Excerpt from the April 10, 2010 Head of School Letter to the Harley Community 

Dr. Tim Cottrell

This past Friday I was in Newark, NJ at St. Phillips Academy, the newest Horizons affiliate, to present to the Board of Director of Horizons National the expansion work going on in Rochester. Over the past two years, a great deal of progress has been made on the idea of expanding Horizons in Rochester to help more children with this program of summer enrichment. The national organization is excited by the work we are undertaking and there is a lot we can be proud of as a leader in the independent school community. With some background, I would like to share the gist of what was presented to the Horizons National board.

Horizons 101: Harley is now entering its sixteenth year with a Horizons program. We were among the first affiliates to adopt the program that was created at New Canaan Country School. The model is pretty simple, take K-8 students from an urban setting who qualify for the free or reduced lunch program and enroll them in a 6-week summer enrichment program. To date, this is how the program is implemented at approximately 20 independent schools, nationally. It would be correct to say that the program is very close to attending Harley for 6 weeks in the summer. Why this is relevant is that it has been found that what happens in the summer plays a direct role in what is well known as the achievement gap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_States. “The summer slide in academic performance among low income children is the single clearest contributor to growth in the achievement gap over a child’s elementary school years. I know of no better intervention than Horizons programs to offset that summer decrement”—Dr. Edward Ziglar, Center for Child Development and Social Policy, Yale University and Founder, Head Start. Our data substantiates this. The young people in the program progress rather than regress during the summer and as a result, they don’t suffer from the achievement gap. More than 90% of the graduates of our program achieve a high school diploma and go to college. Remarkable results within a school district that struggles to graduate half of the student population. Our program serves about 120 children, many Harley students benefit from volunteering at Horizons and funding-wise, the program is supported by fundraising outside of Harley normal operations. It’s often a misunderstanding that tuition dollars or other school funds support the expenses of Horizons. We do incur expenses but they are in the form of in-kind support i.e., use of the facility and administrative assistance. 

Why does Harley do it? (for those of you who have seen the text of this talk, you can skip down to the “what are we doing now” section to read about the current work).

This is part of the public purpose of private schools and here is my answer in the form of a presentation I’ve given to gatherings of Heads of School in the hope that they would consider becoming a Horizons affiliate.

“So the question is, why should an independent school take this on as an area to which we commit our help?   As all of you know, there are many service and philanthropic endeavors that our schools support and this is one that, if you are going to do it well, takes considerable resources. So, why do it?

Well the first answer to this question comes from a values perspective. Independent schools should commit their resources to help in this area because the work required to make a difference is what we do well. Young people are in need of education and we are very good at educating young people.

On moral grounds, when you do something very well, as we do, you have an obligation to give of it. This is fundamentally responsible conduct and our mission statements likely contain these values in some way, shape or form.

Our schools were constructed and have evolved so that they have the resources to engage the mind, body and spirit of our students. On a daily basis our students are challenged intellectually, they experience the arts, we work to grow their social and emotion selves, we expose them to new sports and challenge them to take healthy risks as young athletes and we show them that we care about them, about who they are, and what they interested in.

Metaphorically speaking, we are like fertile gardens in which young minds grow and in practical terms, our gardens aren’t typically fully planted in the summer, there is open ground with which we can work and there are young people near our schools who are withering in their environment. It is a moral imperative to help.

We also benefit from public support in terms of our 501c3 tax status. On ethical grounds we should give back to the public sector. The privileged tax status that we enjoy is a form of social subsidy. The public does, either by the lack of taxes that we could contribute or by the community services that we use, subsidize our existence as independent schools. Of course, if you do the calculation of what we save the state in terms of taking kids out of the public system, the state comes out far ahead but just the same we couldn’t exist without this privileged tax status.

Question answered, that’s why The Harley School does it.

But as a Head of School, I have a practical hat as well as an altruistic one and you can also get to the same answer from a more self-serving point of view.   In terms of “what’s in it for me,” the schools gains in vitality, energy and identity because of the program and this is a genuine return on investment for the institution in the more traditional definition.

Harley’s teachers are part of the Horizons faculty and this is some of the best professional development work that you can find, and they are getting paid for it. They get to meet teachers outside of our school and experience an affirmation of the importance of their craft, that what they do can make a profound difference for this group of kids. They get reinvigorated every summer.

