Over the past three years the Scattergood School Committee has been developing a long range plan.  Thanks to the input of educational consultant Reck Niebuhr, we have been trying to expand our vision of not only Scattergood Friends School, but of the entire concept of Quaker education today.  You can see the entire Long Range Plan here.

Some of us were surprised at Reck's statistics regarding time in school (19% of waking time annually), but you readily see that once you think about it.  As you can see in other articles on this Web site, one of Reck's main ideas is that learning is always occurring, in all settings--family, social, religious as well as school.  A term to describe this is the ECOLOGY OF LEARNING.  While this has been fundamental to Quaker education in the past, many of these ideas and practices were "embedded"--taken for granted, but not usually discussed or sought to be improved.  Most of us are familiar with Scattergood as a model of those ideas.

Unfortunately, we are also aware of how the involvement of the Yearly Meeting, families and other F/friends and organizations previously associated with the school have diminished.  These were important and active ingredients in Scattergood's ecology of learning in the past.

Realizing how important that involvement is, both for the school and the Yearly Meeting, two major thrusts of the long range plan were identified:

1. an internal agenda to identify and reinforce what makes Scattergood such a successful educational environment, and
2. an external agenda to re-establish relationships between the school and the Yearly Meeting and families, which are crucial to Scattergood

Ken Hinshaw and the Scattergood School staff are making significant changes at the school to make more intentional use of the educational possibilities in all settings.

As part of the external agenda, a group of interested Friends in the Yearly Meeting was sought to explore the subject of Quaker Education, attempt to re-establish the role of the Meeting in education, and strengthen the ties between the Yearly Meeting, families, and F/friends and the school.  If you would like to join this email discussion, please send me a note by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.

Following are links to:

1/30/2001 Thomas Farquhar   Quaker Learning Process

1/20/2001  Joe Davison responds

1/20/2001  Thomas Farquhar responds

1/19/2001  Summary of Thomas Farquhar 's article in Friends Journal  What are schools for?

12/14/2000 Feeling Connected  Merry Stanford

A Halloween 2000 Musing  Reck Niebuhr

11/7/2000  Service Learning   Merry Stanford

10/30/2000 Personal relationships and education  Joe Davison

10/30/2000  Teaching Relational Skills   Jim Kenney

The entire Long Range Plan

An interim report from this group.

As part of this discussion, Martha Hampton wrote a summary of how the Yearly Meeting has evolved.

Several discussions of the history of Scattergood and the ecology of learning:

Education at the turn of the century.

Scattergood in the historical and contemporary educational context.

Scattergood and the Ecology of learning.

Jim Kenney on "The Ecology of Education".

Some concrete proposals to strengthen CONNECTIONS between IYM and the school by Jackie Leckband

Ken's report on how Scattergood is implementing changes related to the ecology of learning in this coming school year.