Mission Statement completed!

In attendance:
Barbara W.
Charles W.
Joe B.
Ken V.
Karin
Larry
Patrick M.
Jack
Nina
Tonei

Great turn out and super-productive meeting. Read on for details and how to pitch in on the next step.

Karin presented a document reflecting the work from the last all-community meeting on the Mission Statement. The group quickly gravitated to the shortest, strongest statement as a basis to work from: “The mission of Steller Secondary School is to foster independent, confident, self-directed learners.”

Our first step was deleting everything before “foster.” Then we looked for a stronger verb. Larry won many over with “stimulate,” but some thought that didn’t reflect the nurturing aspect of Steller enough. Tonei suggested “inspire.” After discussion, we agreed that “inspire” suggests both the active, exciting part of the mission and the supportive, nurturing aspect. It also suggests both inspiring independent learners and inspiring students to become independent learners.

Next we focused on broadening the emphasis on individualism in the statement, which we felt left out the important community aspect of Steller. We discussed whether “community” should come before or after the verb: is the community inspiring learners, or is community part of the inspiration we want to provide? Ken pointed out that our mission should focus on student outcomes, and a sense of community is something we want to instill in Steller students; thus, community should come after the verb. That point carried the day.

Here is our final product, presented with pride:

“Inspiring a community of independent, confident, self-directed learners.”

Next we discussed how to approach the Steller philosophy and creating the list of core values. We decided to tackle the list of values first. Each will be followed by an explanatory sentence. Then we will use the values to build the new philosophy statement, filling out what we mean and how each value should be actualized in the school. We threw out words we wanted to see listed as values and asked everyone to contribute more they want to have considered via email. We will plan another meeting to work through the values, trim down, and add explanatory statements.

Here is the brainstormed list of core values so far:

Freedom
Responsibility to self and community
Responsible freedom
(debate deferred to the next meeting on how much to combine the above)
Courage
Trust
Love of learning; life-long learning, enthusiasm for learning
Diversity
Community
Responsible commitment

We had a discussion about approval of the mission statement. Karin agreed to present it to the Ad Board, but the committee felt it would be mistake to allow further editing of the statement, because that would devalue the inclusive process we have used to this point. The consensus was that if the Ad Board rejects the statement, it should be brought back to the committee, but the statement should not be amended outside our process