Framework for the Future of Education at Wildwood

In spring 2019, the Wildwood School Board of Trustees launched a multi-phase process to envision the school’s future and its service to children, young adults, and their families.

In the years ahead, Wildwood School will pursue its mission with a focus on four priorities, all interrelated. It is at the points of intersection where they will have the most power.

Intentionally envisioned as a roadmap to follow—rather than goals to be met—this document is meant to guide the Board, school staff, and key volunteers in decision-making and goal-setting as Wildwood navigates the future. With gratitude for all involved in Task Forces and Design Teams, we are pleased to provide the following Framework for the Future of Wildwood.   

Expand the outstanding academic, athletic, and artistic experiences available K-12.

• Ensure a seamless K-12 experience for students no matter their entry point; provide for strong foundations so students can challenge themselves and be challenged academically, socially, artistically, and physically.
• Increasingly integrate the work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) across culture, curriculum, and programs, including core academic content, arts programming, community involvement and service learning, and International Community Involvement (ICI) program.
• Expand both the influence and reach of Wildwood School’s innovative models, with an eye toward positively impacting education practices before, during, and after the K-12 experience.
• Take advantage of in-house experts—exceptional faculty, administrators, and non-teaching staff—to develop a K-12 Professional Development Leadership Team (PDLT), tying all teaching and learning to strategic priorities, both capitalizing on and contributing to the work of the Outreach Center.

Strategically foster a climate of inclusion, belonging, and wellbeing so that all members of the Wildwood community can be confident that they belong and are connected to each other and to the world; deliberately pursue an “all in, all thrive” philosophy to guide diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) programming.

• Coordinate wellness and inclusion programs to foster overall emotional, social, and physical wellbeing, bringing related programming—advisory, wellness, DEIB, etc.—under one umbrella using a Wellness Center model. 

• Revise social-emotional learning curricula and advisory programming scope and sequence to ensure students’ needs are being met in the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent expansion of global efforts to address systemic racism.

• Establish key indicators to identify and address students’ needs; rely on data to develop initiatives and evaluate the success of program changes, systems, and structures designed to promote experiential equity and belonging. 

• Embrace the fact that students’ personal and work lives will be inextricably tied to the digital world, and expand the development of the school’s Digital Citizenship Scope and Sequence to address students’ needs in age-appropriate ways from kindergarten through college.

• Use a mix of in-person, virtual, and hybrid events to promote further inclusion of all families. 

Embrace the transformative potential of technology to accelerate, augment, and expand teaching and learning, institutional systems, access, and communications.

• Apply the lessons of multiple years of distributed learning to reconsider how we use time and space.

• Identify ways that new and emerging technologies can be used to enhance students’ experience in the classroom and in co-curricular programming.

• Develop augmented and/or virtual reality for application by students, employees, and for connecting with constituents off campus.

• Utilize available technology to maximize safety and security, while streamlining systems and minimizing labor-intensive tasks like tracking student attendance and accounting for community members on campus when crises arise.

Embrace Wildwood School’s promise to be of service to students and educators both within and beyond the boundaries of Wildwood.

• Re-envision Wildwood’s Outreach Center to house professional development for Wildwood and non-Wildwood faculty, maximizing opportunities to exchange research-and-evidence-based ideas and practices around how best to teach and learn. 

• Structure thriving parent/guardian education programming that demystifies innovative pedagogies, provides tools for good parenting, and fosters healthy partnerships that ultimately support students and positively influence the expectations for parents/guardians and for schools.

• Consider how more robust programming—Community Involvement, Internships, The Institutes, Systems Thinking, International Community Involvement (ICI) program—might provide enhanced opportunities for constructive connection and service in Los Angeles and beyond.