Strategic Plan 2020-2025

Academic Excellence is at the heart of our strategic vision. Students will engage meaningfully and collaboratively in project- and research-based learning experiences that will enable them to gain a deep understanding across the liberal arts and sciences while building research and digital literacies, academic acumen, social-emotional competency, and leadership skills. 

King students will continue to build foundations of content mastery and self-knowledge that equip them to construct new understandings, ask the right questions, innovatively solve complex problems, and become empathetic leaders of change.

The initiatives listed in this plan are essential pillars for the realization of this goal and must work in conjunction to support it.

Physical and mental health are interconnected and essential for students and adults to thrive academically, professionally, socially, and emotionally. Overall wellness combines a sense of well-being and fulfillment in all of these areas and is essential in the individual and collective advancement of our strategic goals. 

Broadening our focus to the wellness of our whole community of students and adults, we will inspire the development of fulfilled individuals who embody a sense of purpose and who maintain wellness and balance in all aspects of their lives.

Experiencing a sense of belonging is essential for students to strive for academic excellence and for children and adults to grow and thrive in every area of their lives. As a school focused on providing a deeply engaged student experience, King School will continue its commitment to fostering a respectful and inclusive environment where every voice is heard, respected, and valued.

Ensuring that we are welcoming of all, we will leverage new approaches to understand the myriad of ways in which community members experience life at King and beyond and respond appropriately to the needs of our community. 

King students will be challenged to think critically and consider multiple perspectives and, as a result, will learn more –  and more deeply – as they prepare to enter a world where they will navigate difference on a daily basis.

King School believes in the importance of teaching students to become agents of change and contributing members of their communities. The school also recognizes that through engagement in real-world experiences, students can apply and expand their research skills and knowledge.

We will develop a network of partnerships to enable King students to experience meaningful work in action and better understand how dedication, collaboration, and empathy create positive change in the world. This kind of real-world experience will fundamentally contribute to our students’ understanding of topics and industries as well as to their overall academic, social, and emotional preparedness. 

King School recognizes that a robust and holistic athletic program teaches leadership, teamwork, and collaboration; helps students improve academic performance, and supports a life of health and wellness. An established and reputable athletic program can also help the school increase community spirit, strengthen its institutional identity, and support strategic enrollment goals. 

Recognizing that all of these benefits are key in the advancement of our strategic vision, King School will strengthen the competitiveness and consistency of performance for our athletic program, particularly in terms of student-athlete leadership, wellness, and commitment, while continuing to support and grow our pool of talented coaches, and raising school spirit and Viking Pride. We will also continue to help launch our most dedicated and successful athletes onward to careers in college and beyond.

By designing and implementing a long-term, strategic enrollment model, King School will ensure financial stability; enrich its diverse student body; provide an inclusive approach to financial access; attract and retain the most talented students, faculty, and staff; deliver the most robust and relevant academic experience for King students and position King for success in its institutional advancement efforts.

We will maintain our commitment to responsible and strategic financial management by focusing on implementing best practices to make King School compelling and accessible to the most talented students and continuing to make intentional and mission-aligned financial investments and decisions that simultaneously address the current needs of the school in advancement of our strategic vision.

We envision facilities that can accommodate new and existing programs that align with our strategic goals; incorporate the necessary elements for innovative, inquiry-based teaching and learning; support a variety of research-based teaching methods, and allow students to explore different approaches to a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Our plan envisions flexible indoor and outdoor spaces that can help promote academic success and wellness by boosting engagement, motivation, creativity, and collaboration.

Additionally, these new and renovated facilities will strengthen King School’s reputation and institutional identity, which will help support the school’s strategic enrollment goals by attracting the most talented and mission-aligned students, faculty, and staff. 

As King School advances all of the goals and pillars in the strategic vision, we will develop an intentional and purposeful plan to define and articulate the school’s institutional identity as a student-centered, research-focused independent school that places academic excellence at its core.

Through this defined identity, King will strengthen its reputation and differentiate its position within the market. The value proposition around the strategic vision will reinforce the reputation of a school that nurtures a love of learning and rallies around its virtues of Integrity, Kindness, Perseverance, and Respect. 

As part of the plan to strengthen the school’s institutional identity, we will create opportunities to tell the King School story and champion a cohesive and compelling message that encapsulates our ultimate goal to prepare students to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

First and foremost, we affirm our commitment to the student experience as our top priority. To achieve our bold vision, we strive to be the country’s premier PreK-12 research institution in which students embrace open minds and courageous thinking.

We are committed to doubling down on our commitment to the way students engage in their learning. King takes childhood and adolescence seriously, so we are committed to ensuring that students’ experience as they are learning is truly excellent and optimal. At King, students do not merely “do school” because we appreciate that students’ journey is as important as the destination. 

