Thoughts Between Class – Page 2 – Mike Ehrhardt's Cary Academy Blog

CA @ 20: Still Amazing

Here is a copy of my speech to the Upper School during the convocation at the start of our 20th Anniversary Year.

____________________

As I did a little primary source research preparing to celebrate our 20th anniversary this year, I came across several television news reports from 1996 and 1997 that announced the formation of Cary Academy as a “School of the Future.”

Of course, this school of the future would have The Internet, which was so young that both “The” and “Internet” were still being capitalized. Only one percent of humanity was on the World Wide Web, which is what they called it back then — when the world felt much wider. Cary Academy teachers would learn the coding to create their own web pages that students could access on computers in every classroom that were “networked” to each other and our very own servers with miles of wires spread throughout the campus. CA would be too cool for just The Inter-net; it would have its own Intra-net. The A was for amazing.

Speaking of A, at our founding, the Amazon was still most famously a river. The online store sold only books. It wasn’t supposed to be named Amazon, but when the original name “Cadabra” was misheard as cadaver, founder Jeff Bezos changed it to Amazon, in part because web listings in Yahoo were being done alphabetically.

We didn’t get to start at the beginning of the alphabet and became Cary Academy, which is never shorted to just Cary. Hipsters sometimes call us The Academy though.

The big news during those founding days was that CA would give email accounts to faculty and students to create a wondrous communications nirvana. And in those heady early days, students actually read those emails.

Cary Academy had the great fortune to have both visionary and generous founders. The school opened with nearly all of the buildings that you see right now, red brick emerging from the red clay. From the very beginning, our campus facilities have set a tone that this place is serious about learning. We would bring the best of traditional, liberal arts education into the 21st century. Teachers would have the freedom to use new tools and new methods to inspire and empower students, giving you the skills you need to thrive in college and beyond. The school was forward facing from those very first days.

Of course, when a campus like Cary Academy emerges so quickly and so beautifully, it can run the risk of not feeling real — like Epcot Center. You can walk onto campus and feel that you have walked into some magical place that is not of this world. A fake school.

If those first students felt that way, they quickly learned another lesson. Our buildings and our technology might set a tone, but it cannot build a culture. Those early classes had to collaborate with each other and their teachers to establish traditions, activities, and expectations. That first year, they established 14 clubs. The second year, they established an honor code. Those early students were fundamental in turning Cary Academy from a set of school buildings into a powerful community. They were given an opportunity to be a part of something special, and they took advantage.

Last year, we surveyed our alumni to ask them about their experiences at CA. Here is a representative sample of comments:

The seven years at Cary Academy really defined my personality and who I am today. The biggest impact was being in a community of other students who were the right combination of intellectually curious, ambitious, and passionate. Many of these people are still close friends.

Cary Academy provided me the environment and the academic rigor that shaped me into the person I am today. My experiences at Cary Academy were more influential in my development than any other period of my life. In short, Cary Academy taught me what it takes to be successful in life.

Cary Academy was a school that challenged me to be a better student, community member, and person.

I credit CA with my professional accomplishments, as it set the foundation for what I would later achieve in life.

I would not be where I am today (master’s degree and a great paying job, with knowledge and emotional intelligence) without having a foundation in Cary Academy.

It is an amazing community of people.

For these graduates, Cary Academy was as real as it gets.

But think about that last quote for a second: “an amazing community of people.” I suspect that those students are all graduated. It could be that a good deal of their teachers are gone as well. The funny thing about school is that the community changes every year, and it is up to each of us, each year, to create community, to reinforce culture. If we don’t do it, who will? If all those amazing people have gone, I suppose we can settle for … adequate.

“Cary Academy: An adequate community of people.”

But, if you are engaged, open-minded, curious … this school can change your life. You have to want it. You have to work for it. You have to own it.

Exciting changes are happening all around you, and you have opportunities to do things that past students never could have imagined. We continue to reimagine the CA experience for a new future, and you have the chance this year, right now, to contribute to the community and culture that embraces these exciting opportunities. That is as real as it gets.

So let’s get back to it: Are we adequate or amazing?

That’ what I thought.

The A in CA has always stood for Amazing.

_______________

Postscript: Please enjoy the short video we put together to commemorate our 20th Anniversary.

End of Year Wrap

As we close the 2015-2016 school year, I thought I’d share an update on the school’s strategic plan.

Our 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.

Goal 1: Institutional Flexibility
Cary Academy will create institutional flexibility to facilitate innovative and dynamic learning experiences.

The year started with our faculty and staff design thinking workshop. Following this introduction, a study team formed and met throughout the year to explore how the concepts might be applied to our work.

A task force began to explore the school schedules, looking for ways to better align the MS and US schedule and give it more flexibility. A prototype schedule was tested in the spring. The work of this group will continue, with another prototype coming next year and a schedule change to be introduced for 2017-2018. Continuing on the theme of flexing time, the Upper School developed our first for-credit CA summer course. The US history course will run this summer, and it will give students more flexibility in their scheduling or course selection in the coming year.

In pursuit of more dynamic learning experiences, we began our first formal MS/US curriculum review sequence. Math and science teachers met throughout the year to review curriculum and trends, topics under review range from learning progressions and flexible learning pathways to assessment strategies and cultivation of a growth mindset. They will make a series of recommendations next year, for implementation in 2017-2018. This will align with the planning of our new science building, as outlined in the master facility plan. Next year, reviews will begin in English and social sciences.

Finally, we launched a Research and Development Team to explore concepts that we believe have the potential to positively impact learning at Cary Academy. Early topics being explored include: micro-schools, micro-credentialing, professional development models, and threshold curriculum concepts.

Goal 2: Authentic Engagement
Cary Academy will foster the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to adapt and thrive in the world.

Continuing our initiative to blend the best of digital and face-to-face pedagogy, we added three new blended courses into the Upper School this past year: multivariable calculus and differential equations (in partnership with NC State), architecture, and anatomy and physiology.

Several new projects were introduced this school year as well, including:

a partnership with the CLOSE UP organization for the 11th grade class trip to Washington, DC.,
a 6th grade Citizen Science project,
and new MS world language field trips and Skype collaborations.

To spark further smaller-scale projects within existing courses, we launched a grant program for faculty to use the summer to develop engagement opportunities. We have two projects under development.

The Upper School launched a structured work experience program during Discover Term, creating mini internship-type opportunities for 22 juniors over the last two weeks of school. Look for an overview of this exciting new program in the fall.

Goal 3: Strong Communications
Cary Academy will strengthen existing relationships and build new connections to embrace multiple perspectives and opportunities.

