Board Reflections: Looking Back and Thinking Forward

At Brightworks and the Institute for Applied Tinkering (IAT), we pride ourselves on seeing problems as puzzles and approaching each challenge with curiosity and creativity.

The last several years have been a wild ride. From moving buildings (three times), to weathering a global pandemic, and now working through a drop in enrollment, rebuilding of community, and the evolution of our program and team, we’ve re-adjusted our priorities and plans time and time again so that we continue to do better and grow stronger together. 

Now, in the calm of summer, I am preparing to transition off the board after 6 years, including one as Chair. I had promised when stepping into this position last year to evolve the IAT’s structures and needs to meet our future, and we’ve made a lot of progress. I’m excited – with our board elections next month – to welcome a new Board Chair along with several strong new members who bring tremendous experience, skills, and energy into executing on the governance, financial, and leadership practices we’ve developed. As I reflect on the past and how our experiences have shaped the beautiful learning community Brightworks is today, I’m optimistic about this team and the future.

WHO WE (STILL) ARE

Brightworks is inextricably tied to our nonprofit organization The Institute for Applied Tinkering (IAT) and its mission to develop, practice, and share educational methods that challenge and support all children to engage deeply in real problems with real tools. In addition to Brightworks, the IAT encompasses Tinkering School and The Curious Educators Division (CED), as well as the Innovation Lab, which launched the Mission to Mars, a program that has been touring the country, and Box Bots, a low-cost robots kit now used in several schools. The overarching mission of the IAT is to ensure that the magic of Tinkering School and Brightworks is shared beyond the fortunate few students who experience it firsthand in San Francisco. We share our model of what is possible in child-led education with educators around the globe through CED. 

At its core, Brightworks is an engagement-driven, project-based K-12 school. We believe that every child is inherently amazing, and our goal is to nurture their unique abilities to become exceptional communicators, collaborators, and citizens of the world. We’ve chosen to stand outside of the traditional in the interest of embracing the journey and what’s possible for each child in each moment. How we do this also continues to evolve and improve. The throughline is our belief in providing an education that is deeply aligned with the needs of a changing world, emphasizing agency, inclusion, and learning. 

We take our student’s ideas seriously. All students are encouraged to speak up, take healthy risks, ask questions, share their views, and participate in a variety of subjects and activities. We try to model this at all levels of the organization (though we haven’t always gotten it right, and that’s been good fodder for learning too). By prioritizing inclusion, we ensure that every student is supported in growing into a strong version of themselves, creating a safe space where they can thrive both educationally and personally. This has created an amazing experience and fostered growth for many students here.

To do this well, Brightworks is a “people-intensive” operation. We have fewer students per teacher than public schools and even many other private schools. With an average student-to-teacher ratio of 7:1, our school is designed to truly know and see each student, support their genuine interests (and spark new ones through the diverse passions and expertise of staff), and tailor learning to their needs through engagement and personalized projects. We prioritize experiences, experts, and hands-on exploration over generic exercises and pre-prescribed materials. Post-pandemic, our need for new support services and specialists to serve all students has expanded as well.

Brightworks is part of  and invested in cultivating a strong and equitable community.  One piece that makes it particularly special is the inclusive prioritization of tuition assistance for families. While it is expensive to run a small independent school in San Francisco, we have kept tuition in line with other independent schools in the area and continue to pay living wages to faculty and staff. While independent schools on average grant 25.5% of their students some need-based financial aid, according to the NAIS, as of June 1, 2024, we have 82 students enrolled for the upcoming school year, and 40 of them – nearly 49% – are receiving some level of tuition assistance. This significant number reflects our dedication to ensuring that financial barriers do not stand in the way of a transformative education, even in economically challenging times. 

By offering a substantial percentage of our revenue to tuition assistance, we are able to welcome in families who contribute in other ways, including building a dynamic learning environment that connects and values people from many backgrounds and socioeconomic groups. This level of aid has been a stretch at our current scale, but continuing to support our current families and to advance equity in progressive education is fundamental to our mission.

This is one way that equity is not just a word in a list of Brightworks core values: it is truly a guiding principle. We know that a diverse community strengthens the educational experience for all and prepares our students to be compassionate, engaged citizens in the broader world. By prioritizing financial accessibility, we are taking concrete steps toward realizing our vision of a just and inclusive school community.  Continued fundraising will be necessary to maintain this level of tuition assistance for the long run – as is true for any small school without an endowment. This is among our top priorities as an organization. 