This plan calls us to apply the skillsets of research, inquiry, and problem solving more intentionally, broadly across disciplines, and deeply, so our students build mastery as they leverage curiosity; ask excellent questions; engage in experiential learning; and analyze and synthesize information to construct meaning and take action. Through the initiatives in this plan, King School will continue to set better standards which lead to engaged, healthier students who have a greater sense of purpose; who remain curious to learn; who possess superior critical thinking skills; and who are guided by a deep understanding of themselves as learners.

Yes! As most American students go through school, their sense of curiosity, creativity, and motivation decrease. This research is summarized effectively here, here, and here. Researchers, including KH Kim, Tony Wagner, Yong Zhao, and Ken Robinson, attribute these declines in part to standardized models of schooling that stigmatize failure - which is necessary to innovation - and force singular ways of thinking onto students. Real-world problem-solving, on the other hand, taps into students’ own motivations to understand and impact their world, leading to deeper learning more akin to expertise. As researchers Jal Mehta and Sara Fine write, “The more we can . . . [give] students the freedom to define authentic and purposeful goals for their learning, [create] opportunities for students to lead that learning, and [help] them to refine their work until it meets high standards of quality — the deeper their learning and engagement will be.” 

Mehta’s and Fine’s focus is high school, yet their same criteria could just as easily describe King’s new Reggio-Emilia-inspired Early Childhood program and our Upper School Advanced Science Program for Independent Research and Engineering (ASPIRE) and Tom Main Liberal Arts Fellowship. Under this Strategic Plan, our aim is to integrate these modes of learning - with opportunities for students PreK-12 to apply the skillsets of research, inquiry, and problem solving - so that all King students will be meaningfully engaged, personally motivated, and comfortable with the ambiguity and challenge of creating solutions to the complex problems so often found in the world.

The 2020-2025 King School Strategic Plan weaves together the imperative of Academic Excellence with - 

• Athletics and Community Partnerships to enhance it;
• Wellness to sustain it;
• Strategic Enrollment Management to support it;
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to enrich it;
• Financial Sustainability and Facilities Development to fulfill it; and
• Institutional Identity to share our pride in who we are. 

The plan is broad and deep. Academic Excellence is clearly at the core. We believe true academic excellence is marked by an excellent experience in learning, so students will sustain and retain their learning, while remaining curious and eager to continue growing. 

The plan weaves together the imperative of Academic Excellence with eight other areas of commitment. These initiatives, all briefly defined below, each have an associated set of tactics to move the plan forward. 

Academic Excellence

Deliver project- and research-based learning experiences that will enable students to gain a deep understanding across the liberal arts and sciences while building academic, social-emotional, and leadership skills, and research and digital literacies.  

Wellness

Broaden our focus to the wellness of our whole community of students and adults, with a goal to inspire the development of fulfilled young people who embody a sense of purpose and who maintain wellness and balance. 

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Enhance our culture to ensure we are welcoming of all - leveraging new approaches to understand the myriad ways community members experience life at King, and responding appropriately to our community members’ needs. 

Strategic Enrollment Management

Design and implement a long-term enrollment model that will enrich our diverse student body, provide financial access to the best students for King School, and position us for success in our academic programs and our institutional advancement efforts. 

Financial Sustainability

Maintain our commitment to strong financial management, focusing in particular on developing cutting edge practices that will make King compelling and accessible to the best students, developing the best financial models, and continuing to act responsibly in stewarding our resources to sustain King far into the future. 

Facilities Development

Envision facilities that will be flexible enough to support new programs, and that will set a better standard for innovative teaching and learning environments.  

Athletics

Strengthen the competitiveness and consistency of performance for our athletic programs, particularly in terms of  student-athlete leadership, wellness, and commitment, while continuing to support and grow our pool of talented coaches, and raising school spirit and Viking Pride! Continue to help launch our most dedicated and successful athletes onward to careers in college and beyond.   

Community Partnerships

Develop a network of partnerships that enable King students to experience meaningful work in action, and to better understand how collaborative team learning and empathy create positive change in the world. 

Institutional Identity

Create opportunities to partner with all members of the King community to champion a cohesive, compelling reputation that encapsulates our singular identity and purpose:  to provide a truly student-centered, relevant, and dynamic learning experience that best prepares students to thrive in our complex and rapidly changing world. 

Through this plan, King will expand upon our foundation of Academic Excellence so students will continue to strengthen skills in their current areas of study while also mastering skills to analyze, synthesize, and solve complex challenges. As the plan calls us to be intentional in our focus on the student experience, we can expect that students’ opportunities and our classroom environments will change - we think for the better. 

Changes are already underway!  Here are just some examples of student engagement in recent research and project-based initiatives:  

• The new Reggio-inspired early childhood program places research and project-work in the center of students’ PreKindergarten and Kindergarten experience.  

• All Lower School students are exploring new, open-ended learning opportunities. In the Makerspace, students experiment with hundreds of new, hands-on, construction material. 

• The Middle School math program has adopted an important focus on teaching students to ask the right questions to build skills in how to think through and solve complex problems.  

