Great Changes Coming To The Marylhurst School

There’s Always Room For More!..

We are writing on behalf of the faculty and board to keep our community up-to-date on recent events regarding plans to expand Marylhurst Early Childhood Center to include elementary grades. Please read this information carefully and bring any questions you may have to a member of our steering committee.

As you may remember, we hired an educational consulting firm last spring to begin our initial process of planning for expansion. Why? Each year, parents approach our director and ask why we don’t have an elementary program. As parents prepare to leave Marylhurst, along with typical anxieties of transition, they wonder which elementary programs are a natural extension of our emergent curriculum. The answer becomes apparent quite soon because there are not many programs like MECC. We found out important factors from that research study. The most important factors were that our families come here predominantly for two reasons: our faculty and our curriculum. So, each year, we are asked the question regarding how we might expand our philosophy and curriculum to include elementary children. This year, we left it in the hands of an objective research institution to help us answer the question about whether or not we were ready to expand. The answer was yes – the research group indicated that we have incredible faculty and strong leadership in place to go through this process.

This summer, we developed a steering committee who met several times about what expansion would look like. We met with the research team, the board, developed a business plan and began discussing hard questions about our curriculum and growth.

So, where are we now? So far, we have broken down our steering committee into three subcommittees: communication, facilities, and curriculum.  The communication team is being led by Sheila and myself and is comprised of several wonderful faculty members. They are working on getting the word out about MECC’s plan for expansion, ways to market, branding and logo information, web design, and finalizing key pieces of philosophy and mission statements that will go to the larger public. Second, the facilities team, headed by Stephanie Dow, is working on an exploratory search for a building. As you may guess, we are near capacity at our Barclay building. This team is working with a commercial realtor to assess the market for buying or leasing buildings within a five-mile radius of our current school. They are also looking into a long-term lease for our current building and what necessary changes would  need to take place to accommodate primary grades. Finally, the curriculum team, headed by Mary Mahorney, Jessica Bernert, and Britta Daubersmith are working with other key faculty members to bridge the preschool curriculum (that we already know and love) to a primary school curriculum. The exciting aspect here is that the preschool philosophy will truly drive the primary school curriculum. This means that the emergent curriculum, educational pedagogy and philosophical underpinnings that make us who we are will not be lost as children move through Marylhurst – this team is working tirelessly to ensure that graduates of the Marylhurst program have common threads that bind them all. Our plan is to expand and include a first and second grade beginning fall of 2012. We will then add a grade each year through fifth grade.

In the meantime, we are also developing a budget and meeting with outside entities to gather more information about school expansions. We have hired a project manager to oversee our time line and help us track progress including meeting times. We are asking ourselves thoughtful questions and going to legitimate sources to see how others have done this before us – what has worked and what has failed. We are creating a dynamic, transparent process where no questions are turned away.

While we are going through this process, it has, of course, raised other questions. We continue to discuss what tuition will be, how to create a news feed to the larger public, and what an admissions process would look like that would be genuine to Marylhurst. As we go through this process, many more questions will undoubtedly come up. As we know the answers to these questions, so will you. This is an emerging process that requires patience and effort on everyone’s part. We will deliver information to our MECC community first and then be available to answer questions from our internal community before moving to the community at large. That said, the following group of people make up our steering committee. Please do not hesitate to contact anyone on the steering committee – she can then forward you to the correct person to speak to if she cannot answer your question. Contact information for each of us is located in the MECC Directory.

Sheila Walker – MECC Director

Amy Stoeber – MECC Board President

Mary Mahorney – Kindergarten Teacher

Jessica Bernert – Kindergarten Teacher

Britta Daubersmith – Owl Parent and Veteran Teacher

Stephanie Dow – Squirrel Parent and Legal Counsel

Now you’re officially updated on the status of our school and plans for expansion. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. We will be hosting two informational meetings about the expansion plan in January at the following times:

Wednesday, January 11 at 12 noon

Thursday, January 19 at 6:30 pm

For those of you who are thirsty for more, here is the Marylhurst vision statement, as recently revised by our faculty… 

All children travel a unique path.  In our community of creators, explorers, and citizens, we honor each journey.