At the end of March, Dr. Austin won an Educational Leadership grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation. His application, submitted at the start of the school year, proposed to “provide a practical school-based framework for Boards, school leaders, and faculty to navigate a moment of political complexity, polarization and division” by helping schools to encourage “expressive freedom without fear” and “determine when — and if — to assert neutrality on matters of politics and social action.” His initiative aims to facilitate conversations regarding free inquiry and civic discourse among private secondary schools nationwide.
Dr. Austin’s “framework” includes creating a board or a “task force” of eight headmasters from various private secondary schools around the country. He curated this board based on recommendations from the Edward E. Ford Foundation and suggestions from the educational community. This board is separate from the “Eight Schools Association” that Deerfield shares with some of its neighboring Northeast boarding schools and is instead a variation of private schools from around the country. Dr. Austin picked eight schools of diverse sizes, gender specificities (single sex and co-ed), and geographical locations to see how they would respond to the communication about free inquiry and civic discourse.
Dr. Austin began his project by hiring Lee Levinson, former Head of the Collegiate School New York as the project manager. Dr. Austin stated that he might expand his “task force” as the plan sets into action, but as of now, his board of eight heads of schools and his project organizers are getting the ball rolling. This group will “convene in person over the summer” and begin to discuss what the next few years will look like in terms of achieving their goals. The official grant money will go towards travel expenses for meetings like this one and allow the board to commute to schools that are a part of the membership.
Dr. Austin decided to apply for an Educational Leadership Grant last winter and began working on his idea. He said that throughout the process, he was “in contact with John Gulla, the executive director of the Edward E. Ford Foundation in Brooklyn, New York,” about how he would work with the company to realize his ideas.
According to its website, the Edward E. Ford Foundation has made generous Traditional and Educational Leadership Grants to secondary schools since 2008. The foundation aims to help schools “grow their own missions” and foster conversations and projects that will help better secondary education overall. Edward E. Ford himself was born in 1894 and had great success in the manufacturing industry, as his innovations eventually made it to the International Business Machine Corporation. He made his first donation in 1957 and started to shape his goals for secondary education before he died in 1963. Since then, the board of his foundation has given almost 2,300 grants that have accumulated to about $133,000,000. One of their more recent grants was awarded in 2021 to the Governor’s Academy, where they will use the $250,000 contribution to build a “coastal studies center,” including a wet lab and workshops for field research, as the school sits near the Parker River and Great Marsh. The Edward E. Ford Foundation works to give grants to a diverse group of secondary schools all over the country, and they have varied in geographical location, size, and financial status.
Dr. Austin hopes that in the future, he and his board can attend and present at National Education Conferences and eventually have Deerfield host its own conference. He is also looking forward to getting the Deerfield community more involved with his plans and bringing his ideas to the students and faculty in the future.