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Strategic Plan: The Plan for Emma Willard's Third Century

Mission Statement

Honoring its founder’s vision, Emma Willard School proudly fosters in each young woman a love of learning, the habits of an intellectual life, and the character, moral strength, and qualities of leadership to serve and shape her world.

In 1814 pioneer educator Emma Hart Willard revolutionized education by envisioning a world where girls had the same opportunities as their brothers. The School she founded remains vibrantly true to her vision. Guided by its mission and mindful of the foundation underlying two centuries of extraordinary education, Emma Willard undertakes this plan to sustain and enhance the School’s excellence in its third century. Fulfilling this vision will require imagination, wisdom, hard work, and significant resources. Innovation, respect for the past, and the needs of current and future students remain central to the plan.

Fundamental Principles

A Tradition of Educational Excellence for Girls. As the first school to provide girls with an education commensurate with the best education available to their male counterparts, Emma Willard’s legacy is unparalleled among American girls’ boarding schools. By adhering to this mission in the twenty-first century, the School will remain a leader in secondary education. Among the other “educational firsts” established by its founder are commitment to diversity, provision for financial aid, the utilization of the School as a laboratory for pedagogical research, the inclusion in the curriculum of a regular program of physical education, and the recruitment of international students. The heritage is a rich one, and the future will build on its foundation.

Leadership.

Emma Hart Willard ensured her graduates’ impact upon the world by equipping them to be the teachers the growing nation required. At every juncture since, the School has educated women to serve and shape their world. This legacy of leadership and service will continue as the School prepares future generations to define the multiple roles and responsibilities of twenty-first-century women.

Academic Rigor.

Emma Willard School is synonymous with academic and intellectual rigor in all aspects of the curriculum. High academic standards will be preserved. To this end, the School will instill in its students the love of learning, the habits of an intellectual life, and the moral strength and integrity they will need to shape their world.

Curriculum.

Over the course of its history, Emma Willard has led the way for other schools in curricular and pedagogical reform. Emma Willard will remain the school to which others turn for leadership, insight, and advice in curricular matters. The Correlated Curriculum, the elective curriculum of 1970, and the Dodge Study deserve a twenty-first-century counterpart.

The Goals

Emma Willard School will strengthen the excellence and diversity of its student body.

The best and the brightest young women, regardless of family circumstance, should have access to an Emma Willard education. Students must be admitted solely on the basis of their aptitude, achievement, strength of character, and potential to contribute to the campus community and beyond. Enrolling students without regard for family financial need will create a student body with a richer diversity of interests and talents, socioeconomic backgrounds, race, ethnicity, and geographic roots, thereby enriching the Emma Willard experience for all. The student body will also better reflect the diversity of the world students will enter after graduation.

This ambitious objective will require detailed and thoughtful study, expanded recruitment activity and increased endowed and annual financial aid resources. A national public relations campaign, undergirded by the most effective market research, is a crucial first step in reaching uninformed groups and developing effective recruitment materials. To enroll students of the highest quality requires meeting the demonstrated need of all admitted students with offers of financial aid that match those proffered by other independent schools, especially the leading coeducational institutions. Emma Willard School will no longer lose excellent students to other schools because of limited financial aid resources.

To this end, endowment for financial aid will top the list of fund-raising priorities. By raising new endowed and annual funds for scholarships, Emma Willard will become the first boarding/day girls’ school with the ability to admit the most highly qualified applicants without regard for family financial need. This policy will have a profound impact, enabling the recruitment and admission of those students who will benefit most from the faculty and curriculum, who will challenge their peers, and who will go on to assume positions of leadership in the world beyond Emma Willard.

Emma Willard School will retain and recruit a faculty that is second to none among peer schools.

Emma Willard is justifiably proud of its superb faculty and consequently deeply concerned about the competitive challenges inherent in recruiting and retaining top teachers. Comparisons of faculty salaries at Emma Willard with those at competing institutions show that the School ranks near the bottom and is losing ground. Annual compensation increases that keep pace or slightly exceed the cost of living have done nothing to improve that rank. Furthermore, hiring experience reveals that the School is not alone in making faculty compensation a priority. Other schools are keenly aware that a national teacher shortage looms, that the competition for outstanding new teachers is fierce, and that appropriate compensation is essential to retaining a school’s master teachers. Faculty compensation must be increased so that salaries meet or exceed the 75th percentile among peer schools. To meet this goal, faculty compensation must be a top fund-raising priority.

