A Message from the Strategic Planning Committee Tri-Chairs

Each day at St. Albans begins with a handshake. Lower School students for decades have started their mornings with a firm handshake and a warm greeting by name from the Head of the Lower School. This daily tradition, while seemingly small, speaks to something much larger; the community’s longstanding dedication to building relationships and to knowing, valuing, and supporting every student so that he feels a deep sense of belonging and has the resources he needs to thrive at St. Albans and beyond. Nowhere is that sense of belonging more visible than in the Little Sanctuary, where we gather for chapel each week to pray, sing, and hear students and faculty offer homilies. The candor, vulnerability, and authenticity of those chapel talks allow us to learn from each other in a way that celebrates the speaker’s humanity and builds the trust, comfort, and belonging that make the Little Sanctuary a sacred space and make the bonds of St. Albans so distinct.

But how do we deepen and extend that sense of belonging to ensure that every student, each with his richly distinctive experiences, passions, and identities, is known, supported, and valued? How do we evolve our programs to prepare our students to join, lead, and contribute to their communities in a rapidly changing world? And how do we ensure that St. Albans continues to evolve and endure? We began this strategic-planning process with conversations — with faculty, staff, students, parents, past parents, and alumni — and after hundreds of meetings, calls, surveys, and Zoom sessions, these questions emerged as the central challenges of this Strategic Plan.

This document articulates a series of commitments that reflect what we heard in those conversations. These commitments provide an exciting vision for how we can continue to educate our students in mind, body, and spirit so they are fully equipped with the skills, habits, and dispositions to live and lead in a continually changing world. They are also necessarily grounded in a set of understandings and goals that pervade the plan, namely that St. Albans as a whole must always be not just a school, but, like the Little Sanctuary, a sacred space, where students and community members are known, embraced, and valued equally and individually as critical members of a varied and vibrant whole. Through this plan, St. Albans can more fully meet its educational mission, sustain its defining relational culture, and inhabit its Episcopal identity. Through this plan, St. Albans can be a sacred space for all.

We are enormously grateful for the work that so many poured into the process. This effort was a constant reminder of the generosity, talent, and loyalty of the St. Albans community, to which we are so fortunate to belong.

Gina Coburn (Parent ’21, ’23)

Andrew Marino (Parent ’23, ’25, ’28 and ’28)

Brendan Sullivan ’93