From the Desk of the Head of School- February 19, 2021

Dear Harding Academy Community,

I am incredibly excited to announce the launch of our new strategic plan, Embracing the Future at Harding Academy. Beginning in the fall of 2019, the Strategic Planning Team, comprised of trustees, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and Nashville community leaders, engaged in a design-thinking process that challenged us to approach our strategic landscape from new angles in order to find creative solutions so that we could begin to formulate a plan that supports current and future generations of Harding Academy students, ensuring that each Harding graduate is fully prepared to bravely and boldly embrace the future for themselves. 

We partnered with Leadership+Design, a collaborative of educators, strategists, and experienced designers, to engage the community through empathy interviews, community observations, Faculty and Parent Think Tanks, and a Community Design Day.  During these workshops we did a deep dive into the design-thinking process, actively building solutions, and imagining what our future might look like in both the short and long-term.

Whether you participated in an interview, completed a survey, or participated in a think tank or the Community Design Day, we are grateful for your contribution to this plan. With the feedback from this discovery work members of the Strategic Planning Team were able to understand the strengths and needs of the greater Harding Academy community.  As a result of these discussions and exercises, we were able to conceptualize our ideas for solutions, construct our findings into a multi-year plan and, finally, present you with Embracing the Future at Harding Academy, our strategic plan for 2021-2026.

The Embracing the Future at Harding Academy Strategic Plan consists of four pillars: 

I encourage you to explore these pillars on the website below, which explains the way our new plan is designed to further invigorate our strong curriculum and engage our close-knit community in ways that will keep our school relevant in and responsive to our rapidly changing world for years to come. 

I look forward to Embracing the Future at Harding Academy together.