Faculty compensation, however, goes beyond salary dollars. Efforts must be made to provide competitive health benefits and secure retirement. The School must support teachers in research, travel, and study, and also upgrade on-campus faculty housing. A key to endowing students with a lifelong love of learning is a faculty that models the habits and joys of an intellectual life. Knowing this, Emma Willard must provide the necessary resources to sustain such a faculty.

Emma Willard’s curriculum will remain a standard for excellence and will model balance among humanities, the sciences, foreign languages, athletics, the arts, and technology.

Beginning with the work of its founder, Emma Willard School has been a leader in curricular and pedagogical reform. This leadership will remain a hallmark of the School in its third century. Distinguished by a rigorous college preparatory curriculum that grants the arts their legitimate place as part of a strong academic foundation, the School has prepared young women for the most rigorous higher education available to them at each juncture of its history. Guided by research and experience about how girls learn, the faculty will ensure that the curriculum prepares students for evolving collegiate expectations and a lifetime of learning and success in a world of constant change.

To meet this goal Emma Willard shall undertake a comprehensive, research-based curriculum review and build into it a system for continual curricular assessment and renewal. The process will ensure balance among the academic divisions. The physical plant must be adapted and renewed to meet the growing needs of all academic programs. Improved athletic facilities and better spaces for the theater, orchestra, and dance programs, among others, are critical to achieve this balance.

No qualified student should choose another school because of superior facilities. Likewise, Emma Willard’s use of technology must remain current. To provide students with the tools for lifelong learning, the School must prepare them with the skills needed to acquire and analyze information in an increasingly multi-media environment. Not only must students have access to the machinery and programming of the twenty-first century, technology must be integrated across the curriculum. Students should gain familiarity with information resources across the curriculum so that they can apply technology in sophisticated, innovative ways to solve problems regardless of subject area. Faculty should be given the means to incorporate technology into their courses in order to strengthen their teaching and their students’ learning. The first step toward realizing these aims is the creation of an endowment for academic technology.

Mindful that the lives of contemporary students transcend the boundaries of the campus, the School will pursue regional opportunities for academic and programmatic partnerships. The science and humanities divisions can benefit from the offerings at neighboring colleges and universities and must develop programs that capitalize on the School’s location in the culturally, politically, and historically rich Hudson-Mohawk gateway and capital district region.

Emma Willard’s library will be a vital learning resource at the heart of the academic enterprise.

When Emma Willard School moved to the Mount Ida campus in the early twentieth century, three buildings were erected: Slocum, Sage, and a gymnasium. The library at that time was appropriately located at the heart of the campus. Its location and made an important statement about the significance of reading, reflection, and research in an Emma Willard education. At the beginning of the technological revolution, the library outgrew its original space in Slocum. The architecturally significant William Moore Dietel Library, constructed in the late 1960s, provided multi-media capabilities that were then state-of-the-art.

The Dietel Library is now approaching its fortieth birthday, an auspicious milestone for a facility intended to serve as the cornerstone for Emma Willard’s academic excellence. Forces unforeseen when the library opened its doors have significantly affected education and the delivery of library services. Advances in technology have led to distance learning, digitalization, online access, the Internet, and other dynamic learning tools. The work of librarians has been radically reconceived as libraries are transformed from repositories to information resource centers. A changing world demands that Emma Willard’s students go forth with new skills and abilities unimagined when the Dietel Library opened.

With this is mind, the School will undertake a comprehensive study to ensure that the library, its programs, and its professional staff serve as the central educational resource for Emma Willard students in the twenty-first century.

Emma Willard School will match its rigorous academic program with a student life experience of the highest quality.

In her revolutionary Plan for Improving Female Education, Emma Hart Willard matched her design for academic education with an equally comprehensive program of out-of-classroom experiences. Top quality residential, social, leadership, and character education programs must be vital parts of every student’s school life during her time at Emma Willard. The curriculum review will include not only the academic program, but also the critically important aspect of student life outside the classroom. Societal changes affecting girls as they make the journey from adolescence to adulthood are well documented. Emma Willard will augment student life programming with expanded opportunities for leadership experiences, ethical and spiritual development, community service, the acquisition of life skills, and substantive social activities.

The large, gracious living spaces suitable for social activities of a different era must be supplemented by a vibrant student center. Such a center, housing recreational and lounge spaces as well as attractive workspaces for student activities, must be created by the adaptive reuse of current spaces, paying particular attention to student traditions, habits, and traffic patterns.