There were a number of outreach efforts to connect Cary Academy to the wider community, including:

visits from Dr. Peggy Macintosh and Terri Phoenix and the development of a parent SEED cohort as part of our diversity and inclusion programming,
a schoolwide Celebration of Creativity and Innovation, including a speaker series, as part of our Grandparents Day,
and exciting new PTAA initiatives, such as the Charger Derby 5K and Auction.

We worked with an outside firm to conduct a comprehensive communication audit, and then we followed that up by engaging with a communications firm to help us sharpen our visual and written messaging around the Cary Academy story. That work will continue into next school year. In addition, a committee used a design thinking protocol to prototype a new weekly email communication that will launch in the fall.

Finally, a 20th Anniversary Planning Team has been working all spring to pull things together for a yearlong celebration in 2016-2017.

Goal 4: Appropriate Resources
Cary Academy will build the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our strategic vision.

We migrated to a new student information system, Veracross, across the academic, admissions, advancement divisions. This single platform should improve coordination and communication. Internally, we have begun implementation of an internal calendar, technology, and facilities management platform called SchoolDude.

This fall, we completed a capital campaign readiness study, and the Board of Directors approved that report in January. We have begun a quiet phase in this process, and our Campaign Steering Committee will meet in June to help finalize our campaign case statement. The campaign will be in support of programs identified in the strategic plan and facilities needs outlined as part of our master plan.

Our facilities updates continue this summer with the renovation of the Lecture Hall, the creation of a new makerspace/design studio and the development pilot classroom and collaborative spaces in the Upper School. Our furniture replacement cycle also continues.

As we wrap up this past school year, I hope this overview gives you a sense of the types of things we are working on at Cary Academy. This is a school that does not sit still. However, I do hope that everybody takes some time this coming summer to rest, relax, and recharge. More great things will be on tap for the fall!

A father’s thoughts on graduation

Board members, graduates, parents, guests, alumni, and employees — welcome to the commencement for the Class of 2016.

I gave my first graduation address in 1989, almost a decade before most of you were born. In my 23 years in education, I have stood on stage and addressed 10 graduating classes. In those early days, I got selected to speak. Not anymore. Now speaking is a job hazard. For you, not for me.

This year is unique, though, because I stand here today as the head of school and parent of a graduate. For the last few months, I’ve been asked by many well-meaning people: “How are you doing, Mike?” It’s almost like I’ve had some sort of disease. Talk turns to whispers when I come into the room. Tissue boxes just appear at my desk.

Well, nearing the end of this journey, I can tell you that I have been sick — with the parent version of senioritis, parental EMpty-nest-O-sus – otherwise known as Parental EMO. The symptoms are random waves of nostalgia, brought on by a walk past an empty bedroom, a glance at a pair of muddy cleats, or any trip to the attic. DON’T go into the attic.

The complications of Parental EMO? Well, they are complicated. There are the expected mood swings, coupled with strong bouts of denial. But I think the biggest is an overwhelming urge to plan celebrations. Lots and lots of celebrations. With pictures. Lots of pictures. And balloons.

My battle with parental EMO started early this year. I started this speech months ago. Usually on my runs. This is where my waves of nostalgia would hit. I’d come home all wet, wiping my face. My wife would ask what’s wrong.

“Tough, run,” I’d say.

“You’ll all wet.”

“It’s raining.”

She’d look out the window. “It’s sunny, dear.”

She didn’t really say “dear,” I substituted it for another word, but it’s my memory and I like that better.

I thought today’s theme could be: “Thoughts On a Run.” But then you’d hear mostly lots of “Didn’t I just run up that hill?” and “Maybe I’ll just walk this little bit.” The good thing about all those runs, though, is that it kept my parental EMO symptoms contained.

Or so, I thought.

Just two days ago I passed my daughter on the Quad, right in front of the Upper School building. We just had one of those great text exchanges, where she pours out her feelings about something or other — there always a something or other — and I answered with a curt: “You’ll be fine.”

So we pass, and she says to me: “What is wrong with you, old man, you are acting even more emotionally challenged than normal.”

OK, to be fair, what she really said was: “Are you OK, Dad?”

But I know what she meant. It was the eye roll. I’m not going to miss the eye roll.

So, maybe I haven’t gotten over my parental EMO — and here I am, with a speech to give, and I’ve so stuffed down my emotions that I’ve got nothing.

Previously, I might have gotten on my high horse to tell you that high school, that senior year, that all of this is about them and not about you. For 18 years, I’ve had an agreement with my daughter that I would keep “Dad” away from her school. But now is his time. Perhaps his only time. And what a stage.

Finally, my chance to speak from the heart.

Mmmm.

See, this is what happens when you ask this Dad to speak from the heart. You get silliness or silence. No, you didn’t miss anything. All I gave you there was the silence. This Dad is also getting some smarts. I cut the silly remark from the last version of this speech. We have extended family in the house, so the couch is already taken. Although, I contend that tickles were and always will be a love language.

By now, it is pretty clear that if I’m going to have anything worthwhile to say today, I’m going to need some help. I bet if I could harness the feelings of all the dads in this room, I could generate the same emotional intensity as one normal human being, or half of Christa McElveen.

So, after that little tet-a-tet with my daughter and in the spirit of Cary Academy collaboration, I wrote to all the dads in this room to ask for help. Send me a memory of your child, I pleaded. At this point, I see all the spouses here looking at their husbands and going: “What did you say?”

Well, I’ll tell you what they said:

Watching you finish your first marathon with a smile on your face.
Watching you take to the stage for the first time with your guitar.
Waiting as many years as possible before breaking the news that all the July 4 fireworks were not for your birthday.
When the dance to Space Jam’s “Ya’ll Ready for This” ended prematurely when I threw you into the door jam.
When I could run faster than you, like when you were in the second grade.
When you learned that corn dogs and roller coasters were not a good combination.
When your self-confidence skyrocketed after your 3rd-grade ski trip.
When you learned you could catch a ball with your hands and not just your face.
When you brought the supposedly dead possum into the house, and then learned the meaning behind the phrase “playing possum.”
Letting my excitement get the best of my judgement by letting you learn to drive solo while videotaping from the parking lot. Mom’s reaction upon seeing that tape … priceless.

That’s good stuff, but we need to dig deeper here dads. You’re still channeling the goofy dad vibe. Work with me.

