From the Interim Head of School

August 4, 2010

As Phoenix Country Day School celebrates 50 years, and anticipates the next half-century of distinguished service to youth, it is a special honor to serve as Interim Head of School for this academic year.

Over more than three decades I have spent 28 years as a “regular” headmaster, and four years as an “interim” Head of School on the east and west coasts, in the south and midwest, and in Europe. All of these institutions have ranked among the very finest independent schools nationally and internationally, as does Phoenix Country Day School.

Although so far having spent only a limited time on the PCDS campus, the major sources of this school’s impressive educational excellence are nonetheless obvious:

• Faculty and staff who are highly professional, hard working, and absolutely dedicated to both nurturing and challenging the youth in their care.
   
• Students who are bright, energetic, inquisitive, and who are delighted academically and socially to come to school.
   
• Parents who are fully committed to the high standards Phoenix Country Day School sets for their daughters and sons.
   
• The ideal school size. PCDS is large enough to offer an extraordinary rainbow of academic, athletic, and extracurricular opportunities appropriate to a student’s age level, yet small enough to assure that education here is an intimate, personal process. Teachers know their students well, and both challenge and encourage them as individuals in small classes and elsewhere around the campus.

In this day and age, many schools incorrectly view successful education as an extremely complex process, but
Phoenix Country Day School, like other outstanding and sophisticated schools, long ago discovered that the formula for a really first rate education is relatively simple: put highly qualified, caring faculty, and eager, bright youth together in a personalized setting on a bucolic campus with a robust curriculum and first rate educational facilities – and let things happen. Great things have been happening here for five decades in terms of the intellectual, physical, and character development of youth, and the best is yet to come!

— Lee Pierson