A Turning Point in Our School History?

By now, EMHS students are aware, via chapels and neighbor group discussions, that the school is in a time of transition.  The school administration, particularly the Development Office, is working to create plans that will determine the course of the school for years to come.  As part of this effort, a weekend retreat involving faculty and administration members was recently held with the help of Allen Lefever, a local citizen who specializes in helping organizations like EMHS plan for their futures.

Principal Paul Leaman says that one of the main goals of the event was to help determine three long term planning principles:  1)  What is the school passionate about?,  2)  What are the school’s strengths?,  And 3) What makes the school work economically?  One of the main goals of EMHS’s long term planning, according to Leaman, is to help find where those areas overlap and can work together.

One of the main focuses of future development will be expanding academic options valuable to college bound students, such as AP classes.  “We have to be serious about strengthening programs for students going to competitive colleges,” Leaman said, while stressing that the school also wants to preserve and expand opportunities for students who aren’t going to college.  Sarah Schaeffer, the head of EMHS’s Development Office, concurs, saying she thinks it’s a shame that students taking Calculus or a fourth year of Spanish must go to EMU (and pay extra tuition).

How will the new programs be funded?  Leaman says that if the school can increase enrollment, funding shouldn’t be a problem as long as community support keeps up.  EMHS’s current facilities are intended for three hundred sixty students, but only about three hundred twenty now attend.  Because of this discrepancy, Schaeffer says that she hopes to achieve a “greater awareness in the community” of EMHS and what it has to offer.  This, she hopes, will also help the school to be a “mission” in the community.

Might the drive for new students compromise the school’s identity?  Leaman says that he wants to do more to help non-Mennonite students feel welcome, and to focus on the student body’s commonalities rather than its differences.  At the same time, he says that the school’s core values are “non-negotiable” and that they will be preserved even as less critical distinctions are done away with.  Schaeffer agrees, saying that the school can survive getting rid of extraneous rules while preserving its core identity and values, such as its emphasis on service.

Is there a chance that the school might drop the word “Mennonite” from the name at any point in the foreseeable future, as has happened with other, similar institutions in similar situations?  Schaeffer says that she “hears nothing to make me think it will happen in my lifetime.”  While Leaman stresses that a name change isn’t in the works, he adds that “I think it’s kind of oxymoronic that the Mennonite denomination is named after a person when the last job of the denomination is to honor a person, other than Jesus.”  The school’s values, he says, are more important than names or labels.

And what of the perceived stress between those who want to keep the school accessible to as many people as possible and those who want to make it a more exclusive, high-end school?  “We don’t want to be like Woodberry Forest or Episcopal,” Schaeffer says.  “We want to preserve what we do well.”  Leaman agrees, and says that, as long as community support keeps up, tuition (adjusted for inflation) should remain about the same in coming years.

With so much at stake, hopefully the future of the school is in good hands.  “We can’t stay where we are,” says Schaeffer, “and we can’t turn away,” but, she adds, “there’s no need to worry.”

- Dustin Crummett