• The Grade 6 Team is developing interdisciplinary learning experiences guided by similar themes and skills.  This past year, students explored both the ancient and contemporary history of South Sudan in History, while reading the book A Long Walk to Water in English and investigating water as a natural resource in Science.  This provided a guiding framework for students to dive deeper in their study of cultural conflict, natural resources, and refugees. This unit culminated in a partnership with a local organization, IRIS, a poetry slam, and an open-ended debate about U.S. involvement in South Sudan. 

• Upper School students are observing, hypothesizing, designing experiments, testing solutions; analyzing data; and reasoning through all that information to form strong, valid conclusions to issues they identify -- for example, in Science courses, in History field study classes and simulations, and in the Global Studies directed research class. By deeply engaging with the Scientific Method, students are building transferable skills that will serve them well in any discipline. 

• In December 2019 - partly in response to research on student wellness from Dr. Denise Pope - who then spoke to King faculty and parents in January - the Upper School piloted an experimental schedule with longer periods and fewer per day to facilitate project- and problem-based learning and to reduce the number of transitions students make in a day between different classes and the homework they assign. Similar reductions have been shown to impact school climate, daily homework load, student-teacher relationships, use of resources in the community, and students' feelings of focus and self-efficacy.

• Students are increasingly developing and putting into practice their leadership skills through initiatives including: Upper School Captain’s Council, the Upper School Senior Leaders program, the 8th Grade Leadership Lab, and Lower School A-day assemblies led by Grade 5 students.  

• Through the Visual Arts Department’s new O.P.E.N. (Original, Personal, Experienced, Novel) curriculum, students in all divisions are learning to work independently to understand and express their personal vision in original ways, experimenting with novel approaches. 
   
• The section above lists the progress made during the 2020-21 academic cycle.

King is committed to continuing to invest in the substantial and meaningful professional growth and development (PG&D) that is so generously supported by our community. Faculty will receive in-house training through our Assessment and Instruction Meeting sessions, supported by personal and departmental goals, as well as external PG&D through targeting conferences that focus on this type of learning tailored for each faculty member. We will thoughtfully examine the ways we utilize time and space for learning, courageously pilot new learning experiences, and intentionally engage with other institutions that share our vision for modern learning.  

This strategic plan builds upon King’s commitment to a truly student-centered educational experience and allows us to claim our place among the top schools in the country. This plan sets King apart from peer schools by identifying King as a school that teaches research skills in all grades, across all disciplines, as a way to weave a traditional liberal arts curriculum with a modern, student-centered program.  We feel it is bold, though not un-tested, to learn from successful best practices around the country in teaching and learning and implement them at King in a more intentional and consistent fashion.

Providing a long-range view of future school priorities, the King School Strategic Plan 2020-2025 is the collective, comprehensive effort of the entire King community.  

• We are grateful for the thoughtful input from our community of parents, trustees, students, staffulty, alumni, and parents of alumni who contributed through surveys (1,000+ responses!), focus groups, and working sessions. 
• We are thankful for the leadership and vision of our Strategic Planning Steering Committee members. In partnership with Ian Symmonds & Associates, a leading firms in the field of strategic planning for educational institutions, our Steering Committee reflected on extensive input from our community plus focused on competitive and educational landscape analysis, SWOT analysis, demographic trends, market segmentation, and trends in the independent school and the education sectors.  

The Board of Trustees, Head of School, Leadership Team, staffulty, and indeed our whole community, will continue to partner in the years ahead to achieve the bold vision and forward momentum propelled by the King School Strategic Plan 2020-2025. 

King uses a range of assessment metrics and tools to evaluate progress on the growth of our students, programs, financial health, and institutional health. In order to deliver our plan, we have developed long-term strategies that are supported by shorter-term tactics. 

We are committed to keeping this plan moving forward and to sharing our progress at appropriate opportunities with the community, including State of the School events and updates to this webpage.

Innovation and boldness require our investment in the extraordinary people and programs that make more possible for every family at King. With your help, we will continue to grow King's endowment for increased financial flexibility and access for students. Of course, any plan for King's future must consider our beautiful campus and all learning spaces, inside and outside. We are planning several major initiatives that will require philanthropic support in order for them to become a reality.  One of those is already in progress with the Turfed Middle Fields Initiative, designed to further amplify our mission and enhance the experience of learning at King. The King Fund must also continue to grow in support of annual program needs and King's commitment to recruit, retain, and develop diverse and talented faculty that have the training, resources, and time to thrive along with our students. We are so grateful for the generosity of our community!

People are eager to learn about King and appreciate hearing stories from King families, alumni, and staffulty.  Thank you for sharing the story of your family’s King experience and for sharing your pride in our beloved school! You can also encourage people to read our strategic plan on our website.  

The King Leadership Team and Board of Trustees are all excited to hear the community’s perspective and questions about the Strategic Plan.