What If?

What if?.... Two powerful words…The words “what if…” are an invitation to creativity, to create together…to dare to imagine something special.

Over the summer, our leadership teams and, over the last few weeks, our entire faculty and staff have been collaborating to imagine a school year ahead that we hope will be the best yet in our hundreds of years of serving students.  Across our three campuses, we came together to begin this year as a community through cherished traditions and also through new experiences. Some of us have been affiliated with the school for decades.  For others, it is their first year.  However, none of us would be here today if it were not for two key individuals who asked themselves the question–What if?  In 1742, a 16-year-old girl asked herself the question… what if… What if there were a school for girls here in Pennsylvania?  A school for girls...in fact, the very first school for girls in the colonies!  In 1929, a pioneering educator in Allentown asked herself the question, what if…what if I could create a school that “nurtured the collective joy of learning and individual spirit within each child?” 

Countess Benigna Zinzendorf was that young girl who came here from Germany with her father, Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf. Count Zinzendorf, along with David Nitschmann and a small group of pioneers, helped launch the city of Bethlehem for Moravians in the hope of a new life, escaping religious persecution in Europe to imagine something new, something better.  At 16, young Benigna had the confidence to design a school founded on Moravian principles of educating the heart and the brain… stressing kindness, strong values & character, and community along with key subjects of math, science, English, and more. And today, nearly 300 years later, what young Benigna created is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site.

D. Esther Swain was the woman who was approached by wives of Muhlenberg College professors who convinced her to begin a kindergarten that eventually grew to serve students through high school and then finally settled on the terminal grade being 8th grade as it is today.  Focusing on the whole child, Mrs. Swain ensured students enjoyed experiences inside and outside the classroom, and her dream resulted in thousands of students, over the years, leading lives of purpose and impact.

Last year, to better capture the essence of our three-campus school, we asked parents, students, employees, and alumni which core values were most important to our school. Our goal was to foster an even stronger community built on those values. “Community” was the number one choice of our teachers, staff, alumni, and parents.  For students, “community” came in second after their first choice, “creativity.”

That’s how “community” became a core value of Moravian Academy. But what does a school look like and feel like that places “community” at the heart of everything we do?  What if we always asked ourselves the question, “Am I prioritizing community?” when faced with a difficult decision?  Am I prioritizing community when interacting with teachers, students, parents, or alumni?  Am I prioritizing community when planning my day?  Clearly, community is already a cherished value at Moravian, but what if we made a real commitment to lifting that value up as a lens and framework for the other core values, our programs, our development plans, and so on?

What if…we acknowledged that it is up to each of us to do our part to lift up the value of community?  What if we truly understood that the power lives inside each of us to make that a reality? 

The dreams of our founding mothers, Countess Benigna and D. Esther Swain, live on with all of us, but their dreams will reach their full potential when we stay true to our anchors of love and understanding, of spreading peace, of staying curious, and of embracing creativity. It is up to us to embrace our role as Creators of Community. And that power of community is here at Moravian Academy. 

Much has changed over time; however, with all that has evolved at our school, one of the things that is special is that we maintain the fundamentals of what makes Moravian, well, Moravian... a community full of wonderful traditions that strives to make students, families, alumni, teachers, and staff, feel like you belong to this special place while ensuring an excellent education.

So I will end where I began, leaving you to ponder your response to the question… What if?

Here’s to an amazing year, my fellow Creators of Community!