One winter morning many years ago, as I was conducting an interview in the living room of Laura's and my househead apartment at our last school, a flood of water suddenly began cascading from the ceiling at the top of a two story stairway and down those stairs and through our fuse box. Interview over! In a panic I called the school's facilities operation, and staff members arrived within minutes, quickly identifying a broken water pipe, turning off the water supply and developing a plan to "make things right" as quickly as possible. The renovation work, as you can imagine, was quite extensive.
My leadership of St. Mark's has been highly influenced, since the 2011 adoption of our strategic plan, St. Mark's School: 2020, by the list of educational outcomes the plan asks the School to prioritize.
I am often asked what the phrase "Lives of Consequence" means. The question is a logical one because you see the phrase prominently displayed since we have chosen to make it the tagline for our capital campaign. You can't miss seeing it when you drive up to the Main Building since it appears on banners attached to lampposts, and you will also see it in many of our social media messages and in our publications.
In my experience, the best educators are the ones who constantly seek ways to continue their own learning, thereby modeling a habit of mind that we want for our students. Those educators, lifelong learners, are also able to convey a passion for learning for a particular subject that is infectious for students and colleagues alike. I am proud of the desire for continued growth that I see among my St. Mark's colleagues, and I am proud of the love they convey for their work, both inside and outside the classroom. These educators do so much to make St. Mark's an intellectually vibrant school, energizing for adults and students alike.
A distinguishing characteristic of St. Mark's is that so much of the life of our School takes place in this Main Building. Here we are in the Chapel, so we worship together in the Main Building; 13 faculty and over 100 students live in the Main Building; we take our meals together in the Main Building; most of the School's academic work takes place in the Main Building in classrooms, offices, and the library; many administrative offices are located in the Main Building; and the intellectual heart of the School, the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, is located right in the physical center of the Main Building. So, while we are not literally a school under one roof, since living and learning take place elsewhere on our campus too, the phrase "school under one roof" certainly describes St. Mark's accurately.
