Seven Hills’ New Strategic Plan: Heart, Mind, and Community
October 7, 2025
At the start of every school year, and particularly at the start of this 2025-26 school year, which I believe will be largely defined by our new Strategic Plan, I find myself thinking about continuity and change. I picture that recurring metaphor for time, a river: constant, yet constantly changing.
Heraclitus posited that “you can’t step into the same river twice.” And I think in many ways, you can’t step into the same school twice — at least, not year after year. At the start of every year, students and teachers alike catch up with old friends, share stories of the summer, and settle back into the familiar rituals and routines of school life. Yet every year, things have changed, sometimes incrementally, and sometimes significantly.
On my first day of school as a teacher, 30 years ago, we had no computers, email, or cellphones. I was given two pieces of instructional technology: a box of chalk and a paper gradebook. Today, you are reading this article on a device that would have been unimaginable back then. When I reflect on my 30 years as an educator and my 30 “first days of school,” I see some constants and some radical changes.
Seven Hills is a school that has thrived in no small part due to its healthy relationship with continuity and change. Our history reaches back to 1906, when Miss Doherty founded a school in her East Walnut Hills house with the goal of preparing young women for college, and to the 1920s when Mrs. Lotspeich turned her Clifton home into a school and Burnet Woods into her outdoor classroom, and to 1927 when a group of parents and alums founded the Hillsdale School in what was then farm country, and of course, to 52 years ago, when all of these schools merged to form Seven Hills.
Continuity and change: different neighborhoods and campuses and buildings and names and people, but a deep and constant culture, rooted in a student-centered vision of education.
As we look ahead to the next five years — or 50 years — of Seven Hills history in the making, I believe we must see continuity and change not as opposite poles but as a double helix that encodes meaning. There’s a paradox to change: sometimes we must change in order to become more fully ourselves.
And haven’t we experienced this in the young people we are raising or teaching? We’re not trying to turn them into a different person; we’re cultivating the most promising aspects of their truest selves. That’s what our most life-changing teachers did for us. As our mission statement puts it, “we are cultivating students’ unique capabilities.”
The Strategic Plan, like our school itself, exhibits a healthy relationship to continuity and change. It synthesizes perspectives from our ISACS Self-Study and the recommendations from the accreditation committee, internal data and studies, and thoughts that we heard in a series of interviews and focus groups with many of you over the course of the past year. It draws on our past to meet the moment and to look to the future.
The title, “Strategic Plan 2025-2030: Heart, Mind, & Community,” picks up on the language of our school’s mission statement and that of the new Portrait of a Learner — which was itself the product of a semester’s work of faculty discussions last fall.
As I mentioned in my letter a few weeks ago, the plan is organized around four major goals that speak to values that we share.
Four goals:
- Unify our Campus, Culture, Identity, and Vision
- Sustain Excellence in Teaching and Learning
- Deepen our Sense of Community
- Foster Student Well-being, Engagement, and Fulfillment
I see these goals as being visionary in scope: you can never really check “deepen our sense of community” off the list. They’re something like Platonic ideals: a vision to move ever closer to.
Nested under each of these goals are more specific and actionable ones, such as developing an outdoor learning program, building a best-in-class Lower School, attracting and developing a new generation of teachers, and deliberately balancing our use of instructional technology with low tech or no tech approaches to learning and life.
We are not chasing trends, but reasserting our long-standing values and priorities to meet the moment. The Strategic Plan is an expression of our school’s mission and a commitment about how we will spend our time, energy, and attention.
Of course, the plan sets many goals related to campus unification. Some are about specifics of the new Lower School program: putting stakes in the ground about the importance of play-based education, project-based learning, outdoor education, and multi-age experiences. Others are about the ripple effects of this fundamental transformation of our campus and community.
It’s important to remember that we will be fully unified on the Hillsdale Campus two years from now, August 2027, which is less than halfway through the five-year Strategic Plan. I’ll offer two observations about this. First, unification is integrated into our Strategic Plan, not a parallel or competing process. And second, unification isn’t truly the end in and of itself; rather, it is the means for achieving so many other ends.
First, unification is integrated into our Strategic Plan, not a parallel or competing process. And second, unification isn’t truly the end in and of itself; rather, it is the means for achieving so many other ends.
I know I can speak for everyone on the Board and the administration when I say how excited I am about this new strategic plan, one that draws on our past to chart out our future and strikes an important balance between continuity and change. Let’s get started!
