Rationale
While we treasure and intend to sustain LWS’s rural heritage, close-knit community and traditional college preparatory curriculum, we are also committed to the school’s responsible and necessary evolution in response to local and global change. Evidence emerges daily in national headlines supporting Thomas Friedman’s 2005 thesis that technological connectedness is leveling the playing field, giving individuals and organizations the ability to compete and collaborate in real time, on a global scale. We recognize that youth today face a dramatically more complex array of challenges and opportunities than previous generations and that their parents have an ever expanding range of options for their children’s education.
“We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet“.
-Margaret Mead
As we look to the future, the most critical challenge for LWS is to ensure that we provide the resources that promote the kind of intellectual and academic experiences we would have for our own children-and for every LWS student. Fortunately, the foreign travel program experiences the world as its classroom. The outdoor program explores the entire intermountain west - its mountains, rivers and canyons. The LWS competitive ski and ride program is exceptional because of our collaboration with the local Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club and the training facilities at Howelsen Hill and Mt.Werner.
In contrast, LWS’s campus facilities do not provide a commensurate quality of support for the school’s programs and students. Our academic, social, recreational and living spaces all need renovations or significant additions. While our students’ outdoor, foreign travel and ski/ride experiences rely on extraordinary natural and global resources, it is here on campus that students spend the majority of their time enrolled at the school. LWS’s facilities must evolve along with the school’s programs and current students’ needs.
The strategic renovation of existing buildings and the construction of additional campus facilities will promote the overall excellence of the school’s teaching and learning environment, strengthening and sustaining the Lowell Whiteman Experience for the school’s next fifty years.
Now, over two years from the initiation of the planning process, we are pleased to announce Lowell Whiteman School’s forward-looking, environmentally-conscious Campus Master Plan. A 10-year plan with a 25-year vision, Building on the Experience acknowledges the changes shaping our current world and affirms and honors the school’s traditions and core values. The Building on the Experience plan appears, at first, to be largely about renovation and construction, but it is ultimately about resources. To ensure its future, LWS must develop the resources to:
• Recruit and retain students who benefit from and contribute to the Experience
• Recruit and retain faculty and staff who will sustain the quality of the Experience
• Sustain small class sizes and student-teacher ratios
• Moderate tuition increases and sustain financial aid at necessary levels
• Operate under a financial model that is sustainable well into the future
• Provide students and faculty with the appropriate educational facilities and spaces
There are essential skills, experiences and perspectives students acquire during their LWS Experience that have timeless value. We are teaching them to think creatively, to interpret and analyze information and to apply it insightfully and responsibly. We are immersing students in cultures initially foreign to them. We are teaching students that the lasting joy of academic and athletic endeavors lies in a balance of process and product. We are showing them that you can learn volumes from the natural world if you engage with it reflectively and respectfully.
As always, we remain focused on the school’s mission: “to foster the personal growth of its students, prepare them to succeed in advanced study, to serve as passionate stewards of our human and natural worlds, and to pursue responsible, creative lives.” Every day, we are building on The Lowell Whiteman Experience.