Above Board
When “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
—Thomas Edison
10 years! As you can see throughout this issue of Select News, the past decade has been an exciting time for the Friends Select community. This has been a period marked by increased enrollment; our collective focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; intentionality in integrating the city into our edu-cational curriculum; strengthening our support for employees; and expanding our physical campus, as part of our Advance Friends Select: Transformation Campaign. None of this happened easily.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most schools, including Friends Select, were putting enormous energy into figuring out how to achieve remote learning, head of school Michael Gary and his administrative team looked around at empty classrooms and also saw an opportunity to transform our Parkway Building. As enrollment grew and Friends Select needed more space, the vision of creating an upper school STEAM Building in a run-down building adjacent to the Race Street Meetinghouse was realized, with the added benefit of drawing the school and the Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting closer together. And when the Three Parkway office building was sold, forging a friendship with the new owner ultimately led to the Parkway Campus Expansion Project, realizing a long-held dream of connecting the buildings to provide additional classrooms, a STEAM lab, common spaces, gender-neutral restrooms, and elevator access to the school’s rooftop athletic field.
Seizing opportunity takes vision and courage. It also takes a lot of hard work. A great deal of that work is done by the school’s astute and forward-thinking employees.
No less crucial is the responsibility of Friends Select’s board of trustees—22 alums, parents, Quakers, and friends of the school—who meet at least nine times each year to ensure the school’s long-term health. While most of the trustees are located in the Philadelphia area, Zoom has offered the board the ability to expand geographically and appoint trustees who live in Connecticut, Delaware, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. With remarkable commitment, individual trustees have Zoomed in from travels to Chile, India, Portugal, Spain, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and across the U.S. Board work over the past 10 years has focused on the financial health of the school through approving budgets, managing the endowment, setting tuition and salary increases, and carefully considering the long-term ramifications of expanding our campus.
For Transformation Campaign projects, the board affirmed Friends Select’s Quaker values in the simplicity of design, careful reuse of materials, selection of energy-efficient elements, and diversity of contractors. To support excellence in teaching and learning, higher salaries both retain and attract the best possible teachers. The school’s care relationships with both Monthly Meeting of Philadelphia and Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting are stronger because of greater communication and annual Friends Select Days, in which Friends Select and meeting communities come together for Meeting for Worship, programming, and fun.
What opportunities might the next 10 years bring for Friends Select? Attention to the school’s “big picture” includes growing the endowment, completing the Back Lot Transformation to create an outdoor learning space for our entire community, and attending to the strategic plan.
Amidst the challenges of AI, defending our democracy, and preparing our students to thrive in an uncertain future, one thing is clear to me. Friends Select is deeply grounded in its Quaker mission, is practiced in seeing opportunities in times of crisis, and is poised to step into the future with confidence, empathy, and joy.
Let’s all put on our overalls and get to work!
