Friday, November 6, 2009

Institutional Identity Crisis

I can't believe it. I really can't believe it. I am sitting here in shock and I really can't believe it. I just got off the phone with my mom and she was telling me about my high school when the shock set in. I guess I was mentioned in an article about AP Scholars in the local paper and someone told my parents. When my mom saw the article, she decided to look up my high school and to her surprise the school's website had a countdown to the day when they become Middleburg Academy instead of Notre Dame Academy. There is actually a count down clock on the home page of the website. The website even declares “The clock is counting down… on July 1st, 2010 our name will be Middleburg Academy. The Dragons are off to a great start in the 2009-2010 school year. Our dynamic and diverse community is happily engaged in a variety of challenging classes, exceptional visual and performing arts and competitive athletics." Not only are there many people, including myself, who find this proclamation seriously disturbing, but it the result of a very complicated political and financial struggle that has torn the high school attended apart. The once Catholic college prep high school is now not Catholic and attempting to copy one of the other college prep high schools in the area ( a school that I looked at and felt that was cold and nothing that I wanted, so I went to NDA). But other than me finding this disturbing and shocking, the school is in the middle of a serious institutional identity crisis that has been predicted by may to be the end of the school all together. The school has lost the core of its identity as the Board of Trustees threw the school's Catholic history down the toilet and managed to ruin the school's reputation and community in one fell swoop. With one decision made by the Board of Trustees, the school was sent into chaos and a crisis. The school I graduated from no longer exists. The school that I graduated from has become something that I don't even recognize and has no clue what it's identity is. NDA is lost and confused, and it saddens me that my high school has fallen apart and will never recover to be the same. The administration and the Board of Trustees have destroyed one identity and have failed to come up with a new one. How can an institution spiral into such and identity crisis? Was there no solid identity to begin with? Or did the Board of Trustees and the administration just destroy the school's identity with a proclamation issued from on high?
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2 comments:

  1. chips&salsaNovember 7, 2009 at 5:19 PM

    HAHA, you guys were the dragons?! For some reason I thought you told me your school mascot was a penguin. Anyway, I think that your questions are interesting, there is some identity confusion in your high school. Are the Board of Trustees truly the ones who make the sole decisions for the school? Teachers don't have input?

    Could it also be possible that by changing its identity, the school could actually be trying to make itself more appealing to a broader range of students? Also, (I don't remember if you already answered this or not) what were to happen if parents were to start complaining, (that's if they're displeased as you are) would the trustees listen? Maybe all they need is some sort of authority check. It's pretty amusing that a school that receives tuition from its students would only allow the Board of Trustees to make decisions.

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  2. AJBNovember 8, 2009 at 3:25 PM

    yes the parents complained; no the Board did not feel they needed to listen to those who paid the bills. A Parent

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