Click here to listen to this week’s JAM – A More Beautiful Question.
Conversations about whether Hillbrook should open a high school have been percolating in our community for decades. As far back as the 1980s, Hillbrook parents discussed the idea. The conversation became more serious for our leadership team and the Board of Trustees in 2015 when we conducted community conversations as part of the creation of Vision 2020. Inspired by Warren Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question, we designed a process that emphasized question-asking and encouraged people to use prompts like, “What if…” and “How might we….” Over and over, we found that people kept asking a variation on two questions – what if we built a Hillbrook High School? Or How might we build a Hillbrook High School?
In the Spring of 2018, the Board of Trustees and I decided that it was time to formally tackle those questions. We created the Secondary School Exploratory Committee, a group of Board members, employees, and parents. Led by Board member and parent, Shannon Hunt Scott, the initial charge was straightforward – help us better understand what it would take to expand from a JK-8 into a JK-12. Over two years, we conducted marketing studies, visited other schools that had added high schools, including Nueva School up the Peninsula, visited innovative high schools including Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio, and created various financial and enrollment models to better assess the viability of the project.
Over the course of the process we gleaned a number of key lessons. First, as I noted in episode 2, School leaders consistently emphasized the importance of culture, particularly as we build a two-campus school.
We also were reminded that as we build the new high school, we need to continue to pay close attention to our JK-8. I have been very conscious of this as we have intensified the work of the high school over the past few months. One way we plan to maintain focus on the entire school will be to launch a new strategic plan for the JK-12 this Fall, a process that will enable us to engage the entire community members in generative conversations about our collective future
Finally, we were reminded that there will be unforeseen changes. An example of that happened this summer. As we shift from a school in which students graduate as 8th graders to having students graduate as 12th graders, we realized we needed to change graduation years for all of our students. For example, this year’s 8th grade class was the Class of 2023 but now they are the Class of 2027. As you can imagine, this creates all types of complications with our student information systems. We already had a Class of 2027, for example (the current 4th graders who are now the Class of 2031 – incidentally, the current Kindergarteners were originally the Class of 2031 but are not the Class of 2035). We think we have caught all the changes we need to make internally, but just this past weekend Head of Upper School Mike Peller let me know that his family was invited to join his incoming 1st grader’s What’s App group – the problem, they are still calling it the Class of 2030, not the Class of 2034. I have no doubt we will figure this – and many other things – out in the year ahead. There is clearly a lot of change ahead as we realize this ambitious vision to build a high school.