Institutional Enhancements

Goal #1: Attract and retain the best available faculty and staff to engage our students and fulfill our mission

Rationale: Our faculty is the backbone of the School, and their skill, dedication, and personal examples engage and inspire students daily.  Competitive salaries and benefits, meaningful professional development opportunities, and a commitment to inclusivity encourage RDS teachers and staff to invest deeply in their relationship with the School, with students, and with their craft.

Specific Goals and Objectives:

• Ensure that RDS faculty and staff receive highly competitive compensation and a meaningful work climate when compared to our K-8 peer schools
• Make certain that retention of faculty and staff is consistently above the NAIS average

Goal #2: Make the RDS experience accessible to more students through a greater investment in economic diversity

Rationale: Socioeconomic diversity makes possible kinds of learning that are simply absent in more homogenous settings. Our students learn with and from peers who have different family experiences — and more abundant need-based financial aid is an essential tool that makes this possible. A well articulated and thoughtfully administered financial aid program responds to demographic realities and ensures that mission-match students from low-, middle-, and high-income families will be able to attend Redwood Day School.

Specific Goals and Objectives:

• Target financial aid to be 15% of annual gross tuition revenue
• Review the School’s current operational financial aid policy and create a financial aid policy at the Board level

Goal #3: Design and build a new music building

Rationale: The music program is one of the highlights of our curriculum and of our life as a school community. RDS students and faculty deserve teaching, learning, and practice spaces that reflect the vitality of the program, encourage connection between Lower and Middle School, and serve as an architectural highlight and gateway to the center of campus.

Specific Goals and Objectives:

• Raise the capital through a well articulated and community-supported fundraising campaign
• Construct a beautiful and environmentally sensitive music building that inspires the performing arts and artists at RDS

Goal #4: Prepare for our high school opportunity

Rationale: Redwood Day remains committed to the vision of expanding to a K-12 school and extending our developmental educational approach across the entire range of the pre-collegiate years. While program and curriculum have been developed to transform RDS into a K-12, the economic requirements have not yet aligned.  Therefore, it is imperative to keep ourselves current and prepared as a community (philosophically, financially, and intentionally) for when the opportunity arises.

Specific Goals and Objectives:

• Refresh the K-12 vision and business model, considering a wide range of start-up scenarios. 
• Establish a robust financial position with strengthened reserves to eliminate use of annual unearned revenue before a site search or other such negotiations proceed 
• Create a Board Committee on High School development to meet regularly  and to pursue a prudent path towards creation of our high school, and when the time is right, set in motion a Site Search Committee

Goal #5: Achieve full enrollment of mission-match students

Rationale: Robust enrollment provides stable tuition revenue, financial flexibility, and scope for enhanced philanthropic support. Beyond financial outcomes, increased enrollment also enables greater efficiencies of scale, a stronger critical mass of diversities, a wide range of learners, and increased program opportunities. Redwood Day will not sacrifice its commitment to mission-match families, however; our integrity hinges on intentionally crafting a community of learners and families whose educational needs we are best able to serve and whose goals are most closely allied with our philosophy of developmental education.

Specific Goals and Objectives:

• 370 mission-match students enrolled from grades K-8 with a class-size range of 18-22