Emma Willard will strengthen and celebrate alumnae connections to the School and each other, for the benefit of all.

Emma Willard alumnae, an unbroken chain of women of vision, initiative, and generosity of spirit, connect the seminary of the nineteenth century to the college preparatory school of the twenty-first century. Ever ardent, dedicated, and highly accomplished, the alumnae share a proud legacy that took form in 1814 when Emma Hart Willard introduced the “wild notion” of providing young women with equal educational opportunities. Nearly two hundred years later, Emma Willard’s graduates represent the limitless possibilities open to educated women. Imbued with spirited grace and style, they may be found transforming every facet of life in this rapidly changing world.

As they constitute an invaluable resource for current students, their alma mater, and one another, alumnae will play a central role in bringing the vision of this strategic plan to reality. As they have committed themselves to their alma mater, so Emma Willard commits itself to serving them. The School will initiate and support an alumnae relations program that significantly strengthens the connections alumnae enjoy with one another and with their school.

Emma Willard School will preserve its historic campus, renewing and adapting facilities to meet program needs.

Emma Willard’s magnificent campus is an asset that distinguishes the School from all others. The preservation of the campus must remain one of the School’s highest priorities. There is no better way to honor the campus than to use it well, now and in the future. The restoration of the campus’s original leaded windows, for example, must continue uninterrupted. Although some of the campus buildings are already listed on The National Registry of Historic Places, the administration will pursue landmark status for the entire campus.

The architecture of the campus provides enviable opportunities for program growth and transformation. A comprehensive facilities conditions audit and the strategic planning process have generated a practical approach to facilities master planning. Rather than construct new buildings, underutilized spaces on the campus will be adapted and renovated to provide much needed new facilities. Currently, twenty percent of the School’s heated and lit square footage is underutilized. Examples of underutilized spaces include the chapel, a magnificent building presently used four times per year for ceremonial purposes; Dietel Library, less heavily utilized now that students can access electronic information resources from their dormitory rooms; and Lyon-Remington, originally the library, still perhaps the most beautiful room on the campus, and used only occasionally. Adapting and renovating such spaces will ensure efficient utilization of the campus while attending to a significant portion of Emma Willard’s deferred maintenance needs. In developing an adaptive reuse strategy, the School will increase budgetary support for deferred maintenance and plant operations.

This creative and pragmatic approach will ensure the congruence of modern programming within historic buildings, symbolically connecting Emma Willard School’s past with its future.

Emma Willard School will build financial strength commensurate with its needs and aspirations.

To maintain the School’s current quality and to achieve its aspirations, Emma Willard must build its financial resources. Competition for the best students and faculty requires this. So do the plans for the School’s historic campus.

The Annual Fund, which provides unrestricted support for Emma Willard’s most vital operating needs, is critical to ensuring the School’s financial strength. It offers alumnae, parents, and friends the opportunity to support Emma Willard in a way that touches all aspects of students’ lives. The Annual Fund must grow in order to sustain programs already in place and to allow Emma Willard to undertake new initiatives critical to realizing this plan’s goals.

In addition, Emma Willard’s endowment must increase. Emma Willard no longer competes solely against other girls’ schools for the best students and teachers. Rather, its main competitors include the leading coeducational boarding schools. And while Emma Willard’s endowment grew dramatically during the 1990s (the result of a successful fund-raising campaign, sound financial management, and an extended bull market), it continues to lag behind the endowments of many of its peer schools. For example, endow-ment per student is three times greater at St. Paul’s than at Emma Willard. It is twice as great at Exeter, Andover, Deerfield, and Hotchkiss. Recently, Miss Porter’s endowment surpassed Emma Willard’s.

New endowment funds will provide direct support for significant increases in financial aid, faculty support, and enhanced academics and student life programs. They will also strengthen Emma Willard’s financial position and enable the School to add debt prudently through a tax-exempt bond issue for essential facilities projects that must be undertaken without delay.

Additional avenues of funding, including a mission-based summer program and facilities rental program, must be developed to supplement the financial support Emma Willard receives from its alumnae, parents, and friends.

The goals described in this plan are sweeping. Their achievement is essential to Emma Willard School’s ability to offer future generations of students the best education possible. They mark a bold, distinctive path, one that will ensure Emma Willard’s position of strength in the independent school world.

The Plan for Emma Willard’s Third Century was approved by the Emma Willard School Board of Trustees in May 2002 following eighteen months of strategic planning discussions with the School’s alumnae, faculty, students, parents, and friends.