State of the School: Mission, Mattering, and Meaningful Growth

You’re listening to A View from the Hilltop, a St. Luke’s Episcopal School podcast.

Hello, St. Luke’s families. I hope the first few weeks of school have been a great start for you and most importantly, for your children. There is something special about the beginning of a school year. No matter how many times you experience it, there is an energy that comes with seeing students walk back through the doors, reconnect with friends and teachers, and begin settling into the rhythms of another year.

I’ve been doing this work for more than three decades, and I still get excited about the first day of school. There are still a few jitters. There is still that anticipation the night before, and there is still nothing quite like seeing a school come back to life after the summer. And as I have walked around campus during these opening weeks, I have felt something particularly good at St. Luke’s. There is energy, certainly, but there’s also a sense of confidence and purpose. Our teachers are excited. Our students are engaged. We have welcomed many new students and families into our community. Our classrooms are full of activity. Our athletic teams are practicing and competing. Chapel has brought us back together each day, and you can feel that familiar sense of community that makes St. Luke’s such a special place. But there is something else happening here as well. St. Luke’s is changing. We are growing. We are adding programs. We are adding people. We are asking important questions about teaching and learning. We are thinking intentionally about the student experience from early childhood all the way through eighth grade.

And as exciting as all of that is, growth creates an important responsibility. We have to make sure that as St. Luke’s changes, we become more St. Luke’s, not less. And that is really what I want to talk about today. When I spoke with our faculty and staff at the beginning of school, I framed this year around three ideas: mission, mattering, and meaningful growth.

Those three ideas are deeply connected, and I think they provide a good lens for understanding where St. Luke’s is today, what you will see happening during the school year, and where we are headed next. Let me start with mission. Our mission says that St. Luke’s Episcopal School is a Christian community dedicated to academic and personal excellence, lifelong learning, and service to others.

Those aren’t simply words that belong on our website or in our handbook. They tell us why we exist. And as St. Luke’s grows, our mission has to remain our anchor. I think that is particularly important right now because growth can be seductive for schools. More students sound good. More programs sound good.

More activities, more buildings, more opportunities. All of those things can be positive, but none of them automatically make a school better. Growth for the sake of growth isn’t particularly interesting to me. Becoming a bigger school isn’t necessarily an accomplishment. The question I keep coming back to is, are we becoming a better St.Luke’s? Are we becoming more faithful to our mission? Are we providing a stronger academic experience? Are we developing better programs? Are we building deeper relationships? Are our teachers getting the support they need to do their very best work? And ultimately, are our students becoming more confident, more curious, more compassionate, more capable, and more prepared for what comes next?

That’s the kind of growth that matters. And before talking about where we are going, I think it is worth recognizing just how much happened last year. Academically, we continue to expand the ways our students learn and demonstrate their learning. Our declamation program continued to evolve beyond memorization and recitation.

In Lower School, students connected declamations to their own Texas origin stories, fairy tales, change makers, and Greek poetry. In Middle School, our declamations became increasingly connected to coursework in areas such as information literacy, world religion, service, and United States history. That distinction is important.

Public speaking remains an essential part of the St. Luke’s experience. But now students aren’t simply standing in front of an audience and demonstrating that they can memorize something. They are researching, they are thinking, they are making connections, they are interpreting, they are writing, and then they are learning to communicate those ideas confidently in front of other people.

Those are skills that will serve our students long after they leave St. Luke’s. Our Innovation Lab also continued to develop as a place designed around children’s ideas, curiosity, and creativity. And our students experience learning well beyond the classrooms through distinctive grade level trips and experiential learning opportunities.

Those experiences matter. Some of the most per- powerful learning a child does doesn’t happen while sitting at a desk. It happens when they have to solve a problem with someone else, when they are somewhere unfamiliar, when they have to speak in front of a group, when they make something that doesn’t work for the first time, when they l- have to lead and when they have to follow, or when a teacher gives them just enough support to discover that they are capable of doing something they didn’t think they could do.

We also had an extraordinary year in athletics. A banner year, quite literally. A record number of students participated in our lower school sports program, which starts in first grade. We had a league-winning fifth-grade girls basketball team and an undefeated sixth-grade volleyball team. But most importantly, all of our student-athletes competed at a high level, experienced success, learned how to be teammates, and represented St. Luke’s incredibly well. And no review of last year would be without the amazing production of Lion King Jr. by our entire middle school. Yes, every middle school student had a part in the creation of this production. From making the set, making props, to acting and singing on stage, to the lights, sound, and stage management.

