Affirming Our Values, Building Our Future
The strategic plan is designed to strengthen Kent School as a leader in whole-student education—an education that attends to the wholeness of our students as intellectual, social, ethical, and spiritual beings.
A revolution occurred at the turn of the 20th century when a young Episcopal monk brought his radical idea for a school to life on the banks of the Housatonic River in northwestern Connecticut. This plan represents our continued stewardship of and commitment to Fr. Sill’s vision.
The initiatives in Kent School's strategic plan respond to two foundational needs:
- Bringing Kent School current on best practices in the field of boarding school education.
- Re-affirming the core elements of the School’s purpose as originally articulated by Fr. Sill and updated over the last 100-plus years.
The first set of initiatives establish a residential life curriculum, create a system of faculty evaluation, and develop an equity, inclusion, and diversity action plan. Current initiatives also strengthen our academic program by creating coherence around curricular objectives, a single grading system, shared teaching principles, a faculty-wide professional development curriculum, and revised graduation requirements.
The second set of initiatives fall under the category of “what will make Kent a great school” and will require some measure of institutional will to accomplish. Two intentions of our founder remain as countercultural today as they did at the turn of the 20th century. The first was to establish a Christian school—one in which students learned through their shared experience of communion, quite literally as brothers and, later, sisters in the body of Christ. Few of Fr. Sill’s writings address community because it was such an integral part of his faith and his being, part of his privilege as an Episcopal priest. For him, community and its location in St. Joseph’s Chapel were givens. Neither are today. As the Episcopal Church redefines itself and the School is called to re-examine its Episcopal identity, one of its givens should be to keep St. Joseph’s Chapel at the center of our community and our curriculum. We can start by giving every student a seat in that sacred space by expanding it.