Education Vision

Joanne Hoffman is Moses Brown's<br> first female head of school in the<br>school's 220-year history.
Joanne Hoffman is Moses Brown's
first female head of school in the
school's 220-year history.

Moses Brown Head of School cherishes past, evaluates future

Joanne Hoffman

Position: Head of School at Moses Brown School

Background: Hoffman has been head of school for 10 years; prior to
that she was associate head and English teacher at Concord Academy in Massachusetts.
She also served in a number of administrative positions at The Ethel Walker
School in Simsbury, Conn., and was also assistant dean of students and English
teacher at the Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Conn.


Education: Bachelor’s degree in English from Marymount College in New
York; master’s in English from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.


Age: 56


Residence: Providence


 



Q. What attracted you to Moses Brown and what was it like becoming the first female head of school?



A.
I came with 25 years of experience in schools … so I came here with the kind of understanding of the way in which independent schools work and thrive. I was drawn to Moses Brown because of its mission as a Friends (Quaker) school. I was drawn to the real ethos of the school, which has to do with respect for individual voice and vision, therefore a real commitment to diversity. I was drawn to the school because of its long heritage, tradition, and as a Friends school that cares about academic excellence, rigor. … The students are taught to be, in their classrooms, great analyzers, great researchers, introspective thinkers, very powerful listeners, collaborative problem solvers. I was really intrigued by that. … I was intrigued by the fact that because of (it being a) Quaker school and because Quakers believe that (there is) God or goodness or light in all of us and that’s where that mutual respect comes from – what you have to say is equally important to what I have to say. There’s a real listening here and a real attention to each other that I really liked. Even though I was going to be the first female head, I will have to say I love challenge and I love finding new paths, and I like demanding situations and so I was really interested in that little piece … People have made a big deal about it since I’ve been here. While that’s certainly a splashy thing to talk about, it really didn’t have the reality for me that was important. The importance was the quality of education at Moses Brown, the reputation of academic excellence Moses Brown has and excellence across the board in the co-curriculum as well, and the longstanding history and tradition.



 



Q. How big is the school’s fund-raising arm?



A.
One of the things we decided to do was make a strategic education vision for Moses Brown School to take it into the 21st century and part of that strategic educational vision is thinking about that part. So we developed a 10-year campus plan, then that spawned a capital campaign, because we have to have a capital fund drive to pay for all of the renovations that are going on and continue to go on at Moses Brown. Nine people are in our development office but we didn’t have nine people in our development office when I got here. This has been a 10-year building process. We have a $25 million campaign and we have raised over the last four or so years, $10.6 million on that road.


 



Q. How do you build pride among alumni?



A.
One of the things that happens is I travel all over the country and talk with alumni – they already have great pride in the education they got here. I don’t actually have to build the pride at all – I have to make sure we are reconnecting with the approximately 4,500 to 5,000 alumni who are living all over this country and all over the world. That’s the job here – to reconnect with them and to have them remember what it is that really causes them to have the pride they have in Moses Brown, and it is powerful. Here’s what they say to me, almost with one voice: ‘Moses Brown was transformative. It was the transformative education in our lives.’ Here’s what young alumnus will say, and people from the 1930s and ’40s will say. This big span and all these people say the same thing: ‘I learned how to write here. I learned how to read here. I learned how to calculate here.’ Now our students are saying different things – they’re learning about technology here.


 



Q. Who and where are your target students? Has the school ever considered recruiting from outside areas or building a dorm-based campus?



A.
We’re looking for students whom we best serve and those students are bright, energetic students who want to be engaged and involved in a total learning experience. We educate the whole child here at Moses Brown – so we’re not just educating the child as an academician, but we’re educating the child to do all that academic work and work on teams. We look for students who match that which we do here, so we look for students who really want to spend their days here and their weekends here, as they often do, learning as much as they can. We’re looking for students interested in taking risks, who will be excited by new challenges. (Geographically, it’s all of Rhode Island and some of Massachusetts.)



The school was a boarding school; it was started as a boarding and day school. In the 1980s so many students were interested in coming to Moses Brown that the board decided to have Moses Brown become fully a day school, with the exception of a small residential community, 11 or 12 students (for special circumstances). Have we thought about being a five-day boarding school? Yes. It’s part of a long-term vision for the school. It won’t happen any time during my tenure, but we certainly talk about the fact that there are people who are in a wider geographical area who would like to come to Moses Brown.



Q. How do you make a diverse student body?



A.
We work very hard at it. Because we care about all kinds of diversity, our admission staff works tirelessly on going out to all manners of area institutions, and organizations, and talking about the goodness of a Moses Brown education. They do this all over the state and into Massachusetts. We also have many open houses – we’ll come and see you, but more importantly, you come and see us and look at what this is about. We have students who are able to translate several different languages, speaking of the kind of diversity that we care about.



 



Q. What is the tuition and what kind of financial aid does the school offer?



A.
(Tuition for the 2003-2004 year is $8,780 for nursery and primary; $16,100 for kindergarten to grade 5; $17,420 for grades 6 to 8; and $17,770 for grades 9 to 12.) We have a scholarship budget, which is ($1.6 million), we have it on purpose and it’s always growing so that we can bring in people from various and diverse backgrounds. We accept children without thinking about whether they need financial aid or they don’t. We accept students without looking at need, but we can’t fund them all because our budget would have to be so much bigger than it is. But we try our very best to serve the students’ needs who apply to us. Everyone who would like to apply for financial aid may, and they fill out a form and that is not collated here, it is sent to a Princeton service, a school scholarship service. So we help families with this and they’re sent away and then sent back to us from an external agency, and it does schools from all over the country. They’ll send us back their sense of apparent need, and then we allot, according to that external and objective manner.


 



Q. The school completed a major expansion a few years ago – is that it for now?



A.
We had our architects and construction folks in here (earlier). When I got here the campus plan included creating facilities that spoke to gender equity, spoke to the finest program to educate children now and for the future and several other priorities. We have the need to build more science labs and we’re going to do an entire renovation and create a new science center this summer (where the student center is now) – just the beginning stages internally to ready the building. (An addition will hold the new student center.) The middle school’s science students will go to the North Tower, which will also undergo a renovation. In the lower school, we will create two new learning environments for the third and fourth grade. There will also be some renovation of the Studio of the Three Oaks. We’re just marching through in a systematic way, realizing the campus plan. Within that financial plan, we have a faculty compensation model that is very aggressive, to increase faculty salaries. We’re in the second year of that (five-year) plan and we have increased faculty salaries dramatically, and will do so over the next three years. This model has lots of moving parts.


 



Q. How would you want the community to perceive Moses Brown?



A.
I would hope that people perceive Moses Brown as a school which educates the whole child, as a school which cares about academic excellence, and rigor, asks students to be reflective and collaborative. I would hope that others perceive Moses Brown as a place where students, faculty and administrators are committed to excellence. … I would hope that also people would understand Moses Brown’s long history of 220 years, which has always cared about serving its community, right from the founder’s first dream.

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