If a community event can not only bring out hundreds of people but make them all energized in the month of May in a school, you know it was a success. I wish I could bottle the good feelings around this production. It was truly a highlight of my career in schools to witness this extraordinary production of our middle school students and teachers last May.

All of that is part of education because the St. Luke’s education has never been defined simply by what happens behind a desk. We want children to discover what they are good at. We want them to discover what they love. We want them to develop confidence to try something new. And sometimes we want them to discover that they can do something that they weren’t entirely sure they could do.

This brings me to my second theme of the year: mattering. We think of mattering of how people should experience our mission and the St. Luke’s way. Mattering is something I have thought a great deal about over the past year. We talk frequently in schools about belonging And belonging is incredibly important.

We certainly want every child and every family to feel that they belong at St. Luke’s. But I think mattering goes a little deeper. Belonging says there is a place for me here. Mattering says this place is different because I am here. That is a powerful distinction. Mattering means knowing that your presence makes a difference, that you are noticed, that you are valued, that someone would know if you weren’t there.

And that concept should apply to everyone in our [00:08:00] community: students, teachers, staff, and parents. For our students, mattering means being known well enough that a teacher recognizes when they need encouragement and also when they need to be pushed. It means having adults who know their strengths, their struggles, their personality, and their potential.

It means that when a child has a great day, someone notices, and when a child isn’t quite themselves, someone notices that too. That doesn’t happen accidentally. It happens because of relationships. And one of the great advantages of a school like St. Luke’s is that relationships can remain at the center of the educational experience, and we never want to lose that.

In fact, as we grow, I want us to become more intentional about it. Growth should never mean that children become anonymous. Growth should give us the resources and capacity to know them even better. Mattering also extends to our teachers and staff. If we expect our faculty to create classrooms where children feel known and valued, then we have a responsibility to create a professional culture where our adults feel that way as well.

Our teachers should know that their work matters, their ideas matter, their professional growth matters, and their wellbeing matters. And the relationships they build with children every day are central to who we are as a school And then there are parents. For parents, mattering means partnership. There is one reason we began this year with our parent partnership kickoff meetings.

Those meetings weren’t simply another item on the beginning of school calendar. They were intentional. We want parents and teachers talking with each other before there is a problem to solve. We want you to know one another before the first difficult conversation. Our goal is that by the time we reach out for our first formal parent-teacher conference in October, the relationship between parents and teachers has already been established.

You’ve already met, you’ve already talked about your child, you’ve shared what you know about them. Your child’s teachers begin sharing what they are seeing at school. We have already started building the trust that allows us to work together when things are going wonderfully, and perhaps even more importantly, when something is difficult.

Education works best when school and family see themselves as partners. We aren’t going to agree on everything all the time. In fact, I don’t think a strong partnership requires that. But it does require trust, communication, and assuming good intentions. And it requires the shared understanding that everyone sitting around the table wants the same thing: for that child to thrive.

Which brings me to our third theme: meaningful growth. We are so excited that more families believe in our mission, believe in what is happening at St. Luke’s, and want to be part of this amazing community. That growth is something worth celebrating, and in just a moment, I want to share how significant it has been.

But for us, growth is about more than numbers. As we become larger, our responsibility is to make sure we are also becoming more faithful to our mission, more excellent in what we do, and more relational in the way we know and care for one another. As a result of the work going on here and our focus on mission and mattering, St. Luke’s is growing. Two years ago, our enrollment was two hundred and forty-one students. Today, we have two hundred and ninety-two students. We have seventy-eight students in early childhood, a hundred and thirty-nine in our elementary level, and seventy-five in middle school. Our faculty and staff has grown as well, from forty-nine two years ago to fifty-seven today.

