"A Place to Grow" (Capital Campaign)
A Place to Grow: A Campaign for The Stony Brook School
Since 1922, The Stony Brook School has embraced the challenge of integrating an academically excellent education with a biblically based Christian faith. Today, as for the last 90 years, the School’s mission remains as relevant as ever: to develop young men and women of character, who, because of their formative experiences within the Stony Brook community, leave SBS equipped to offer hope in a fallen and broken world. In fact, SBS is one of the increasingly rare places in contemporary America where young people experience genuine global community – the context in which deep and lasting moral character is shaped.
In this residential setting, where faculty members are both spiritually unified and intellectually qualified, students constantly observe the adults surrounding them. Within this environment, teachers model – and students experience – valuable lessons in leadership, conflict resolution, forgiveness, and servanthood. These lessons occur not only in the classroom, but on the athletic fields, in the residence halls, in faculty homes, and around the dining table. Students then integrate these observations and lessons into their own roles as developing student leaders as mentors, tutors, dorm council members, team captains, and prefects.
This campaign, known as A Place to Grow: A Campaign for The Stony Brook School, seeks to reinforce the School’s commitment to a diverse yet connected community where students are repeatedly challenged to discover who they are, what they love, and how their lives can be used throughout the world in service and leadership.
Vision
To accomplish the School’s mission – preparing young men and women “to serve the world through their character and leadership” as they ask questions about life’s big issues and consider answers from a biblical perspective –requires a programmatic emphasis that is both scripted and unscripted. Stony Brook faculty are profound mentors in this regard, working with students in the classroom and in the residence halls, on the playing fields, and in the dining hall, living transparently and striving to model forgiveness, humility, reconciliation, and service to others.
Throughout the past nine decades, believing that character is best shaped in community, The Stony Brook School has placed deliberate emphasis on the practice of communal gathering – in worship, meals, and fun. This deeply embedded tradition is essential to SBS’ mission and is a core vehicle through which character is cultivated.
To continue this vision into the 21st century, we have focused in the past 15 years on the physical and financial rehabilitation of the School. The result has been a growing financial stability, a strengthening of our academic program, an emphasis on community life, and much-needed modernization of campus facilities.
- Financial Stability
- Operating budgets balanced for 10 of the last 11 years
- Endowment has nearly doubled from $7.2 million in 2001 to $13 million in 2011
- Overall gift revenue has risen from $1.6 million in 2009 to $2.5 million in 2011 - Academic Strength
- Writing curriculum expanded, targeting our students’ ability to write skillfully at the college level when they graduate from SBS
- Advanced Placement (AP) courses offered in 18 disciplines
- Over 40% of the Senior Class named AP Scholars (scoring 3 or higher on 3 or more AP exams) for the last 3 years
- Academic components integrated into Summer Programs
- Course in critical reading and reasoning skills added to ninth-grade curriculum - Community Life
- Head of Residential Life position added, along with Activities Director position
- Community service opportunities expanded
- Mid-week, all-school worship service integrated into schedule
- Traditional sit-down, family-style evening meals continue
- Leadership curriculum formalized
The Centerpiece of Community: Learning to Serve
The systematic modernization of campus facilities has resulted in an environment where relationships that build community and develop servant leaders are effectively nurtured. Three new residence halls and three major dorm renovations have been completed, along with significant upgrades to academic space, athletic facilities, and worship and assembly areas.
Yet one major piece remains to create an environment that best fosters character-development in the context of community – a new dining room and student center.
To be situated between Johnston Hall and Barnhouse and overlooking both the Campus Green and the athletic fields, this 19,000 square-foot building will featuring a spacious dining room and full-size industrial kitchen on the main level. The lower level will house offices and activity areas devoted to developing student leaders, as well as general areas conducive to unstructured interaction.
This new dining room and student center – the capstone of the School’s masterplan – will facilitate our conviction that what happens in the classroom is most deeply received when it is supplemented by formal and informal encounters with teachers and peers. It will also bridge the global and local student body, which is a treasured aspect of The Stony Brook School.
Student Center
Central to The Stony Brook School’s emphasis on developing leaders of character is the mentoring that occurs as faculty members interact with students serving in leadership positions, such as on the Prefect Board, Student Activities Council, the H.E.A.R.T. community service program, and in numerous venues in which students learn to lead through real-life experiences. Faculty and student offices for these programmatic areas are integrated into the 9,700 square-foot lower-level, which will also feature spacious lounge areas, a mail center, a campus store, and a snack bar offering freshly made food between meals and on weekends.
Dedicated to both informal student gathering as well as to structured activities, the Student Center will reinforce and affirm the centrality of community, mentoring, conversation, and shared recreational activities.
Dining Room
A highlight of the 9,700 square-foot upper-level will be a 350-seat dining room, which will allow all members of the School community to dine together at family-style tables.
Through the intimate setting of shared meals, students and faculty alike experience the intersection of manners, feelings, and actions. Service to each other is modeled, leadership is demonstrated, and character is shaped as table companions engage in civil discourse, learn to practice restraint as well as generosity, and cultivate gratitude in expressing thanks to those who have prepared the food. Whether students are working “crew” in the kitchen, serving as maitre d’s in the dining room, or dialoguing with faculty in mealtime conversation, Stony Brook’s family-style meals play a key role in teaching students to engage with others and to serve others.
Kanas Commons: A Gift and a Challenge
When students are immersed in a community whose members serve each other, the local area, and the broader world around them, they cannot help but learn servant leadership. Having experienced the organic and “real-life” manner in which The Stony Brook School trains students to “serve the world through their character and leadership,” Board member Elaine Kanas and her husband John (parents of John Kanas ‘09) are thrilled to make a transformational challenge gift that will set the stage for many future generations of students to learn how to serve and to lead.
As the lead donors for a new dining room and student center – to be known as Kanas Commons – Elaine and John affirm the lifelong value of an education such as The Stony Brook School offers. Through their giving, they are playing a critical role in Stony Brook’s timeless mission of developing leaders of character.
John and Elaine, along with The Stony Brook School’s Board of Trustees, ask the entire SBS community to join together to bring this final campaign goal to fruition. Your generous gift (payable between now and December 2013) will help to make Kanas Commons a reality for SBS students by the target date of Fall 2013.
We invite you to join us in realizing this final campaign goal through a generous gift to build Kanas Commons. Click here for ways to give, or please contact Director of Development Kathryn Sides for more information.
