About

Strategic Planning

Strategic Plan | 2019-2025

In August 2019, the Board of Trustees approved Archer's strategic plan for the next 5 years. Click on a goal area below to learn more.

List of 5 items.

  • I. Transformational Teaching and Learning

    1. Recruit, support, and retain a diverse and expert faculty by providing a research-based professional learning community, competitive compensation, and a culture that promotes teachers’ growth and well-being.
    1. Reimagine Archer’s curriculum map as a future-facing interactive framework of purposeful, inquiry-driven learning.
    1. Amplify Archer’s position as a thought leader on how girls learn and thrive by defining and publishing its culture of excellence in teaching and learning.

  • II. Empowerment and Confidence of Girls

    1. Establish competency strands across the curriculum, including cross-cultural, environmental, digital, and financial literacies. 
    1. Provide opportunities for girls to study and exercise entrepreneurial leadership, including access to a network of exceptional female mentors and role models.

  • III. Relationships, Culture, and Community

    1. Create and implement a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan.
    1. Elevate service learning as a signature experiential program with clearly defined areas of inquiry and impact. 

  • IV. Joy and Well-Being of Girls

    1. Develop a wellness inventory in order to measure and promote what it means for a girl to be healthy and strong in body, mind, and spirit.
    1. Safeguard Archer’s culture of joy and gratitude by articulating and assessing the factors that contribute to a vibrant, joyful community.

  • V. Institutional Stewardship and Strength

    1. Seek additional approaches to broaden Archer’s affordability. 
    1. Increase unrestricted financial reserves. 
    1. Continue Archer’s ongoing commitment to preserving and enhancing its campus.

Mission Statement

The Archer School for Girls nurtures the fearlessness, compassion, and resilience girls need to pursue their brilliance.

Mission

The Archer School for Girls empowers young women to discover their passions and realize their true potential in an environment that is both ambitious and joyful.
We sustain a collaborative, student-centered teaching and learning community that explores and contributes to the research on how girls learn and thrive.
We engage girls in a purposeful, inquiry-driven curriculum that fosters critical thinking and life-long intellectual curiosity.
We inspire girls to become confident, ethical leaders, strengthening their voices and capacity to contribute positively to their communities.
We promote challenge-seeking, encourage creative risk-taking, and embrace each girl’s unique possibility.
We support girls to develop meaningful relationships in a diverse and inclusive community rooted in empathy, integrity, and responsibility.
We graduate courageous, resilient young women who take responsibility for their own physical, financial, and emotional well-being.

Looking Back: A Reflective Process - Organize, Imagine, Launch


Strategic planning involves and affects everyone within the community. When an organization goes into strategic planning mode, it takes a big step back to reaffirm what we do, what we cherish here, and makes a commitment to upholding it. We also reimagine who we could be along with new and promising ways to deliver on our mission. As the educational landscape, demographics, and other related factors change, we need to take them into account. In essence, strategic planning seeks to ensure that an Archer education remains relevant and transformational for our students. It calls on us to reflect and set new goals for the next five years.

During the 2018-2019 school year, our three-phased approach, Organize, Imagine, Launch, provided the entire Archer community with the opportunity to contribute meaningful input and reflect on the School’s mission, values, and future.


A Message from the Head of School

This is a thrilling moment for Archer. Not only are we opening a stunning, new Academic Center, we’ve launched a new cycle of strategic planning. Strategic planning will offer a generative new vision that emerges for Archer’s future, a vision that will at once uphold our most cherished programs and practices and imagine new ones to ensure our students thrive in college and beyond.

We have lofty goals at Archer for amplifying our mission and disseminating what we do. Visitors come from across the country and the world to see the School in action. The question that invariably arises is, "How did Archer create the kind of culture that results in such a strong professional community among faculty and such a healthy, high-achieving student body?" As we imagine the next five years at Archer, we’ll be thinking deeply about how we ensure that the School remains a leader in cutting-edge education for girls. This will require deepening our knowledge base and engaging in further research on how girls learn and develop - and investing in our teachers to deliver on those findings. We’ll also consider how we make our research and practice available to other learning communities in order to multiply our impact.

Over the next few months, we’ll be engaging the entire Archer community in the strategic planning process and asking you to imagine all the possibilities that await The Archer School for Girls. On behalf of the entire Strategic Planning Committee, we look forward to hearing from you!

- Elizabeth English
 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

List of 4 frequently asked questions.

  • What is the purpose of Strategic Planning?

    Strategic Planning provides a unifying and inspiring vision, shared goals and direction, stimulates reflection and growth to avoid complacency and stagnation, and ensures excellence.

  • What inputs or data are necessary for effective goal setting?

    Effective goal setting gathers input from constituent surveys, dashboard analytics (demographics, enrollment, finance, fundraising), market research (perception audit, enrollment surveys, competitor analysis), and trend analyses (independent schools, higher education, disruptors).

  • Who is responsible for a strategic plan’s implementation?

    The entire community is responsible for implementation. The Board provides strategic partnership, goal setting, advancement, and resource allocation. The Head provides inspiration, distributed leadership, and ownership. The Senior Administration team, faculty, and staff operationalize the plan. Students and families give ongoing feedback through surveys and assessment data.

  • How does an organization know it has been successful?

    An organization is successful with a plan that is simple, clear, and actionable. Priorities are written as measurable objectives. Implementation steps are arrived at by asking questions. There is broad participation and ownership among the community in answering those questions. Finally, outcomes demonstrate measurable success.

"I raise up my voice - not so I can shout but so that those without a voice can be heard... We cannot succeed when half of us are held back."

Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

The Archer School for Girls admits students of any race, color, religion, national and ethnic origin, sexual orientation or other legally protected status to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national and ethnic origin, sexual orientation or other legally protected status in its hiring or in the administration of its educational policies and programs, admissions policies, financial aid programs or other school-administered programs. 

The Archer School for Girls’ mission is to educate students in an environment specifically designed for girls. As such, the school will consider any candidate for admission who identifies as a girl. Once admitted to Archer, all students in good academic standing who abide by Archer’s code of conduct and who meet requirements for graduation will be eligible to receive an Archer diploma, regardless of any change in sexual identity or other legally protected status.