Strategic Plan
Adopted on November 1, 2014 by vote of the faculty and Board of Trustees, our Strategic Plan outlines the strategic priorities for our school consistent with our mission.
Education has always mattered, but the kind of education we provide to our children now matters more than ever. Parents and grandparents face more challenges in imagining the world their children and grandchildren will live in than in almost any other generation. Change is constant, as the Greek philosophers observed, but never before has change come as fast as now. We are drawn now, irrevocably, into a new frontier of accelerating change: technological, economic, social, political, ecological, and global. How are we to prepare today’s students to work, to serve, to thrive, and to lead in an unpredictable world beyond much of what is familiar and known to us? How are we to equip them for unforeseeable changes that will transform their world many times over and evermore fast? How do we prepare them for revolutions?
The Governor’s Academy rises to this challenging imperative, confident in our unrivaled heritage of educational excellence, innovation, and success for more than 250 years and inspired perhaps most of all by the example of the school’s first 25 years, when its teachers and students saw their world transformed from British colonies to a new American nation; and when many of those first heirs of the Governor rose to shape that revolution. We, too, are heirs of the Governor, and we are called now to a project worthy of the challenges that faced that first generation of “Governors” and many more following them.
Our project is to pass on the values enduring for more than 250 years in this historic American academy, tried and true values that time has not changed although some of the ways those values have been imparted have been wisely and effectively modified over time by generations of great educators here. If 25 years is the measure of a generation, that 250-year-old legacy of tradition and innovation is now ours to pass on, not only to the Academy’s eleventh generation but to the world this next generation of secondary-school students will inhabit and shape. Thus it falls to us, heirs of the Governor, to evaluate most carefully the values that are constant in the Academy’s heritage and to dedicate ourselves to a strategic plan for bequeathing those timeless values to a world needing them more than ever.
Rooted in Four Enduring Qualities at the core of 250 years of education at this Academy, our strategic plan aims to cultivate Seven Essential Skills in the school’s 21st-century graduates. Although adapted to suit challenges peculiar to the present and immediate future, these Seven Essential Skills are modified versions of skills and values that have always been cultivated in the Academy’s students.
Thus, in our Strategic Plan, we will:
- Launch innovative educational programs inside and outside the classroom;
- Diversify our student body, faculty, and staff;
- Attract and support the very best faculty by providing more on-campus housing options and professional development resources that they need and deserve to sustain themselves, their families, and their indispensable dedication to the Academy’s mission;
- Enhance the campus’s pastoral landscape and historical architecture, carefully updating infrastructure, building new facilities, and renovating historical ones with keen appreciation for our unique place and past while also keeping current with state-of-the-art advances;
- Realize more sustainability programs and environmental studies initiatives that capitalize on the school’s distinctive location on the banks of the Parker River and the great Atlantic salt marshes;
- Re-dedicate ourselves to the ethic of service and philanthropy that moved Governor William Dummer to bequeath his home and farm for the founding of this now most venerable American school; and
- Rally ourselves, altogether as a family-like community – students and parents, faculty and staff, alumni and their parents – to bequeath the best possible Governor’s education to the next generation and those to follow.
Supporting Documents