Shaping Our Vision for Park’s Campus and Future

As members of the Park community, we have a rare opportunity right now to create the Park we want for the present and for the future.

This past year, Park launched an important, vision-shaping initiative, and our engagement as a community is particularly essential. The ideal of “community” is central to the identity of Park, and it’s something we literally create and sustain together through our efforts every day.

Whether we are parents or caregivers, faculty or staff, we each chose at one time or another to join this community, and in doing so, became part of something larger than ourselves. It’s much the same for alumni: while you may not have made the choice on your own to join Park as a four-year-old or ten-year-old—or whenever your Park journey began—your daily engagement as students in the learning enterprise driven by the School’s mission, vision, and values embodied the best of Park. Your lasting affection and belief in what Park stands for continues to nourish the community.

Over the course of the fall and continuing into the winter, school leadership has invited community members to campus to explore, discuss, and envision what our campus can be, how it can serve our vision of community and learning, and how we will use the untapped resources of Park’s acreage to bring those visions into reality.

When Park moved to 11 acres on Goddard Avenue in 1971, the circular driveway met our needs. The campus was designed for a smaller, more local student body, and the driveway closely followed the northern property line. Today, with 35% more students from across the region and a campus spanning 34 acres, the driveway no longer reflects how we learn, play, and connect at Park.

The traffic flow creates barriers, limiting students’ access to nature, outdoor learning, and the full potential of our campus—especially the acreage adjacent to the Shed and the Head of School’s house. In the final chapter of The SPARK Campaign, the driveway will be reconfigured and the outdoor experience at Park will be completely transformed.

This reimagining of campus—specifically the area we are calling Park’s backyard—began with guided walks around campus this fall to help community members understand what we have to work with. What outdoor spaces could we envision? What creative purposes might they serve? These conversations led to input gathering and brainstorming, and now to the ideation that will guide the architects later this year. It’s an inclusive, creative, discovery- and solution-focused effort grounded in our mission, vision, values, and hopes for Park’s next phase.

Inclusivity and Community

The community-wide engagement in this phase, and the many voices envisioning the way forward, reflect our belief that at Park, it all starts with community. Since its launch in 2021, The SPARK Campaign has centered inclusivity as a core value. In the coming months, everything we do will build on that foundation of inclusive community engagement.

Through the data and reflections we collect and consider—from the self-study to shaping the campus vision—we hope to bring the Park community together in shared excitement for all that Park is and all it aspires to be. These efforts reflect Park’s commitment to inclusivity in ways that will have a lasting, powerful impact on the long-term health of the School.

By Shannon O'Leary, Director of Development

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