Hearing “Daddy, you are my best.”
Watching you, age two, pull spices from the kitchen cabinet and name each one.
Pullen Park on a summer day, and you are three, sitting happily under a large tree. I call to you. You excitedly take two steps towards me, trip over an exposed root, and do a face plant.
Recalling before prom your pronouncement at age five that you would never, ever, ever wear a dress.
When your realized all your practice time in the playground could take away the butterflies before your first day in elementary school.
Dancing with you as the King your recitals.
When you learned that bike riding was freedom, and never looked back.
When making sure you had your belt for middle school became making sure you had your car keys in high school.

There we go. Thank you, dads. I think you’ve helped me find the emotional core. Something that all parents experienced, like a thunderbolt at your birth.

PANIC.

But you know, I’m not talking about fear. I’m talking about love.

That feeling when we held you in our arms at your birth. Electric.

Now, I’ve needed a little help to break past my parental EMO, but this is a shared story. To reference one of the masterpieces in British literature, it was the love of both James and Lily that surrounded and protected Harry Potter on his magical journey. I’d like to ask my wife Krista to stand and represent my better half. In fact, as I close this welcome, I’d like to ask all the parents of graduates to stand with us.

Graduates, know that love drove the sacrifices we made to have you on this stage today. During our journey, love and fear often fought pitched battles for preeminence over our emotions and decision making. We may not have gotten it right every time — but the way your hormones have been raging, we still had more common sense than you could muster on any day.

You leave Cary Academy today with so many wonderful attributes, but remember that the gift of love is not only the first thing you received in your life but is behind so much of what is right and good in the world: passion, inspiration, patience, sacrifice, acceptance, and forgiveness.

Finally, please know graduates that today you get the cure for senioritis — your diploma. I’m afraid parental EMO is a chronic condition.

On Artistry

I’ve been thinking about Hamilton lately.

By this time, you’ve probably heard at least something about the historical hip-hop sensation that has taken Broadway by storm. The Bernie Sanders of musical theater, the Hamilton soundtrack is inflaming the passions of teens and young adults across the country. Your kids may have already corralled you to have a listen. On April 18, the musical was awarded a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

For those who are not familiar with the backstory: Hamilton is the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda. (It is fair to use genius next to his name, because Miranda did win a 2015 MacArthur “Genius” Award.) Born to Puerto Rican parents, Miranda grew up in New York City and attended Wesleyan University, where in his sophomore year he wrote the first draft of what would become another Broadway musical In the Heights. His second musical was inspired after reading Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton. The musical is set during the founding of the United States and tells the story of Hamilton’s life through song, with nearly all major characters played by people of color.

Among many accomplishments befit a man of varied talents and interests, Alexander Hamilton was the chief architect of our nation’s financial system. Even with his face on the $10 bill, Hamilton is probably best known as the founding father who died in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr.

It would be fair to say that the musical Hamilton can be understood on many levels.

What has me thinking about Hamilton isn’t my soft spot for musical theater (even though I get a lump in my throat at just the “duh duh” of the Les Miserables Prologue) but in what Hamilton the musical and the real life of Alexander Hamilton say about school and teachers.

Hamilton and education

Hamilton and other transformative works of art help us to see the world differently. They connect head, hands, and heart to our humanity. That a hip-hop tale about the founding fathers can connect people across generations is remarkable, and this is certainly the goal of a liberal arts education as well.

Hamilton’s real life journey from orphan to Founding Father resonates today not only because of Miranda’s gifts as a writer but because Hamilton’s life speaks to what we still want to believe about the American Dream.

As Aaron Burr raps in Hamilton:

”How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”

Hamilton’s transformation begins when he receives a scholarship to attend school in the colonies, first a prep school in New Jersey and then later Kings College (later Columbia University) in New York City.

Miranda’s special artistic feat with Hamilton the musical has been to find a way to make Hamilton the man relatable, bringing themes forward that are still very relevant today. Setting it to rap was a risky move. Despite the technology, the research, and the rubrics, I do believe that there is a deep artistry in good teaching as well. Teachers create curriculum, foster relationships, and build communities. Like an artist, they dare to leave something of themselves in their work everyday. Miranda is clearly a teacher, and we can probably all think back on a teacher or who has worked similar magic in our own lives.

Hamilton and legacy

Art can influence well beyond its original intention. Who could have imagined Hamilton the musical would change the Treasury Department’s decision to replace Hamilton on the $10 bill and instead move them to bump Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill for Harriet Tubman. Who would imagine that 20,000 NYC students are getting to perform their own compositions for the cast of Hamilton as part of their US history curriculum?

Education today is obsessed with measuring impact. We evaluate by lesson, by unit, and by marking period — often feeling a need to quantify the value or value-added nature of our work.

Hamilton speaks to me not about this immediate impact but about the legacy of our work.

At the end of Miranda’s play, after Hamilton’s dies from his gunshot wounds, George Washington reminds the audience that we have no control on how we will be remembered. In the last number, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?” the characters reflect on Hamilton’s legacy.

Sings Burr:

“But when you are gone, who remembers your name?
Who keeps your flame?”

Miranda gives voice to Hamilton’s wife Eliza later, when she sings:

“And when my time is up
Have I done enough?”

How should we remember Hamilton the man? Should Hamilton the musical be measured by box office receipts alone? How does Hamilton the musical impact Hamilton the man’s legacy? And if you want to get real meta: What is the legacy of Ron Chernow, whose 2004 autobiography inspired Miranda to write Hamilton?

I think about these things when reflecting on the legacy of teachers, who have so many interactions — big and small — with so many different people on a daily basis. They work hard to understand their short-term impact on learning, but who knows what pebble will ignite a passion or inspire an insight that causes transformative ripples in the pond far away from that original source. There is no doubt that Alexander Hamilton could never imagined that his story would be told in such a way today.

Thank you to the artists in our classrooms and in our world for this inspiration.

It’s Complicated

OMG, I am a dinosaur.

I still vividly remember the first time I stepped outside to talk on the telephone. I was in high school, and my family had just gotten a 27MHz Sony cordless phone. It felt like magic, extending the metal antenna and walking away from the receiver … farther, farther, until I opened the sliding glass door and stood on our patio. It felt like magic.

Then I shivered. It was cold outside. After a few minutes, the wonder wore off and I came back inside and sat in the chair by the receiver. I’ll do my talking in the warmth of my house, thank you.

: Source: Gawker Media

I remember feeling that cell phones might have some value — especially since they came right after a phase where people wore wireless gizmos that buzzed to tell them somebody wanted to talk to them. Carrying the phone itself seemed like a natural next step to remove the middle man that was the beeper.

For many years, I failed to get the point of texting. Email was already established, and I just couldn’t see the value struggling with a phone keypad to send cryptic messages to people when I could just call them.

