Adapted from Tom Gibian’s November 2014 report to Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting
It is often said that Sandy Spring Friends School is not just a place; it is a state of mind. We do have a campus to maintain, and a payroll to make; we certainly have children to enroll, and to teach and coach and counsel and feed and supervise and discipline and to be inspired by. But there is more. Every time I turn off Norwood Rd. and drive onto Esther Scott's old farm, I feel like I will be my better self, that the Spirit is strong here. And I know that there are many others that feel the same way. I have been stopped in Senegal by an alum and in Egypt by a parent of an alum while wearing SSFS-branded clothes, both reporting the transformational power of the School. People who are part of the Sandy Spring Friends School community ingest something that remains part of their lives for the rest of their lives. Perhaps it is not ingesting; rather, this School encourages us to recognize the best part of who we are and offers the space, time, and narrative for this to happen.
SSFS is what Quaker outreach looks like in the 21st Century. Our schools (and our retirement communities and our prison ministries and our legislative activities) give voice to what we hold to be true to hundreds of students - and their families and their grandparents.
The school operates in a tough environment. We charge for what people can get for free. The fact that we are private and exercise discretion in the admissions process may offend the sensibilities of some Friends. But we are not like most other schools: we are a Friends school, and, because we are so, we are obliged to be a North Star for how to educate kids from our community and from the wider world. We have the Quaker thing going for us: first, we believe in continuing revelation, and second, we believe the world can be made a better place. So we strive to make the school accessible to families who cannot afford the sticker price while believing that this is the right thing to do, because Friends schools can change the world.
How? Each of us has an idea. My own experience in doing business in this country and in developing countries has been that there is no shortage of resources; the main obstacles I note are lack of trust and its cousin, lack of integrity, as well as a lack of cultural competencies and its relative, lack of respect. At SSFS, respect is the coin of the realm. And while we don't teach blind trust, we do have a high bar for integrity and, just as it is important to break cycles of violence, it is extraordinarily important to break cycles of mistrust by preparing people to work in the world who are committed to our values – Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, Stewardship (the Quaker “SPICES”).
We started this year with 550 students, 20 more than our starting enrollment a year ago. Next June we will graduate 76 seniors, the largest graduating class in our 53 years. We have 54 Quakers (30 connected to our Monthly Meeting) proceeding as the Way Opens, and 279 or 51% of our students are people of color. 38% of our students receive financial aid through a very generous program, with the average award equating to approximately half of the cost of attending SSFS.
I am delighted to announce that in the new year, we will be doubling our capacity of our renewable energy by expanding our ground mounted solar array from .5 mW to 1.0 mW. Members of Sandy Spring Meeting serving on our Board pushed us in this direction: first, Chuck Harker and then Sandra Michaels. We also plan to expand the School’s farm through a lease of the land around the Sandy Spring, which will allow us to continue the activity that originally brought Quakers to this area 300 years ago.
We are good at sports, excellent in the arts, inspiring in our academics, and we are delighted with where our graduates go to college. But mostly, we are committed to our mission to increase the amount of Light that comes into the world.