The phone rang incessantly. “Can you help? We want to start an Episcopal School.” It was the late 80’s and early 90’s. I was NAES Executive Director and we were experiencing a surge in such inquiries and in the growth of our schools.
Read More » For over a dozen years, I have been writing a Weekly Meditation to our membership, something I have been gratified to learn has been valued by many people. While the ideas for these meditations have never stopped presenting themselves—as many writers have pointed out, much of writing is about watching and listening—the more challenging aspect has been to live each week with the self-imposed brevity of these meditations.
Read More » This document reflects recommended best practices. However, it is intended as a draft document for discussion. Each parish and school must develop a scope of roles and responsibilities best suited to the particular conditions of their church and school, taking into consideration the size of the parish and school operations, staffs, and budgets.
Read More » We are very much looking forward to our upcoming conference, “A DEIJ Road Map for the Future,” to be held in San Francisco on March 9–11, 2022, and we are delighted that you will be attending. This is a very important gathering, given this place and time in our country as well as in the life of our schools, and we are blessed that we have, at the very least, come upon a respite with the pandemic, making in-person gatherings a little easier.
My first experience in an Episcopal school came over a quarter century ago. Still new to the independent school world, I quickly saw how the Episcopal tradition informed everything we did. Above all, it was clear that living into our Baptismal Covenant depended on valuing the dignity and worth of every member of our community.
Read More » I recently received a phone call from a former student of my previous school in Southwestern Louisiana. When I began at my previous school in 2014, tasked with bringing the upper school campus “back in line” with its Episcopal identity and liturgical tradition, I was met with much resistance, particularly by the senior class. This former student and his senior classmates were accustomed to daily chapel being a certain way and grew resentful of me changing things. To borrow from Dickens, “It was…the worst of times.”
Read More » Grocery store parking lots are a microcosm of society’s bias, classism, and justice opportunities. I'm sitting in my car in the parking lot eating a bag of chips so I can throw the bag away before I get home, hiding their existence from my kids.
Read More » I vividly recall late February of 2020, at the NAIS conference in Philadelphia, where I crossed paths with numerous school people I knew, who shared with me the preparations their schools were making in case it was necessary to go virtual in the upcoming weeks. It sounded strange to me, at that point. Day by day, the Coronavirus was becoming more and more real to our country, and it gradually dawned upon me that life as we knew might well be interrupted.
Read More » I have now spent over twenty years in association work, along with additional years serving on the board of some associations. While all of these organizations have been school-related, I have always maintained that the work of leading a school association possesses a very different flavor from actually working in a school. It is vital, of course, to have the school experience—if nothing else you know many of the issues and can talk the language—but a great deal of the substance and tone of the work differs from the rough and tumble, as well as the deep joys, of school life.
Read More » The NAES Online Community will relaunch this month. This will impact all NAES members, and provide a powerful new means of connection and collaboration with peers at fellow Episcopal schools. Most crucially, since this is a benefit of NAES membership, all members will be automatically enrolled. Here's what that means for you:
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