Of course, it eventually dawned on me that I hated talking on the phone, and that texting could replace most times when I’d need to call somebody.

I share this as a way of introducing an ongoing topic of conversation with parents and teachers everywhere — making sense of the role of social media in our lives.

By this point, we’ve all heard the horror stories. Oversharing. Bullying. Lives forever changed by an inappropriate post or picture. In March, the Cary Academy Upper School hosted two days of conversation with Dr. Yalda Uhls on “Avoiding the Pitfalls of Social Media.” Dr. Uhls works with Common Sense media and is the author of Media Moms and Digital Dads: Parenting in the Digital Age.

The first step in this journey is to understand how technology and social media are impacting communication. Dr. Uhls summarized research that tells us that girls today use text messaging and that boys use video games as primary mechanisms for communication. The 2015 Pew Research study indicates 76% of teens use some form of social media regularly (71% Facebook, 52% Instagram, 41% Snapchat). Teens believe that technology not only broadens their social networks but it is an important platform for communicating with close friends. Pew research tell us:

49% of teens say text messaging (including on messaging apps) is their first choice of platform for communicating with their closest friend.
20% say social media is their first-choice communication tool when talking with their closest friend.
13% say phone calls are the method they would choose first to talk with their closest friend.

Despite what we might believe, teens do recognize the pitfalls and dangers of social media as well. Also from Pew:

88% of teen social media users believe people share too much information.
68% have experienced drama among their friends on social media.
53% have seen people posting about events to which they were not invited.
21% report feeling worse about their own life because of what they see from other friends on social media.

Importantly, 68% report getting support from friends via social media during rough times.

As parents, our most important task is to be a good social media role model and to form relationships that can keep the lines of communication open with our children. We may have a need early in the social lives of our children to exercise tight oversight — through limiting access, sharing passwords, or filtering content. As our children mature, Dr. Uhls urged parents to turn the keys over to our teens and substitute communication for control. Our kids need to learn how to exercise judgement and having a non-judgemental, trusting relationship with their parents will make it more likely they would turn to us should trouble happen.

Interestingly, if parents are worried about kids oversharing on social media, students also report concerns about what their parents share about kids on social media. Wearing grandma’s gift sweater to dinner was the right thing to do, but it was not an image meant to be shared with the world!

No matter how much long for the pre-iPhone days, we are not going to be able to “scare” kids off these platforms. Social media is woven into the fabric of our communications. Danah Boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens spent significant time researching and talking with teens about their social media use, and she believes that while the issues bear attention, concerns are often overblown.

At Cary Academy, we support our students growth and development through regular advisory programming regarding technology, social media, responsibility, and decision making.

In 6th grade students learn about digital housekeeping, digital etiquette, and cyber permanence. Parents of 6th grade students are invited to attend a parent coffee on Parenting and Social Media.
In 7th grade, students study the brain and technology and consider the concept of a healthy digital diet.
In 8th grade students look at social power both on- and off-line. In one activity students analyze a fictional case of inappropriate use of social media and consider a framework for healthy decision-making. In addition, Drs. Matt Ezzell and Millie Maxwell speak to the 7th and 8th grade students on being wise consumers of media.
In 9th grade, advisors run activities on media messages and how they affect the brain. The students and adults also address the issues of conflict resolution, looking at personal values and communications skills.
In 10th grade, student focus on how to act as agents of positive change in all aspects of their lives.
Conversations about social media, digital footprints and the power of networking take place throughout the junior and senior years.

So it is time for this dinosaur to get back at it. I’m proud to report that I’ve found a good use for Twitter (snow days, anyone) — although I’m still struggling to understand Snapchat.

The Right College Fit

The data is pretty interesting.

There are a lot of ways you might measure school performance. When assessing a school parents will often ask about outcomes, and they often use college admissions as a proxy for overall school strength. While we proudly collect and publish a list of college acceptances and matriculations, we shy away from pointing to any names on that list as evidence of the success of our program. There are just too many factors that go into any individual student’s acceptance and matriculation at a college or university. We believe that each student must find the right fit, and that there are many wonderful options.

However, there may be value to stepping back and looking at a broader data set. For my Cary Academy “State of the School” presentation, I often share the percentage of our students who are accepted at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill as a proxy for program strength. We use UNC-CH because of the large number of CA students who apply and because we can access a rich set of benchmark data from the state of North Carolina called Freshman Measures.

Here is the most recent complete data set that we have:

admits

If you dig deeper, you learn that Cary Academy students were more likely to enter into an honors program or take an honors English or an advanced level math class. More recent acceptance rates have been even higher, but benchmark data has not yet been released.

Digging Deeper

The data is pretty interesting, and as good data can, it made me want to know more.

Members of the CA Class of 2012 are now seniors and ready to graduate. After sharing the data with employees and parents, I couldn’t help but feel that there was more of a story to tell. I decided to embark on a little action research.

I first collected all the information I could about these 26 students: their test scores when they applied to come to Cary Academy, the grades of every course they took while they were here, and their standardized test scores when they applied to Chapel Hill.

The picture that emerged showed students with a broad range of academic abilities and interests were successfully served at CA. While the average reading score when they applied to Cary Academy was at the 76th percentile (of independent school norms), the range was broad. One student entered CA at the 25th percentile, another at the 99th percentile.

I chose to narrow my look at course selection to the junior year, where students at CA first take advanced level classes that might count for college credit. This cohort took a wide range of course before their acceptance and matriculation to Chapel Hill. While roughly 70% took one advanced science class, there was no particular path or course that seemed to dominate. Roughly 65% took a version of advanced calculus. Slightly more took an advanced world language. For the most part, students did well in these courses, but Bs were also in the mix. Standardized tests scores also varied.

Against a backdrop of anxiety over the “recipe” for college admissions success, the data tells me there are any number of paths that one could take through Cary Academy to land happily in college. Of course, students need to take a challenging academic program and do well, but beyond that there was plenty of flexibility for students to craft a path that fits them best. This is as it should be.

After my paper chase, I decided it was time to meet some of these folks. I invited them to lunch (what college senior will turn down a free meal), and took three trips to Chapel Hill to hear their stories. Here is what I learned:

Preparation

The students universally told me they were prepared for the academic rigors of Chapel Hill. Importantly, they felt prepared for both the familiar and unfamiliar. They knew how to write and how to think. When some professors told them they couldn’t use their laptops in class, the knew how to adjust and take notes by hand. They adapted, some quicker than others, to courses where assessments were infrequent and they need to study for big, make-or-break exams. Most referenced a teacher at Cary Academy who had a lasting academic or personal impact, some remembering even as far back as the 6th grade.

