Welcome Prospective BVR Board Members - Beaver Country Day School

As the school’s governing body, the Board of Trustees plays a central role in overseeing the school’s operations and in planning Beaver’s future. The board’s responsibilities include setting and implementing strategic goals to fulfill the school’s mission and ensure its financial health. While day-to-day operations are the responsibility of the Core Leadership Team, longer-term projects often originate and take shape at the board level.

As you consider beginning this important work with the Board of Trustees, scroll through this page to learn more about who we are and what we believe.

BVR Community

At Beaver, we recognize the unique experiences some underrepresented students may have at independent schools, and we work diligently to promote success for all students. Through a broad range of activities and programming, we help students affirm identity, build community, and cultivate leadership skills. Throughout their time at Beaver, students have access to teachers, administrators, and staff who support them—and learn and grow alongside them. Empathy for other viewpoints is imperative for a diverse, equitable, and inclusive school.

It is all our responsibility to build this type of environment.

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BVR Students

Our curriculum is based on a pedagogical approach that engages students in real-world experiences. We are teaching them in the context of the world they are living in today, and we are challenging them to demonstrate their grasp of subject matter through meaningful work. This unique approach creates a tremendous advantage: students build independence through learning structure and accountability; they also grow as critical thinkers who embrace exploring new subjects and are able to creatively and thoughtfully apply information.

From day one, students are connected with a team of teachers and advisors who help them create personal benchmarks and goals and who give them the structure they need to reach their highest aspirations. This gives us an objective way to assess the quality of each student’s individual work and is an impetus for students to push themselves further.

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BVR Teachers

Educational practices are always evolving, so there is a fluidity to how we approach teaching. We are continuously re-examining and rethinking our approach to teaching for learning.

We believe teachers should have an active role in designing and carrying out their professional development, and we invest in those opportunities. Our faculty attend and present at conferences across the country and globe (see some recent places we’ve been below) and have time dedicated each week to exchange experiences and ideas, share best practices, and debate new ideologies.

This collaborative culture ensures our teachers have access to—and training on—the ever-evolving tools and techniques critical to being an extraordinary educator. By being in tune with new advancements in teaching, our faculty are empowered to try new things to help students push themselves in a well-supported environment. As a result, our students are being led by best-in-class faculty.

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Professional development programs

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BVR History

Beaver Country Day School was incorporated in 1920 by a group of Boston-area parents who wished to have a truly “progressive” (in the John Dewey sense) school for their children to attend in their middle and high school years. The school opened its doors to students in the fall of 1921, and its original appeal was based on such radical notions as the need for education to focus on the individual needs, experiences, and developing capacities of its students.
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Students were taught through creativity and play as well as through hard work, and teachers were hired for their own creativity as well as for their commitment to the well-being of children. In its earliest days, the school included a coeducational primary program, but from the seventh grade on, the school was for girls only. The student body at the time reflected the demographics of affluent Boston, with Brookline and Beacon Hill-Back Bay families predominating. It is interesting to note that the hard-headed Bostonians who founded the school also insisted that progressive education pay its own way: the current school building was constructed piecemeal over a period of years on a cash-flow basis.

The first Head of School, Eugene R. Smith, is regarded today by some scholars as a major unsung hero of the progressive education movement, and it was indeed a coup for Beaver’s founding families to lure Smith away from the Park School of Baltimore. By the early 1930s, Smith’s assiduous recruiting of faculty committed to progressive ideals and his energy as a leader had helped to establish Beaver as one of the nation’s leading progressive schools. As such it was chosen in 1932 to participate in the “Eight-Year Study,” a controlled experiment designed and led by Dr. Ralph Tyler of Ohio University (and funded by the Carnegie Foundation), to explore the comparative strengths of progressive, versus traditional, secondary education. By the time the study ended, coincident with the start of American involvement in World War II, it had been established that in college students from progressive secondary schools performed as well as, and in some areas more successfully than, peers from traditional systems. Unfortunately for Beaver and for progressive education in general, the exigencies of the war re-emphasized the virtues of traditional, goal-driven, mass training as necessary for a nation at war, and the Eight Year Study was set aside and is now considered an interesting, if somewhat tragic, footnote in American educational history.

