me close by wishing you all the very best this spring and summer. You will be receiving a lot of communication in the coming months about next school year, including an invitation to our Fun Fest on April 11 and our CA 101 workshop on May 3. In the meantime, please let this serve as your first welcoming message to the school.

Sincerely,

Michael Ehrhardt, Ed.D.
Head of School