Adjustments

When asked about their biggest adjustments, our graduates talked about finding a home within the wider world of a big school like Chapel Hill. Academics were the reason they were in school, they said, but classes alone don’t make a community. Once they found their tribes — in the arts, through sports, or through service — they started to feel at home.

Success

The overall key for success in college, they said, was taking ownership over the experience. As our Upper School Principal Heather Clarkson likes to say: Own Your Learning. Cary Academy gave them the experiences and skills necessary for success, but our nurturing environment had plenty of built-in safety nets. In a bigger environment like Chapel Hill, our graduates needed to be proactive about just about everything: their housing, their course selection, their activities.

The Future

Future plans for the CA Class of 2012/UNC-CH Class of 2016 varied. Some are applying to graduate school, others full-time work or internships. I met those seeking to go into medical research or medical school. Interestingly, some future doctors took advanced science courses at CA, others did not. Some were looking to work overseas, and they pointed to the CA exchange programs as being a transformative experience in shaping their worldview. Others were headed into the work world, looking at roles as varied as communications and finance.

Overall, I am pleased to report that the graduates I met were thriving. They looked back fondly on their days at CA and were hopeful about their futures. Based on my time with them, I’m hopeful for the future for all of us.

Global Social Entrepreneurs

Cary Academy students have many opportunities to develop leadership skills, in academic and authentic settings. In addition to traditional roles as activity and athletic leaders, our students have created and led courses for Discovery Term and developed and nurtured many community service and outreach projects.

In the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to travel with a group of students to Mumbai, India to participate in the Global Social Entrepreneurs Summit (GSES) hosted by the American School of Bombay. Over four days, our students joined others from India, Turkey, South Africa, Jordan, and Bangladesh to explore and tackle global problems from their unique perspectives.

gses

This is not the first time a group of CA students have participated in a project-based, global leadership conference. For several years, CA students have attended in the Student Global Leadership Institute, hosted by Punahou school in Hawaii. During two weeks over the summer, SGLI students work with peers from their own schools to develop projects that they can then implement when they return to their home campuses. Students have regularly returned from this experienced inspired and with a new appreciation for their peers from around the world.

The Mumbai conference partnered students from other schools and had them work through a design thinking protocol to solve social problems. Students had their thinking sparked the first morning, when they toured the Dharavi slum and learned about the lives of the poorest in Mumbai and the thriving social and economic subsystems of the slums. From there, they broke into groups and worked with outside experts on how convert interest to impact. In the evenings, our students had home stays with students from ASB, learning more about how their peers lived within one of the largest cities in the world.

“GSES was an incredible experience,” said one CA student. “I loved everything about it, from the homestays to the conference to the guest speakers. I made close connections to peers from around the world that I plan on keeping in contact with for the rest of my high school experience. The instruction was effective, and our group activities promoted teamwork, innovation, and critical thinking. Overall, GSES was a fantastic leadership opportunity that I won’t forget.”

Within the constraints of time, students developed some very interesting concepts and then presented them to their peers, outside judges, and the more than 300 teachers that were at the school for a concurrent educational conference. Examples of their projects included:

using social media to connect rural girls in India with role models,
developing the prototype of a low-cost DIY water-filtration system,
creating a social network of home-stay opportunities to extend existing social tourism networks within Dharavi,
and developing a process and app to log and map outbreaks of malaria and dengue, thus driving economic activity away from trouble areas and incentivizing governmental agencies to act on infrastructure problems.

In the end, two of our teams were presented with the “Most Promising Social Enterprise” award.

After the conference, we extended our time in India to visit Avasara Academy, a new leadership school serving poor girls of promise in the city of Pune. The school was a natural connection with the GSES, as it embodied the “ideas to impact” ethos of the conference. At the campus, our students heard about the economic landscape of India and particular issues facing women. They also were treated to a mini-workshop hosted by four of the seventh- and eighth-grade girls that currently attend the school. Prior to the Avasara visit, the group had a chance to tour a local municipal school and meet with its principal.

“The entire experience of visiting Dharavi to hearing other student’s ideas to seeing the recently developed school of Avasara was incredibly inspiring,” said another CA student. “At the conference we had the opportunity to hear about various social enterprises that worked to make real changes in the world, and the leadership school in Pune was another example of this.”

Students were invited to the GSES based on their leadership roles within the CA S.T.E.P. club, which has developed and hosted educational conferences on campus the past two years, or their enrollment in the CA Global Leadership course, which is a blended course that involves students in Argentina, Brazil, India, South Carolina, and Florida. The American School of Bombay is a participating school in the Global Leadership project.

Based on the positive experiences from this first group of students, we expect that Cary Academy will continue with the GSES and look for new ways for students to connect with peers around the world.

FutureWork

This particular student’s first year HS schedule was familiar: English, algebra and geometry, physics, ancient and medieval history, and Latin. I might have counseled towards a language such as Spanish or Chinese, but otherwise it was a pretty unremarkable.

Except that it was pretty remarkable.

This wasn’t a schedule from one of my students; it was a schedule from a student in 1912. I wasn’t building a plan for the current school year, I was preparing a presentation for my previous school’s Founders’ Day assembly. Schools today are under remarkable pressure to adapt for the future, and I was holding a piece of paper that dramatically illustrated our lack of change.

How can this be, though? Our country has been in an “educational crisis” for all 23 years I’ve been in the field — non-stop, in fact, since the 1983 publication of “A Nation at Risk.” This covers the career of just about every educator working today.

No wonder morale in the teaching profession is at an all time low. Decades of non-stop, top-down initiatives will do that to folks. As school leaders, we need to stop believing that we will find the magic initiative that will bring us some sense of normalcy.

Reform is the new (old) norm.

A Culture of Continual Momentum
Instead, we need to tune our school’s cultures to embrace this reality. I am all for developing programs and measuring outputs, but I believe that the most important thing we can do for our organizations is create a culture that embraces continual momentum.

(Notice that I did not use the phrase “continual improvement.” This implies that each step will take us forward along a known path, which paralyzes educators and mocks what we tell students but don’t really mean: We learn through failure and need to prepare students for a future that is not wholly understood.)

