Dear Parents:

You know that school is right around the corner when you open your e-mail and find the headmaster's welcome back letter. My advice: close the box and head for the beach. I confess that I love school and wait anxiously for the beginning of August so that school can be revived. I don't expect everyone to share my enthusiasm. Such a convergence would be a field day for therapists.

In hedgehog fashion, we focus persistently on significant targets for school improvement. The platform begins always with people. Our administrative centers are led by skillful, disciplined, hard-working, and honest people who have made excellent choices about the design of their offices and the staff that executes the duties of their departments. Beginning with the three academic divisions, each vital component of the school serves the interests of students. Admission, development, business, athletics, technology, learning support services (Achievement Center), and arts administration provide the resources for faculty to instruct and inspire. The right people must be in the right administrative places to ensure maximum quality. We have a fine team that collaborates thoughtfully and cheerfully.

We have dedicated our energies over the last several years to investing in and employing the best teachers for Christ Church Episcopal School. Just as we sensibly preach the importance of the right match of senior and college, we seek the ideal match of teacher and school culture. We are committed to academic challenge. We do a fine job of cultivating the intellect but not as a consuming purpose. The manner in which we approach instruction, with care and affection for children, goes beyond sharpening intellectual skills. In each division, faculty inspires a desire to learn and a will to take learning beyond utilitarian aims. Coupled with the vast opportunities in the arts and sports, this whole-child approach to instruction goes a long way to produce whole people, young adults who think and feel intelligently, whose moral and civic compasses are directed well. Rather than the icing on the cake, faith and service are the foundations of the school. They support everything that we do. People who serve students here must embrace values that resonate with those the school lives by and promotes. We have successfully assembled a growing community of educators and administrators who bring shared values to the school for the betterment of students. We have enriched the faculty through prudent professional development that reflects institutional objectives as well as personal goals; comprehensive professional evaluation that engenders an active and honest partnership between administrators and teachers; and discerning hiring by leadership in all divisions.

Our abiding interests over the last five years in addition to ensuring fine instruction have been:

• Curricular review
• Financial management
• Plant maintenance and improvement
• Learning support services
• Arts enhancements
• Technology integration
• Security (protection of people)
• Refining management structure and enhancing administrative services

The opportunities for improvement in the next five years revolve around building on the priorities of the last five years:

• The maturation of Achievement Center services to students, parents, and faculty
• A systematic schedule for major plant repair and replacement
• The construction of a Performing Arts Center
• Security  concerns are much broader than protecting people: we now have to address and think about protecting our systems from infiltration--thereby protecting financial resources and data. The domain of people protection goes well beyond physical safety, though that factor is still prominent. The two watershed events in the past couple of years from our standpoint are: the shootings in Newtown and the Sandusky horror. A subset of the sexual abuse saga that absorbed our attention during the Sandusky investigation was a raft of disclosures about predatory behavior of teachers at elite schools for decades starting years ago.
• Focus on character traits: resilience, integrity, creativity, collaboration, time management, intellectual curiosity--there are others but I cite the six traits that represent our Middle School partnership with 59 other schools in the Mission Skills Assessment. Perhaps most important in this catalogue to long term success and happiness, to sustaining relationships and serving others, to being productive members of society is grit, determination to stay true and move forward despite setbacks, a trait developed through grappling with some hardships and doubt.
• Decisions about growth

I want to address the growth issue directly. We are certainly delighted and flattered at the high level of interest at the school. I feel like Sally Field when she won an Oscar in 1985 for Places in the Heart and incredulously shrieked, "You like me." Well, I am so happy that a horde of families like CCES.

We ended last year with 1123 students and begin this year with approximately 1150 students, about 2 1/2% over our closing enrollment, about 5% over our opening enrollment one year ago, and 16% over our opening enrollment three years ago. Compared to year's end in May, the projected LS enrollment is 10 down, MS 19 up, and US 21 higher.  

CCES is a not-for-profit entity. It exists to provide a top quality education for every child. We are singularly focused on the quality of all services to students and determined that we have excellent people driving challenging and mission-centered programs in a plant that supports optimal performance--in academics, athletics, arts, and spiritual life.

Growth has given us the means to upgrade quality in all respects. The dominant vector in improved services to students lies in the quality of teachers. We have attracted an impressive group of new teachers who bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to their returning colleagues and to students. Our additional teachers reduce the number of students each teacher instructs and thereby preserve energy for heightened individual attention and creativity. Teaching is incredibly labor intensive. Great teaching is equivalent to giving five or six virtuoso performances, or directing five or six productions, or coaching five or six games each day for 175 days. Really great teachers are great coaches who motivate, great actors who captivate, and great directors who navigate. Growth helps to produce financial health. But it is legitimate only if quality flourishes.

Quality consumes our attention at CCES. I am a devotee of Edwards Deming, who was the American father of the Japanese post-war industrial miracle. He believed that we are "always in the hospital." In contrast to the proclamation attributed to Bert Lance, the recently deceased advisor to President Carter, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," I believe that everything we do can always be better. We should never feel as if we have plateaued. The quality of schooling at CCES has risen, prompting higher demand. Respect for CCES has been high for over fifty years. It is especially strong now.

Growth also provides resources for improved infrastructure to support effective instruction. We are now dedicating all of Melissa Langford's abundant talents to college counseling and removed the registrar part of her job, assigning it to a new full-time position on the admission team. The registrar will ensure that the historical record for each student from start to finish is seamless, accurate, and complete. To bolster management of our phenomenal sports program, we have asked Larry Frost to devote a majority of his time to his service as Assistant Athletic Director. To direct a full scale initiative to integrate technology into our P-12 instruction, we have created a new leadership position, Director of Instructional Technology, which Melissa Hughes ably fills. She will provide the foresight and drive to upgrade the use of technology throughout the school by both teachers and students.

Finally, growth permits plant improvements. Less significant than people and programs, plant can either inhibit peak performance or support it. We want to be sure that everywhere on campus we provide for safety, security, and space to foster learning, achievement, and pleasant social interaction. You will come to a campus newly enhanced. The Chapel of the Good Shepherd will seat 100 more people, allowing us to maintain the tone of the original design. The McCall Field House will have a new, beautiful glass-enclosed lobby, where trophy cases will celebrate the successes of our athletics programs over the decades. The central entrance to the school, off Cavalier Drive, will have a Welcome Station, manned from 8:30-2:15 daily as one element in our tightened security structure. We have paved a connector road between the Middle School drive and the Lower School circle, to be open during the times when only the central entrance is open. We have expanded the press box over Carson Stadium, installed a new scoreboard on Linda Reeves Field, and made the entrances to all of the academic buildings much more personal, with reception stations to greet visitors.

The net effect of enrollment growth has been universally positive: great new students, genial and generous new parents, energetic and bright new teachers, improved administrative services, and enhanced facilities. The beneficiaries of recent growth are our students.

I will keep you informed in a timely manner about decisions we reach regarding growth.

Finally, we have been laboring over our Mission statement for many years. Not that we are discontent with our Mission or that we have changed course in any appreciable way, but we have felt that the statement was not direct or memorable. We sought to design a statement that captured the essence of the school and would serve as an aspirational statement to identify the overarching results of a CCES education: the key behavioral traits and the way those traits are acted on.

We believe that the best format to present our aims is a three-fold approach: Mission statement; Mission goals; and Mission values. Please review the document that appears below.

I look forward to a school year filled with joy, accomplishment, love, and benevolence.