2023 Head of School Report

The Day School remains strong and healthy in its 67th year. Our programs operate within a vibrant community marked by academic excellence and innovation, creative expression, regular worship, and opportunities for service. Our community is nurtured by our Episcopal traditions of open inquiry and inclusion, affirming the infinite value of each individual as a child of God. 

Enrollment for the 2023-2024 academic year is 477 students, supported by 125 passionate faculty and staff. Our student body includes 89 new students, a 29% increase in the number of students new to the Day School during the previous academic year. 

Programming throughout our three divisions—Nursery School, Lower School, and Middle School—has regained the vibrancy of pre-pandemic offerings and includes treasured traditions such as our Christmas pageants and St. Francis Day Chapel—with live wolfhounds! 

The Day School experience is enhanced by new offerings representing our continued commitment to academic and athletic excellence, social justice, and environmental stewardship.

This winter, we held our first-ever school-wide spelling bee. Three students qualified for a regional competition to be held in February. Finalists from that competition will compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in March. After several years of passionate advocacy from students, parents, and coaches, we added the first-ever baseball team to our athletic offerings last spring.

Recent parent programming included a session on how to discuss gender and gender identity with children. JR and Vanessa Ford, authors of the children’s book Calvin, spoke about how they navigated school settings and gained community support for their family’s journey with a child who is transgender. 

Established in 2017, the Day School’s sustainability program remains a priority, rooted in our social justice work. Recent milestones include a Green Flag Award from the National Wildlife Federation’s Eco-Schools Program—the first awarded to a Washington, DC school.  This is the highest award offered by this program and is reserved for schools achieving sustainability milestones—such as our active work on de-carbonization.

The Day School’s relationship with the parish remains a distinguishing feature.  Our core values stem from this association, now in its seventh decade, and continue to inform and guide the Day School’s worship, spiritual life, and service initiatives. Four weekly chapel services nourish our community, and our work with the Grate Patrol and partnership with St. Etienne Church and School in Haiti take our shared expressions of service beyond our campuses. 

I especially appreciate the collaborative space the Coordinating Committee provides, which is composed of Vestry and Day School leadership. Led by Andrew Ogletree, our ongoing work includes dedicated time, attention, and conversation to define and support our shared purpose. 

It is an exciting time at the Day School! Areas of interest and focus for our Board of Trustees include examining how our indoor and outdoor spaces can best support our overall programming (academic, athletic, and auxiliary). We are proud of our recently renovated science labs, which opened this fall.

I remain honored and humbled to lead the Day School, a continuing and outward expression of God’s love, nurtured by St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church, a leading parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

In closing, I ask for your prayers as the faculty, staff, and I continue to serve as stewards of the precious community of children with which God has entrusted us.

Faithfully,