At this year’s IEI Emerging Issues Forum “FutureWork,” authors from the Institute for the Future shared a report on 10 skills graduates today need: sense-making; social intelligence; novel and adaptive thinking; cross-cultural competence; computational thinking; new media literacy; transdisciplinarity (literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines); design mindset; cognitive load management; and virtual collaboration

Aligning around Innovation
There is nothing static about this list, and an organization that thinks it can deploy a singular “roadmap” will continue to spin its wheels. This is a mindset thing, and school culture is the engine. At Cary Academy, we’ve been focusing on this since our founding in 1996, with a mission that puts discovery, innovation, and collaboration front and center. Our latest strategic plan re-commits our focus to an innovative school culture at the core of everything we do. We are organizing across the school around three key aspects of innovation: sustaining, disrupting, and diffusing.

It is significant that the first goal in our plan is to embrace the “institutional flexibility” necessary to create modern learning environments. We too often find ourselves advocating for a growth mindset for our students but fail to embrace this as an institution. Schools need to be very deliberate about modeling the same type of thinking we expect from our students. Your culture is at odds with your goals in a “do as I say, not as I do” environment.

Our second strategic goal hits hard at what we know about deep learning — that it is meaningful and authentic. This part of our plan was built from our “We Believe” statements about learning, which were informed by compelling research from the OECD into what makes an innovative learning environment. The key learnings for this discussion are to:

Put learners at the center and encourage engagement.
See learning as social and collaborative.
Understand that emotions are integral to learning and learners’ motivations matter.
Recognize individual differences.
Build horizontal connections across activities and subjects, in- and out-of-school.

Among other things, achieving the goals of our strategic plan will lead us to new approaches for curriculum and employee development, new uses for instructional technology that disrupt the pace, path, place and time of learning, interdisciplinary and international programs that connect students in meaningful ways to their wider world, the creation of an research and development team that can nurture, test, and refine promising ideas, and the remodeling our physical spaces to support these new dynamic learning environments and our culture of collaboration.

Of course, any one of the these approaches could likely to be found in another school’s strategic plan. It is the collective force of these efforts that will reinforce our shared values and establish a future-forwards mindset. We believe a strong, diverse, and inclusive organizational culture is a force multiplier for our individual and collective growth.

The R&D behind Blended Learning

We’ve got a guest blogger for this month’s newsletter entry. Below is an article written for publication by Cary Academy’s Dean of Faculty Martina Greene. She was asked to contribute a chapter to the recent Future Forwards book from the American School of Bombay’s Research and Development Team. This piece will provide insight into the development of Cary Academy’s blended learning courses, and it is also serving as a template for future R&D projects at CA. This fall, our Director of Technology and Innovation Karen McKenzie has launched our own R&D team as part of the CA Strategic Plan.

Mike Ehrhardt,
Head of School

Blazing the Trail for Blended Learning:
The Cary Academy Blended Learning Development Team

by Martina Greene, CA Dean of Faculty

The blended learning model is rich with potential to transform teaching and learning, but how does a school prepare faculty to design and implement blended courses and assess the impact of these courses on students? At Cary Academy, we decided to take a collaborative approach to the process by creating and funding a Blended Learning Development Team. This chapter will describe how we engaged this faculty cohort in a year-long process of professional learning, course development and evaluation that resulted in the successful implementation of seven new blended learning courses in our Upper School.

From an individual to an organizational approach
Our first venture into blended learning came in 2011, when Cary Academy launched a summer grant program to support individual faculty members wanting to experiment with the blended format. While the grant program did result in the design and implementation of a couple of blended courses, it did not generate any broader interest in or momentum toward a larger scale implementation of the blended format at our school. In 2014, we decided to change tack, moving away from the isolated efforts brought forth by our individual grant program to a clearly-defined organizational effort rooted in the work of a collaborative group. The result was the launch of the Blended Learning Development Team.

Team objectives

The Blended Learning Development Team was established with three major objectives:

To design and implement a slate of high quality blended courses rooted in research-based promising practices and reflecting the mission of the school.
To identify core design principles for blended learning emerging from the implementation and evaluation of these courses.
To contribute to the creation of an online training course to support future blended course development.

Importantly, we did not select a specific model of blended learning at the outset for all team members to adopt. We instead gave team members the flexibility to experiment with a variety of blended structures and strategies, as long as those experiments were consistent with the following four defining aims of blended learning[1]:

A substantial proportion of the learning in the course (30-79%) takes place outside of the physical classroom in an online learning environment.
The face-to-face and online components of the course are tightly connected in an online platform to provide an integrated learning experience.
Learners experience increased control over the time, place, path and/or pace of their learning.
Learners experience enhanced opportunities for engagement with teacher, with peers, with content and with outside resources.

Choosing the courses to be developed
Teachers interested in becoming a part of the Blended Learning Development Team were invited to submit proposals describing how they hoped to use blended structures and strategies to better meet the needs of students in a given course. Seven proposals from a variety of content areas were ultimately accepted, each with a specific area of focus for leveraging the blended format:

Course	Focus
Calculus I and II (Advanced)	Using the blended format to support accelerated learning for talented and highly-motivated students.
Creative Writing	Using the blended format to enhance coaching and peer feedback in support of individual projects.
Environmental Science (Advanced)	Using the blended format to support student-directed project-based learning.
Great Books (Advanced)	Using the blended format to expand participation in discussions and to improve the quality of contributions to discussions.
Global Leadership	Using the blended format to facilitate team teaching and student collaboration involving multiple schools.
Music Theory (Advanced)	Using the blended format to give students choice in pathway and to support the creative use of music-specific technology tools.
Physics	Using the blended format to enable students to work at their own pace toward mastery of key concepts.

By creating a vehicle for pursuing these seven individual experiments within a team setting, we were able to generate an ongoing flow of ideas from which all members of the team could draw. In so doing, we were able to bring much-needed synergy to our school’s blended learning initiative.

Building the team

The Blended Learning Development Team began its work in June 2014 with a two-week program of collaborative course development centered on the creation and critique of a prototype module for each course. Cary Academy partnered with the Virtual High School Collaborative to create a set of training materials to support team members in the development of the online infrastructure for their courses. These materials addressed a variety of topics, including organization and learner support features, facilitation of online discussions, strategies for promoting online collaboration, and use of the virtual space for formative evaluation and feedback. We also arranged for faculty from North Carolina State University College of Education, the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, the Virtual High School Collaborative, and the North Carolina Virtual Public High School to help review the course modules created. Team members then spent the remainder of the summer using their vetted prototype units as models for building out the rest of their courses. The team’s work continued during the academic year with biweekly meetings focused on idea sharing and problem solving, review of student feedback, group tuning of course modules, and identification of emerging design principles and best practices.