Our students volunteer to help with the program. Each summer 20 to 30 Harley students volunteer to work at Horizons and this is a diversity experience that brings together groups from our community who don’t know each other. The greater Rochester area, like much of America, is not a homogenous distribution of ethnicities. It’s quite heterogeneous with real and imagined boundaries separating the life experiences of kids who live within miles of each other.  

This volunteer work comes back internally to the school in the form of student leadership. Students who have worked in the Horizons program gain an understanding of their community and they grow into young people actualized to help.

For example, a few years ago, a couple of seniors, approached the administration with the idea of building a Habitat for Humanity house as their senior service project. We accomplished it and it was a student-led all-school initiative. Many of the student leaders had been Horizons volunteers and I believe this experience gave them a deeper understanding of the city in which they live and their capacity to take on the responsibility of making a difference

For both the students and faculty, hosting Horizons adds a dynamic creativity to our school. Annually, we see new projects and programs spin off from Horizons.

In the past two years alone, we’ve launched a program called BRIDGES, that is loosely modeled on the Rocking the Boat program in the Bronx, which brings together Horizons graduates and Harley Upper School students. This happens during the school year and the group of students come together to build boats. It’s a project-based environment but the underlying goal is experiential diversity work and it’s been a great success.

We have an organic garden at the school and this past summer, working in the garden became part of the Horizons curriculum. This led us to make a connection with a local organization that focuses on urban agriculture—Rochester Roots. This in turn led to faculty and student initiatives around the idea of fixed bed gardening and this work subsequently led to a trip this year that students and faculty will take to South Africa to install fixed bed agriculture units for families that have been decimated by the AIDS epidemic.   

This is what I mean by a dynamic creativity coming back to the school environment because of our participation in the Horizons program.

It also connects the school to our community. It has given me the opportunity to get to know the Superintendent of the Rochester City School district and talk to him about how we could work together to expand the program. There are a couple of instances of Horizons affiliates that have public side support and this is potentially a very interesting model. The Horizons program accomplishes what many city school districts are trying to do during the summer and the superintendent and I are talking about the idea of scaling up the program with a public and private braiding of funds. But it is because of Horizons that I have a good working relationship with the superintendent of the city schools.

So you can see that even if you took the stance of “what’s in it for my school” rather than viewing the investment in Horizons as an ethical and moral responsibility, it still justifies an affirmative answer the question of why a school would take on the responsibility of support.

What we do well, gives us great ability to do good and by doing good, we further establish what we do well. 

This is the answer, from my point of view, to the question of why an independent school would take on the responsibilities of a Horizons program.”

What are we doing now? Well, a couple of years ago, we looked at the success of the program, the needs of the children of our city and the fundraising challenges we face each year for Horizons. The vision that came out of this work was to grow Horizons into a regional program that would engage 1,000 students each summer. We would need to find new affiliates within our community and gain the support of the RCSD for a larger summer enrichment effort.

We’ve been working on this for the past two years and a lot has been accomplished. Last year was the first summer that the RCSD supported the program by taking on the transportation needs. Three independent schools, five colleges, principals from many RCSD schools and the Superintendent’s senior administrative group all visited/evaluated our Horizons program. We also raised $300,000 from two families who have supported Horizon’s from its inception at Harley for the development of a Rochester regional program. The culmination of our first year is that The Warner School at the University of Rochester has agreed to be the first new affiliate program. This summer they will have two sections, K and 5, at Harley in a model of incubating the first year of new programs which will thereafter move to the host site.

The board members of Horizons National are thrilled that the Harley chapter is breaking new ground with colleges and universities. To date, only independent schools host Horizons programs. Many “ifs” remain and equal in importance to growing a larger program is maintaining the quality of our program. We have a new Executive Director, Luis Perez, at the helm and he has a distinguished background in leading programs that help the children of Rochester. 

At the end of the day, our community needs private-side leadership to support the good work of those leading the RCSD. If our school can also be a leader toward closing the achievement gap for thousands of the children of our city, we will benefit from the health that grows out of serving the greater good. If you are interested in helping with Horizons in any way, please contact Conger Gable: cgabel@mindspring.com, Chair of the Horizons Advisory Board.