This article appeared as "Reason for Being" in the Spring 2023 issue of Independent School.For many educators, the past three years have been the most challenging of their careers. Even teachers working in well-resourced schools that could navigate the economic whiplash of the pandemic were under constant pressure to reinvent their practice, keep showing up on screens and in classrooms (often at the same time), and help keep school open under any circumstances. Administrators had to become armchair epidemiologists, public policy gurus, therapists, and systems engineers overnight, working to keep everyone safe, informed, and rowing together toward a theoretical shore that only seemed to recede with each new variant, each new surge. And many educators did all of this amid illness, loss, economic hardship, or child care crises in their own families, summoning any remaining energy in support of their students’ evolving social and emotional needs.
There was rarely time for anyone to reflect or process anything that was happening before it was time to reinvent yet again, as the restless journey back toward “normal school” stretched from weeks to months to years. Without a sense of community—a sense that all of this was in service of getting students, families, and faculty and staff to the other side intact—keeping school going under such extraordinary circumstances would have been impossible. In rolling crisis mode, fueled only by adrenaline, trusting each other and thinking in terms of the collective became spiritual and logistical necessities. Our shared understanding of scientific facts and public health guidance, our ability to listen and truly hear one another’s concerns, our willingness to consider the impact of individual choices on the school community—these took on the weight of life or death, sickness or health, keeping school open or closing it. Encouraging faculty, staff, families, and students to truly see each other as interconnected, fellow travelers—and maybe even to find a sense of joy and strength in that reality—became a survival strategy for ourselves and for our schools.
Responding to these challenges as one organism was only possible with ongoing efforts—rightly urged by our constituents—to revisit our very definition of community, to expand it, to reckon with the historical root of the independence that differentiates us from public schools: exclusionary access. If access and belonging were no longer oriented along shared aspects of individual identity—race, socioeconomic status, religion, educational background, previous connection to the institution—how must we redefine and sustain community? What binds members of a school community together and creates the conditions for students to thrive and overcome obstacles, both within and beyond school walls?
The work of creating equitable and resilient schools in the face of constant upheaval returns us to our missions and foundational documents as engines of community-building. In clarifying and recommitting to our reason for being, we ensure that belonging is defined by a commitment to a shared set of ideas, values, and practices, and we can fully see each other as intertwined in an educational enterprise that will shape how the world responds to the next global crisis.