Since I was a young child, I have spent a week or two every summer in Central Oregon. Each time upon my arrival, I feel a change in my body, as I breathe in the pine-scented air, see the Cascade mountain range rising up in the near-distance, and find myself walking paths and trails that I have visited my entire life. There is a small creek that I always visit on my first and last day, a bubbling spring emerging directly from the ground that is so clean that you can actually drink the water. The tagline for the community we stay in is, “There is a place,” which has always struck me as just the right way to describe it. There is something about the place that needs to be experienced to fully understand.
Our Los Gatos campus has always been a “place” like that too. Every time I walk onto campus, I feel my blood pressure drop and I feel like I am entering a place and a space that feels right. I know that this is a common experience, as I hear from families year after year how they fell in love with our school when they walked on campus, visited classrooms, watched children moving in and out of our 14 acres of learning spaces. Indeed, I have heard families say that as soon as they toured our campus, they realized there was no longer a choice – they had to send their children here.
To some degree, I believe that our families sense intuitively what our team of educators has designed intentionally: a purpose-based education that is grounded in a sense of place. Walking through our Los Gatos campus, you will see evidence of how we utilize our space – flexible classroom design that helps students develop agency for their own learning, design and engineering space in the Hub that invites students to learn core making skills and engage in an extraordinary array of real-world problem solving and creation. Our campus is filled with natural spaces that invite reflection, curiosity, deep scientific observation, and play for students of a broad range of ages and stages.
Starting this Fall, we have another campus that I am confident will quickly become a “place” too. Our brand new Upper School campus is opening this year, with the celebratory ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Upper School Arts & Athletics Building this coming Monday, August 26. This stunning new space – a renovation of the historical Armory Building with a spectacular gym at the center – will be the first of two historical buildings that will become the heart of the Upper School campus in downtown San Jose. The building has been beautifully restored, preserving its historical character, while also providing state-of-the-art learning spaces for our Upper School students. The newly designed space has already been honored by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, receiving top honors for Rehab and Reuse, a new, purposeful use of a historical space.
Like our Los Gatos campus, the learning is not simply tied to what happens inside this beautiful new building. The true power of our Upper School campus is that it unlocks the opportunity to make the city our classroom. From this new site, Upper School students will have immediate access to educational opportunities at City Hall, the local courthouses, San Jose State University, myriad non-profit organizations in the arts and social services, and some of the largest tech companies in the world. Like last year, our students will start the year in Immersives, three-week interdisciplinary courses that are academically challenging and deeply tied to the city around them. 9th graders will explore energy usage in urban spaces, including a detailed analysis of the energy usage at our new campus, while 10th graders will participate in one of two offerings: a design course looking at tiny homes and issues impacting the unhoused, or a course exploring the First Amendment in contemporary society, with particular attention to campus protest, pop culture, and sports. The latter is a course I will be co-teaching, an experience I am beyond excited about, and an amazing opportunity for me to reconnect with my teaching roots as a US history teacher. The city as a classroom makes these educational experiences possible.
In education there is a term: the third teacher, which refers to the role that space plays in a student’s education. The term comes from the Reggio Emilia philosophy and the idea that students have three teachers: adults, other students, and the environment in which they learn. Our two campuses, with their deep sense of place, are the ultimate third teacher. Both spaces ground students in their learning while also providing endless provocations and invitations that invite curiosity and exploration.
And, with their strong sense of place, both spaces quickly feel to students, families, and employees like something more than a school. For years, I have had alums return to our Los Gatos campus and say they feel like they are coming home. I have no doubt that our San Jose campus will quickly develop that same deep connection. Indeed, standing in the middle of the new gymnasium the other evening after everyone had left, I took a moment to simply be in the space. I closed my eyes and imagined all that will happen here in the years ahead, and felt an incredible sense of excitement and anticipation and deep gratitude for the team who worked tirelessly to make the space a reality.
More than anything, I thought to myself, there is a place. Welcome back to school, everyone.