We are seeing record numbers of tours, several grades are full, and interest in St. Luke’s continues to grow. I am proud of those numbers. They represent a tremendous amount of work by a lot of people, but more importantly, they represent trust. Every one of those two hundred and ninety-two students represents a family that has made a significant decision to entrust part of their child’s formation to St. Luke’s, and I don’t take that lightly. And I want to be careful about what we celebrate because the goal isn’t two hundred and ninety-two, the goal isn’t three hundred, and someday when we reach three hundred and twenty, the goal simply won’t be three hundred and twenty either. Enrollment is an indicator of the confidence families have in St. Luke’s. Healthy enrollment gives us resources. It allows us to build programs. It allows us to hire outstanding educators. It allows us to provide more opportunities for children. But enrollment itself isn’t the mission. The real question is: What do we do with that growth? And I believe you can see the answer to that question in some of the investments we are making this year.

One of the most significant additional investments is the addition of Dr. Chad Knessick as our Chief Academic Officer, and I want to spend a little time explaining why this position matters. Schools can have outstanding individual teachers and still lack coherence from one grade to the next. Our goal is not simply to have a collection of excellent classrooms.

Our goal is to create an excellent pre-K through eighth-grade educational journey. That means understanding where a child begins, where we want them to be when they graduate from St. Luke’s, and then being intentional about everything that happens in between. Chad’s work is about helping us do exactly that.

He is working to strengthen curriculum alignment so that what happens in one grade intentionally prepares students for the next. He is supporting teaching practices that encourage curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, student agency, and meaningful learning. And importantly, he is investing in our teachers through coaching, professional learning, and collaboration.

When we talk about academic excellence at St. Luke’s, we aren’t talking simply about making school harder. Harder isn’t necessarily better. More homework doesn’t automatically mean more rigor. More tests don’t automatically mean more learning. We are talking about making learning deeper, more intentional, more coherent, and challenging.

We want students to have strong foundational skills. We want them to acquire knowledge. But then we also want them to do something with that knowledge. We want them to ask good questions, solve problems, communicate ideas, make connections, create, and think independently. That’s the academic experience we are continuing to build.

We are also investing in our leadership and programming in early childhood. Our early childhood program has experienced significant growth, and as that division grows, our leadership capacity needs to grow with it. Sari Weller is taking on the role of early years innovation coordinator. Her work will strengthen collaboration among teachers, expand hands-on learning through science, STEM field trips, and the innovation lab.

She’ll grow outdoor and nature-based learning and support professional development specifically focused on how young children learn. And I think this is another good example of meaningful growth. We aren’t simply saying we have more early childhood students. We’re asking, because we have grown, how can their experience become even better?

More students should lead to more capacity, more expertise, more opportunities, and a stronger experience for children We have designate- we have a designated science teacher with a STEM focus, allowing for more hands-on science experiences, while also giving classroom teachers greater opportunity to focus on core areas of instruction.

We are expanding targeted math support and enrichment so that we can better meet children where they are. Students who need additional support should receive it, and students who are ready to move further should be stretched. Those two things aren’t contradictory. They are both part of knowing children well.

We’ve also made an important investment in social-emotional learning across the school. Rachel Sanborn will serve as our SEL coordinator, helping us build a more intentional pre-K through eighth grade approach to social-emotional development. I think sometimes people hear social-emotional learning and assume that it is somehow separate from academics.

I don’t see it that way. A child who can regulate emotions is better prepared to learn. A child who knows how to navigate conflict is better prepared to collaborate. A child who develops executive functioning skills is better prepared to manage increasingly complex academic responsibilities. A child who can advocate appropriately for themselves is better prepared for the next level, for high school, college, and eventually adulthood.

So this work includes classroom lessons, small groups, individual support, helping teachers develop strategies around emotion regulation, relationships, conflict resolution, executive functioning, and of course, responsibility and respect. And importantly, our approach is connected to our Episcopal identity and to our pillars of scholarship, citizenship, and leadership.

Again, we are not simply asking, what does this child know? We’re asking, who is this child becoming? I also want to mention an area that may not sound like an academic program but has an enormous impact on the experience of being part of a school community, and that is communication. As St. Luke’s grow, communication becomes more important and more complicated.

There are simply more students, more families, more teachers, more programs, more teams, more events, and more information moving throughout the school day. And one thing that we have heard from families is that it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out what is happening at your child’s school. So this year, we have been intentional about strengthening our communication structure.

Alexa Low is serving as our Chief Communication Officer, providing greater coordination and consistency around school-wide communication. And we have also added Brenna Cortinas as our athletic scheduling and communication coordinator, recognizing that athletics, in particular, has grown to the point where schedules, changes, practices, games, and other important information require more dedicated attention.

