Pictured above: Storytelling with retired FSP teacher, Linda Ashe-Ford during a recent Friday all-school assembly.
Committee work is the engine of how our school runs. Students, parents, faculty and staff, board members, grandfriends, and Friends engage in different ways to move projects they are passionate about to fruition. Recently, the Outdoor Spaces faculty committee came together to have a new swingset installed. The committee worked together to choose the equipment and organize the installation.
Committee work is critical at the board level as well. FSP’s board has a handful of committees that each meet once per month: Finance, Governance, Development, and School Safety. There are also board committees that meet a few times per year: the Personnel and Executive Committees. Each board member is a member of at least one committee and board committees often include community members who are not board members.
There are a handful of faculty and staff committees: Assembly Committee, Hiring Committees, Faculty Clerks, Outdoor Spaces, Student Integrity, Multilingual Learners, and a Love Week Committee. Every faculty and staff member belongs to at least one committee. Committees such as Quaker Life, Parenting for Peace, Visiting Artists’ Week, and Point Parents tend to have more varied representation including faculty, staff, parents, and students.
Committee work at a Quaker school can also be characterized as “Meeting for Business,” which is a way of saying there can be something spiritual about working collectively, listening deeply, and letting a group goal evolve. This article from Friends Journal describes what it can be like to clerk a committee.
Love Week happens every February, based on “Spring Fever” week, a model from the Netherlands where schools spend an intensive week each year with students from ages four through adolescence focusing on relationship and sexual health education.
The Love Week committee, which has representation of each grade level, meets three or four times a year. Each academic year, the committee sets a new goal based on where they are with their ongoing work. In 2023, the Love Week Committee considered the National Sex Education Standards through an organization called FoSE (Future of Sex Education) and made a new Scope and Sequence for FSP. This February, each grade level band will have the chance to review and assess the new Scope and Sequence.
Just like with math and literacy, we aim for students to have a developmental progression from preschool through eighth grade on this subject. Aliza Gordon, 5-6 teacher and clerk of the committee, said: “I do really think of this committee as one about student rights. We really want students to have this knowledge.” She pointed to a description from the national standards: We “recognize young people’s rights to honest sexual health education.” Aliza also added: “A Scope and Sequence doesn’t tell a teacher how to teach; teachers use their own best practices and knowledge of their students to apply the standards.”
Carie Garrett, Kindergarten teacher and a member of Love Week Committee, shared: “I see this as identity work. From the lower school perspective, a big part of our Love Week work is helping students to know themselves and their boundaries – and what kinds of friends they want to be. That moves up the age progression little by little until people can really speak up for themselves and their identity at every age level.”
A big thank you to the Love Week Committee as we approach Love Week 2024, as well as to everyone serving on a committee that supports Friends School.
Other glimpses into faculty committee work in the past months:
In early 2024, the Quaker Life committee will be compiling and crafting an FSP Faith and Practice booklet which will be used to share our common understandings of Quaker practice and ideology. We received a grant from the Sue Thomas Turner Fund to create and publish this booklet for our community.
Visiting Artists’ Week committee wrote this guiding mission statement in June of 2023, which just recently anchored its past few committee meetings when searching and hiring artists for the upcoming Spring 2024 event: The Visiting Artists program gives students new, creative experiences both in its variety of art forms and artists, holding central the school’s values of community, truth, and joy.
The Assembly Committee organizes a weekly gathering for students on Fridays. In December, the Assembly Committee was particularly excited to bring retired teacher, Linda Ashe-Ford, in for a special storytelling assembly.