Guilford Central School: Vision, Mission, Values
March 27, 2008 Proceedings
Present: Jason Touchette, Margaret Dale Barrand, Susan Hessey, Adelaide Minott, John Gagnon, Brian Remer, Karen Duggan, Arthur Pettee, Anna Pettee, Susan Bergman Miyake, Jeanne Walker, Verandah Porche
Those present identified themselves as Parents (4), Community Members (2), Teachers (2), Faculty (3), Board Members (1), Students (1).
Goal: The purpose of the meeting was to identify common values for the Guilford Central School community.
The meeting began with a recap of the purpose and history of this series of meetings. Each meeting builds upon the work of previous meetings. Last time we talked about our vision and arrived at three vision statements. We also identified the major themes common among the different vision statements.
Today the group agreed that, rather than refine the vision statement, we should spend our time talking about the values that are important for the school community. Brian said that the information from our previous vision discussion, like our discussion today, could be used as “raw material” for our final meeting to craft our mission statement.
Brian gave a brief description of why values are so important. You can have a wonderful vision (to lead the greatest nation in the Western World, for example) but achieve disastrous results depending on the values that drive your work (note, Hitler v. Churchill). Jeanne pointed out that Churchill wasn’t always so great either but the main point is that values help us determine the right path to our vision. So, it’s very important to talk about some of the values that drive the work toward the vision of our school.
Each person used a list of values to identify ten values that they think are important for our school community. People were asked to choose the five most important and write them on separate cards. Brian then asked them to give up cards one-by-one until they had just two cards representing very important values.
People then met with a partner to talk about the values they chose, their relevance for the school community, and their connections to the common themes of our vision.
Next, people formed teams of five or six to talk about the values they chose and their overlap with the eight current values of Respect, Responsibility, Tolerance, Compassion, Trust, Honesty, Courtesy, and Equal Opportunity.
Here is a list of the values that people talked about (a “+” indicates a value already held by the school community; numbers after values indicate how many times that value was cited by a group member:
+ Compassion - 3
+ Respect - 3
+ Tolerance - 3
Adventure - 2
Global Awareness- 2
Knowledge - 2
Personal Development in own way and time - 2
+ Trust - 2
The Arts - 1
Community - 1
Cooperation - 1
+ Desire - 1
+ Empathy - 1
+ Responsibility - 1
+ Self-Respect - 1
+ Equal opportunity - 0
+ Courtesy - 0
+ Honesty - 0
Examples of comments from these discussions include (but are not limited to):
- Some values can encompass other values (e.g. Tolerance = Empathy + Compassion).
- We may “give up” the Arts under pressure but they can be a means to foster other important values.
- Desire is important for students. Many do not have a passion, or something that they are excited about. Adventure fits into this also.
- We need to reclaim the meaning of some values by further defining them through dialogue (e.g. Tolerance, for some, has come to mean “putting up with” a person’s disagreeable behavior rather than being open to learning from what is different about them).
- Discussing and defining our values can be a way to make our vision and mission more concrete for some people, especially students.
Next Meeting: Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, May 1 from 4:00 to 8:00. Food will be provided. At this longer meeting, the group will make decisions and agree upon a vision statement, list of guiding values, and a mission statement for the school. Please plan to come whether you are a student, teacher, faculty member, board member, parent, or community member – and bring a friend!