This is another example of what meaningful growth looks like to me. As the school becomes more complex, we have to build the systems and capacity necessary to keep the experience personal and manageable for families. Our goal isn’t simply to communicate more. More emails aren’t necessarily better communication.

Our goal is to communicate better, to make information clearer, more consistent, easier to find, and ultimately more useful. Because good communication builds trust, it strengthens partnerships, and it allows parents to spend less time trying to figure out what is happening and more time engaging in the life of a school. And in lower schools, families will see several important investments this year that reflect the same philosophy.

And there are five quick things I wanna highlight. First, as I’ve already mentioned, Sari Weller’s work as our early years innovation coordinator will extend into the early elementary experience, helping students think intentionally about innovation, creativity, curiosity, and hands-on learning. Again, as I mentioned, that designated science teacher with a STEM focus.

This means our students will engage in that hands-on science instruction quite frequently. Third, Ms. Sanborn and a dedicated social-emotional learning class for fourth grade. Students are becoming more independent. Their relationships are becoming more complex, and we want to help them develop those communication skills, conflict resolution, collaboration, and self-advocacy before they enter middle school.

Fourth, we are strengthening math support and enrichment, specifically in third and fourth grade. And the important word there is and. We want to identify students who need additional support and provide it early and intentionally We want to meet students where they are and where, and how that goes in both directions.

And finally, our lower school declamations will continue to involve. By intentionally connecting declamation experiences with art, music, language, arts, students aren’t simply memorizing something. They’re interpreting, creating, making connections, collaborating, and communicating. When you put those five things together, I think you begin to see what we are trying to accomplish in lower school.

We aren’t trying to fill children’s days with more things. We’re trying to create a richer, more connected learning experience, one that builds strong foundational skills while also giving students the opportunity to think, create, [00:21:00] communicate, collaborate, and take ownership of their learning. Our middle school is another area where you’ll see significant investment.

Middle school has grown, and we want to ensure that infrastructure and experience grow with it. This year, we have intentionally created additional layers of leadership within our middle school, which includes our interim middle school director, a chief academic officer, and our middle school dean of students.

That gives our teachers more support and gives our students and families more dedicated leadership. We have introduced Canvas as our m- middle school learning platform to provide students and parents with greater clarity around assignments, grade, and progress. Well, we have introduced and expanded clubs, including Math Olympiad, community service, chess and strategic games, programming and coding, Quiz Bowl, and a few other opportunities for students to discover interests and find places to contribute.

We have tweaked the schedule to provide a combination of traditional class periods and longer instructional blocks, and every middle school grade will have a distinctive class trip designed around the developmental experience of that particular age group. Middle school should be challenging. It should stretch students, but it should also be a place where they’re allowed to be middle school students.

They are figuring out who they are, they’re learning greater independence, and they’re gonna make mistakes. That is the middle school experience we are continuing to build. And this is where our three ideas, mission mattering and meaningful growth, come back together. Mission keeps us rooted. It reminds us why St. Luke’s exists. When there are a hundred good things we could potentially do, mission helps us decide things we should do. Mattering keeps us relational. Growth should never make people feel like numbers. As we become larger, students and families should actually feel more known, not less. And meaningful growth means we are becoming more of the school God is calling us to be.

Not just bigger, better, more faithful, more excellent, more connected. That is the standard. Ultimately, all of this leads to what I have come to think of as the St. Luke experience. The St. Luke’s experience exists at the intersection of two things that I don’t believe should ever be separated: community and challenge.

We want St. Luke’s to be a deeply caring environment. We want children to feel safe. We want them to know they are loved. But caring for children doesn’t mean removing every obstacle from their path. It doesn’t mean making sure they never struggle. In fact, sometimes struggle is exactly where growth occurs.

Sometimes caring means encouragement. Sometimes it means supporting. Sometimes it means allowing a child to work through something difficult. And sometimes it means stretching a child beyond what he or she believes is possible. That’s why the relationship between the student and the teacher matters so much.

A talented teacher who truly knows a child can understand the difference between a moment when that student needs support and a moment when that student needs a push. Our goal is to create an environment where talented educators are able to know, support, and stretch each student. Through those relationships and through the opportunities we provide, we want our students to grow in scholarship, leadership, citizenship, character, confidence, and faith.