Course evaluation model
Course evaluation was from the beginning a key component of the vision for the Blended Learning Development Team. To that end, Cary Academy partnered with two research scholars from the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation to help us assess the impact of our blended courses upon student learning through development and implementation of a formal course review protocol. The researchers began by working with the team to develop a set of indicators for effective blended learning informed by a review of relevant literature, existing standards for blended and online learning, and the specific goals of team members. From there, the researchers helped the team create two student surveys, one given at the beginning of the year to capture student perceptions of blended learning entering into the courses, and one more in-depth survey toward the end of the year to capture student perceptions of their experiences in the blended courses. Our research partners also conducted a mid-year student focus group with a mix of students from all seven courses to collect feedback and recommendations for improving various elements of the courses. To round out the process, the researchers conducted two teacher interviews, one at the beginning of the year to register the teacher’s initial approach to course development, and a second interview at mid-year to document changes the teacher made to the course and to capture emerging best practices from the teacher’s perspective.
General outcomes
The table below shows some of the general outcomes of our blended learning initiative captured in survey data collected from the 139 students enrolled in blended courses in 2014-15:

blendedchart1

Students clearly felt that the blended format gave them greater control over the time and place of their learning, with 88% of students reporting that their blended course was either better or much better in that regard. Students also felt that they had greater opportunities to interact and collaborate with peers in the blended format, with two-thirds of students reporting improvement over a traditional course. In addition, the majority of students indicated that they experienced greater flexibility to explore their own areas of interest and greater choice in how they demonstrated their learning. Nearly half the students saw improvement in opportunities to interact with the teacher as well, but it should be noted that this perception varied significantly from course to course and even within some of the courses. When it came to opportunities to interact with experts outside of the Cary Academy community, however, 70% of students found no improvement with the blended format. Those students who did report improvement in that area were mostly in the Global Leadership and Advanced Environmental Science courses.

The power of the digital platform
The qualitative data we collected from teachers and students also provided a number of interesting insights into the effectiveness of our blended learning initiative, starting with the power of the electronic infrastructure that team members worked so hard to design for their courses during the summer institute. As expected, in the absence of daily face-to-face contact with the teacher or with fellow students, the digital platform became the nexus for information-sharing and management of the learning process. Students reported much greater use of communication features like announcements, private messages, chat and discussion boards in their blended courses than in traditional courses operating with the same learning management system. Perhaps even more significantly, the digital platform also served to demystify the blended format for our community by capturing the learning that took place in our blended courses in highly visible ways. In each of our blended courses, one can easily see the engagement of the students with the subject matter, the individual and collaborative work produced by students in the effort to attain mastery, and the feedback sought and given—all preserved within the digital learning space. We hope that the success of our Blended Learning Development Team in leveraging the tools within our learning management system to facilitate meaningful communication and collaboration and to document student learning will inspire fuller utilization of the system’s features in our traditional courses, as well.

A positive shift in student culture
Conversations with teachers and students also revealed an important shift in student culture arising from our blended learning courses. The teacher group in particular reported that students no longer seemed to view face-to-face class periods in the physical classroom as teacher-controlled time and space. As the students became accustomed to taking more responsibility for their own learning outside of the physical classroom environment, they started assuming more responsibility for the learning within the physical classroom, too. For example, rather than arriving in class and waiting for the teacher to introduce the lesson plan for the day, the students began coming to class and talking to the teacher about what they thought would be the best way to utilize the class meeting time. We are eager to see whether this increased sense of ownership among students of their learning time will carry over to other classes, even those that are not blended.

Fostering more thoughtful discussion
Blended course teachers noticed a similar trend toward greater student responsibility in class discussions. The blended format necessarily shifts a substantial amount of discussion from the face-to-face classroom environment to the virtual environment. One of the major benefits of an online discussion forum is that it captures a written record of a discussion, thus providing teachers with a means to engage students in some meta-analysis of what makes a good discussion and how they can contribute effectively to discussions. Several of our blended learning teachers worked with students to create detailed rubrics to guide student contributions to online discussions and help students evaluate their contributions. As students internalized the techniques of effective discussion in the online forum, teachers noted improvement in the quality of participation in face-to-face discussions as well. We believe that this is another success stemming from our blended learning initiative that will positively impact student performance in all class settings.

Students as co-creators of course content
The value of online discussion forums within the blended model was by no means limited to helping students improve their contributions to class conversations. Teachers also reported using discussion boards in combination with other social media tools to engage students in defining the direction of the course. Our environmental science teacher, for example, created a system for “crowdsourcing” course content by soliciting ideas from students through news discussion threads, green tweets, and student-generated mini-lessons posted to a blog. Each student in the course contributed to a weekly online discussion group by starting a discussion thread for an environmental news story that piqued his or her interest and by responding to at least one other thread started by someone else in the group. Students were also asked to scour Twitter for what they considered to be the most intriguing tweets on the environment and to retweet at least one of those tweets each week to the class. Last but not least, students were expected to work in groups to develop short lessons on environmental topics of interest, which were posted to a blog with opportunities for peers to comment. The discussion threads, tweets, and mini-lessons that resonated most with members of the class then became the topics for more in-depth exploration by the entire class through labs and project work. Evidence of the success of this effort to give students greater voice in the direction of their learning can be seen in the student survey data for this specific course. 73% of students in environmental science reported better or much better flexibility to explore their own areas of interest, 86% of students reported better or much better choice in how they applied their learning, and 93% of students reported better or much better connection to real world problems or contexts. These results were well above the already noteworthy outcomes in these areas for our blended courses across the board.

The value of self-paced learning
While all of our blended courses aimed to give students greater control over the time, place, path and pace of their learning, one course in particular stood out in providing students with a self-paced, mastery-based learning experience. The physics teacher used the Meteor platform to build a custom application called OpenLab to support student-driven learning rooted in a modeling approach. The OpenLab application enabled students to schedule and track themselves at their own pace through the collaborative and cyclical process of developing and deploying their models, while at the same time freeing the teacher to work with individuals or small groups to address specific learning needs as they arose. The course teacher reported that students in the blended physics course with OpenLab showed significant improvement in the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K), moving from 28% to 75% when most high school students average only 40% upon completing an introductory physics course. This also marked the first time at Cary Academy that every student in the general physics course showed improvement. Although there is still much to be done to streamline and improve the OpenLab application, the initial results on an objective and standard assessment suggest that the increased student control over the pace of learning made possible by the blended format with OpenLab led to better mastery of core physics concepts. These results persuaded at least two other members of the Blended Learning Development Team to consider integrating the OpenLab application into their own blended courses as part of their own standards-based approach to teaching.