At the end of World War II, Eugene Smith had retired, and Beaver was in the hands of managers who saw the school’s future in more traditional terms. While the student demographic remained unchanged (some 42 of Boston’s 130 debutantes in the 1946 season were Beaver students), the curricular emphasis was now on training young women in traditional areas using traditional means. Certain aspects of Beaver’s progressive heritage remained, however, including a continuing strength in the performing and visual arts and a sense of connection to the world at large; Eleanor Roosevelt once addressed a student convocation on America’s place in the world.

Through the 1950s and early Sixties Beaver maintained itself as a successful girls’ school in Boston, sending an increasing number of its graduates to two- and four-year college programs and continuing to attract students from families of “affluence and influence” in the community. Campus development in the period included the construction of a gymnasium and a wing housing both a library and several large, state-of-the-art science classrooms, a nod to the community’s felt need to emphasize and support traditional academic programs and values.

Like that of many other independent schools, Beaver’s experience in the late 1960s and through the 1970s was a “mixed bag.” Student and community interest in diversifying the student body began to have visible impact in terms of the racial and religious mix of students and faculty, and the retirement of the school’s second Head in 1967 opened the door for further change. The old “progressive” values seemed to resurface in the school’s culture and to a degree in the curriculum, but in many ways this resurfacing was more of a pretext for making change to accommodate a student body and a parent community that was questioning traditional values just as much in schools as they were in family life, community structures, and politics. To make a long story short, in many ways Beaver began to look more “permissive” than progressive. Coeducation in the early 1970s only served to further distance Beaver from many aspects of its core identity of the previous generation: alumnae from the single-sex days could not always recognize a coed school, and graduates from the Fifties and Sixties strained to see remnants of the “traditional” school to which they had gone. Those who remembered fondly the earliest progressive days under Eugene Smith did not always see the similarities between the Age of Aquarius and their experiences in the Age of Coolidge and Hoover.

Through it all, however, any perusal of Beaver’s archives clearly reveals that certain core values had remained intact since the moment of founding. Beaver students and families remained passionate about the arts, and extensive and active programs were a hallmark of the school—perhaps even reaching a peak in the Fifties, when Tammy Grimes and Jane Alexander trod the boards of Beaver’s stage. Although facilities development in the arts never occurred on any large scale, the importance of these programs cannot be overstated.

Similarly, Beaver had remained notable since its founding for the quality and passion of its faculty. The intellectual achievements of the men and women who taught at Beaver were only surpassed by their obsessive concern for the development of the individual student. In an era when students elsewhere were largely expected to take whatever was offered to them, students at Beaver were challenged, cajoled, encouraged, inspired, and loved by a faculty that, however quirky its individual members, collectively cared deeply and personally about the life and learning of each student.

As the Reagan era began, Beaver, though packed with students, was in philosophical disarray. Without a meaningfully redefined sense of “progressive” and uncomfortable with old-fashioned values, Beaver drifted toward a kind of easy-going traditionalism that satisfied few and which became increasingly difficult to describe or, when questioned, defend. For roughly a decade, the school went through an identity crisis characterized by declining enrollments and a growing alienation of its constituencies. Administrative efforts to traditionalize the school seemed also to frustrate those committed to maintaining Beaver’s historical areas of strength, including the arts and the deep personal commitment of faculty members.

In 1992 Beaver began a serious process of curriculum, program, and mission review. Dramatic advances in educational thinking had led to the development of a new strain of progressivism, still based on the needs of the individual student and on making learning an active experience. At the same time, progressive social values in such areas as multiculturalism, political awareness, and community service played well with Beaver’s traditional emphasis on the development of the intellectual, creative, and moral capacity of the individual. Student interest in athletics inspired the continuing development of an already extensive athletic program, and here again, the traditionally progressive value of collaboration could be seen reflected in student teamwork as well as in the growing number of ensemble productions on the stage and in musical performance. Beaver faculty saw every reason to master the arts of the “new” progressivism as ways to reach and inspire every student and to strengthen Beaver’s programs in unique and meaningful ways.

The Strategic Plan adopted by the Board in the spring of 2000 emphasized Beaver’s aspiration to be a leading progressive school, defined as such by its innovative and challenging curriculum, its multicultural community, its program of professional development for faculty, the resources of its campus, and the support of its constituencies. Within three years the school has made significant progress toward achieving those goals, and Beaver’s people, policies, and practices are indeed regarded as models of the very best possibilities of contemporary progressive education. The school has moved dramatically forward—toward its roots. [/toggle]