Because ultimately, our job is about much more than preparing children for high school. We are helping them become their very best selves. So there is a verse from Luke that I shared with our faculty before school began, and I think that captures this beautifully. Luke two verse fifty-two tells us, “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.”

What I love about this verse is that Luke doesn’t simply tell us that Je-Jesus grew. He tells us how he grew. His growth was intellectual; it was personal, it was spiritual, and it was relational. In other words, not all growth is the same. That is true of children. We know that. Children don’t develop in perfectly straight lines.

Sometimes academic growth comes quickly while confidence takes longer. Sometimes a child suddenly finds their voice. Sometimes leadership emerges from a student who never saw themselves as a leader. Sometimes a child struggles with something for weeks or months, and then almost unexpectedly, it clicks.

Education is human work, and human growth is rarely linear. I think the, the same thing is true of schools. We shouldn’t judge our progress simply by counting students or programs. We need to ask whether we are growing in the right way. Are we wiser? Are we stronger? Are our relationships deeper? Is our program better?

Are we more faithful to who we say we are? Those are harder things to measure than enrollment, but ultimately they are much more important. And those questions are especially important because, as we are entering an exciting period in the life of St. Luke’s, this year, we are beginning a strategic planning process led by mission and data that will help shape the next chapter of our school.

This will not be a plan developed by a few people sitting around a conference table. We want the process itself to reflect the community we are trying to build. There will be opportunities for input. There will be surveys and focus groups. Faculty and staff will participate, parents will participate, our board will participate, and we’ll have conversations around our strengths, our opportunities, our challenges, and our aspirations for the future.

Ultimately, that work will help us identify the strategic priorities that will guide St. Luke’s in the years ahead, and [00:27:00] I hope you will participate because this simply isn’t my school. It isn’t the board’s school; it isn’t the faculty’s school. It is our school. And one of the things I have learned during my time at St.

Luke’s is just how deeply people care about this place. There is a reason families describe St. Luke’s as feeling like home. There is a reason our alumni return. There is a reason teachers invest so deeply in their students. There is a reason parents volunteer so much, and there is a reason families tell other families about what is happening here.

There is something distinctive about this community. And our responsibility now is to protect what makes St. Luke’s special while continuing to make it better. We shouldn’t be afraid of change, but neither should we pursue change simply because something new sounds exciting. We should ask whether it strengthens our mission, whether it strengthens the student experience, whether it strengthens our teachers, or whether it strengthens our community, and whether it helps us become the school we believe God is calling St. Luke’s to be. And that is the work in front of us. And I believe we are entering this year from a position of tremendous strength. We have more students, more educators. We have strength in leadership. We are investing in academics. We are expanding opportunities. We are thinking more intentionally about the development of the whole child, and we are becoming increasingly clear about the experience we want every child and every family to have.

But through all of that change, I hope one thing remains unmistakable. When your child walks onto this campus, we want them to know you are known here, you are loved here, and you will be challenged here. And perhaps most importantly, you matter here. And when our eighth graders eventually leave the Hilltop, I hope they leave knowing something else: that St.

Luke’s helped prepare them academically for whatever school comes next, but also that this community helped shape who they are. That they learned how to think, how to communicate, how to lead, how to serve, how to treat other people, how to respond when something is difficult, and how to recognize that their gifts carry with them a responsibility to use those gifts for something larger for them- than themselves, and how faith can help give meaning and purpose to all of it.

If we do those things well, then we have accomplished something much more sigifi- significant than simply growing a school. We will have helped grow young people, and ultimately, that’s why we are here. So thank you for trusting us with your children. Thank you for your partnership. Thank you for supporting our teachers.

Thank you for believing in St. Luke’s and what our school is becoming. There is a great deal to be excited about in the year ahead, and there is an extraordinary amount to be grateful for right now. I am incredibly proud of this community. I’m excited about where we are. I’m even more excited about where we are going, and I look forward to walking that journey together.

We are St. Luke’s, and it’s going to be a great year. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to A View from the Hilltop, a St. Luke’s Episcopal School podcast. Please subscribe to hear future podcast episodes. Visit us at sles-sa.org to learn more about St. Luke’s Episcopal School