Next steps
Given the success of the Blended Learning Development Team in its first year, we decided to keep the team in place for a second year, with a focus on fine-tuning the courses created in year one based upon the results of the course evaluation data. We also invited faculty to submit additional proposals for blended courses to bring the total number of blended offerings to ten. Significantly, each of the new courses will include a focus on creating opportunities for students to interact with experts outside the Cary Academy community, an aspect of blended learning that we felt was not fully explored in our first year:

Course	Focus
Architecture	Using the blended format to create opportunities for students to apply their learning to real-world projects.
Calculus III (Advanced)	Using the blended format to supplement a university-based course.
Human Anatomy and Physiology	Using the blended format to facilitate the integration of outside experts and resources.

Conclusion
The courses created and implemented by members of the Blended Learning Development Team have proven to be vivid examples of the potential of the blended model to transform teaching and learning. The success and popularity of these classes has also generated the momentum we were seeking toward a larger scale implementation of the blended format. We expect blended learning to evolve from its current status as an experimental course structure to eventually become the norm for the creative and effective use of technology to enhance teaching and learning at our school. The Blended Learning Development Team has certainly helped us to blaze the trail in that direction.

[1] See Heather Staker and Michael B. Horn, Classifying K-12 Blended Learning (Innosight Institute, 2012).

State of the School

At the recent PTAA annual meeting, I shared some information regarding the State of the School. As has been our practice, we use this time to share highlights from the past year and look towards the future.

Any such presentation regarding Cary Academy must begin with the most important item: Our students continue excel inside and outside of the classroom. They are taking full advantage of the rich learning environment at CA through participation in extracurricular activities, athletics, and service projects. As we know from our own experiences, these opportunities allow for real-life skill development that serve as an essential complement to the good work happening in our classrooms.

The last year had many highlights:

A number of our Science Olympiad students placed in the top 10 in their respective events at the state tournament last April. Our mathematicians continued to represent themselves and CA well in state competitions at all levels. Our Varsity robotics program was profiled in the News and Observer this fall. Our MS Lego robotics had an extremely good showing in competition and just missed qualifying for the state tournament this December. Our JV FIRST Tech Challenge team qualified for the state tournament to be held later this winter. Finally, this fall, CA introduced a new researched-based science competition, sending a team to the USA Young Physics Tournament in Virginia at the end of January.
In 2014-2015, our athletic teams had their second best collective year ever, placing 4th (out of 21 schools) for the top overall program award — the Wells Fargo Cup — which was helped by state championships in boys swimming and boys tennis. This was on the heels of our best year at the state level in 2013-2014, where we bested all our Triangle rivals. This fall, our boys and girls Cross Country teams won state championships, and in between more teams than can easily be listed here took home TISAC championships and runners-up trophies at the state tournament. At the end of the fall season, Cary Academy sat in 5th place in the Wells Fargo cup.

Two highly successful theatrical productions held in our Black Box Theater, in the fall it was Metamorphoses for the US and winter A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the MS. The US also held its first joint performing arts presentation at Meymandi Concert Hall between the orchestra, band, and chorus.
On November 6th, 2016 we held a Celebration of Creativity and Innovation as part of our regular Grandparents Day. Students presented in the morning, a Speaker Series (featuring students and alumni guests as well) took place midday, and a series of hands-on art, athletic, music, and dance opportunities were available in the afternoon.
Students continue to excel in their commitment to the wider community, serving others individually, in clubs, and by grade level. Cary Academy employees held their second all-employee service day this fall, working with Stop Hunger Now. Among many other grade-level activities, the full community participated in our Community Service Day in honor of MLK by sorting coats for at the Salvation Army this January.
Cary Academy continued to play host to many groups coming from schools around the world, and this fall we hosted Dr. Peggy McIntosh, who spoke on the topic of diversity and inclusion to educators from around the state. For the second year in a row, CA students hosted their own educational conference, this time focusing on the “ideal educational program” with students from around the Triangle.

As an institution, Cary Academy continues to thrive. We measure the health of the organization in several ways:

Interest in what we offer. Our applications remain at the top-end of recent averages, and last year 88% of students offered a place at the school enrolled — well above peer school benchmarks. Our attrition rate last year was a remarkably small 3%.

Inclusive in our environment. Overall, students of color make up 32% of our enrollment and faculty of color are at 22%, again exceeding our peer school benchmark group.

Value for your tuition dollar. Cary Academy is debt free and a generous endowment supports 85% of our financial aid budget, allowing us to keep our tuition below our peer schools and allocate more of those dollars to support top-rate faculty and innovative programs.

Strong program performance indicators. This year, 89% of parents and past parents told us that they had a positive (22%) or very positive (67%) view of the school. Parents also are showing their support by making CA a top priority in their philanthropic giving. The Cary Academy Annual Fund has seen a remarkable 68% increase in the last two years, and this year’s effort will again set a new record. A huge thank you to the parent chairs the last three years: Greg and Liz Sanchez, John and Christa McElveen, and Jeff and Jill Wilson.
Student outcomes, as measured by standardized test scores, AP exams, and college admissions remain remarkably strong. We are particularly proud of our acceptance rates at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In the past two years, CA has also had three alumni recognized by Forbes in their “30 under 30” publication — Philip DeSimone (‘07), Travis May (‘05), and Uzma Rawn (‘02).

A quick note on a few major initiatives:

Strategic Plan. We have begun the implementation of our newly approved strategic plan. A new website has debuted at http://blogs.caryacademy.org/CA2020. Initiatives for this year include:

establishing a shared language for innovation through the use of design thinking,
forming a cross-divisional schedule study team,
instituting a curriculum review cycle, starting with math, science, and health,
launching a Research and Development team,
auditing our external communications,
connecting with the internal and external communities through our creativity and innovation showcase; STEP Conference; Peggy McIntosh presentation,
conducting a successful feasibility study to assess financial support with the community for our strategic plan and our master facilities plans.

New student information system implementation. We have had started rollout of Veracross, which replaces our old system by Blackbaud and connects demographic, academic, and business functions.
We continue to move forward with the work identified by our master facilities planning process. We updated classroom furniture in 11 rooms this summer. We are planning a major update of our main chiller unit, as part of needed HVAC work. This summer, we expect to conduct a pilot renovation in the top floor of the US building, to test some new concepts for offices, classrooms, and collaboration spaces.

On a personal note, I am in the fortunate position of working regularly with employees, students, parents, alumni, and past parents. All I can say is: Wow. Those interactions never fail to leave me impressed and humbled. Cary Academy is a special place, and it is an honor to play my part in its wonderful story.