As an organization, we are dedicated to investing in our people, our community and educational innovation. Right now our highest priority is to ensure Brightworks and its families flourish. We have more to do to make Tinkering School fully self-sustaining. On the CED side, over the last several years, we’ve operated the program at cash-flow-neutral or as a positive financial contributor to the IAT overall.  (Institutions pay the IAT for training, expertise, and advisory services.) As we redouble our energy into our core program, The sharing aspect of our mission (through CED) is not our focus at this moment, but we look forward to a future when we can resume this work. 

OUR PATH

2017-18  

Seven years ago, Brightworks looked different than it does today. Our school was famously founded in a warehouse in the Mission in 2011, where students and collaborators built their own classrooms, creating a magical space where you could see the evidence of students co-creating their own education.

As word spread about the engagement-driven, project-based learning happening in our corner of the world, educators from around the globe began touring our school and sponsoring our founder, Gever Tulley, and collaborators to travel internationally to speak at their institutions. To create a platform for sharing best practices, we established our Curious Educators Division in 2016, and our Annual Summer Institute for Educators was born. During the 2017-18 school year, CED was in full swing as a platform for sharing our methodology with schools and organizations worldwide.  

2018-19

In the 2018-19 school year, the IAT Board of Directors began considering hiring a part-time Executive Director (ED) to help expand our capacity to share the Tinkering School and Brightworks pedagogy with the world and to support a new approach to school leadership, which elevated four strong collaborators with complementary skills and distinct focus areas in place of a single Head of School. In the spring of 2019, Aaron Eden stepped off the board to temporarily fill and help us define this new ED position. Simultaneously, zoning code violations emerged at Brightworks' rental location, forcing us to terminate our lease and seek a new home. Leveraging our agility and resourcefulness, we quickly found a beautiful new spot at the Palace of Fine Arts. Aaron Eden, as interim Executive Director, helped us navigate the transition and support the school's new flat leadership team.

2019-20

Brightworks started the 2019-20 school year in a new building in the Inner Richmond with a three-year lease and plans to find a long-term home. While the separate rooms in the new building were an adjustment from our “one room warehouse school,” we were excited for the challenge of a progressive model operating inside a traditional space. 

In the spring of 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit, our Brightworks team did not miss a beat; they transitioned our K-12 school to remote learning after taking just one week off to pivot. The new building also ended up being a boon during the pandemic when indoor airspace carried so much risk for community spread. We had exceptionally low community spread throughout the duration of the pandemic – an incredible accomplishment.

Meanwhile, Tinkering School and Gever founded the Mars Mission, a project leading to the Box Bot robotics initiative now running in several schools. During this period, the IAT received two rounds of PPP funding and an EIDL loan, which were crucial in maintaining operations.

2020-21

In 2020, recognizing the challenges of remote learning for our youngest students, Brightworks was among the first schools to return to in-person learning. The elementary school reopened in Golden Gate Park, followed closely by the middle school and eventually the high school in the spring. Our ability to adapt quickly ensured continuity in education and community engagement. In this year we also added a budget line for a DEI contract position at Brightworks. 

Brightworks' agile, creative, and community-centered approach during the pandemic led to a 30% increase in enrollment for the 2021-22 school year. Families from public schools and other private schools were drawn to our commitment to social-emotional learning, engagement-based education, and health-conscious practices. Our school grew and we were thrilled to welcome so many new learners.

2021-22

We continued school in Golden Gate Park for our youngest learners, who were thriving. As COVID's impact on communities began to recede, parents quickly reprioritized various areas of their children's development from preserving happiness to preventing learning loss. We, in turn, began to take a closer look at how our program attended to these needs. These shifting priorities led the team to take a closer look at our approach to literacy in the lower school and numeracy in the middle and high school.

With how quickly things were changing during the pandemic and with families and collaborators in person together less often, we saw an even greater need for more clarity in roles and responsibilities, especially around who in leadership to go to. This led us to shift back from the flat model of leadership set up in the 2019-20 school year to the naming of a Head of School and Assistant Head of School (founding collaborators Mackenzie Price and Anthony Consilio).

The IAT launched the Vision Fund capital campaign to support our imminent move to the Presidio and expansion of our leadership capacity to double down on our mission for the Executive Director and Founder to grow the sharing function of the organization: bringing the best parts of the IAT’s programs to other learning environments that were in that moment so hungry for new approaches. 

2022-23 

In the fall of 2022, Brightworks opened in the Presidio, mask-free for the first time, marking the emergence from a wild time of struggle and endless pivots. During this school year our Head of School, Mackenzie, took maternity leave and was covered by the Assistant Head of School and our part-time ED. Aaron Eden announced his plan to depart after Mackenzie’s return, and we began the search for our first full-time ED who could be in-person and dedicate more time to growing the IAT's impact.

During this year, Brightworks undertook a collaborative process involving students and community members to define a new mission statement, clarifying our shared goals, purpose and values. We also added our first (half time) Learning Specialist. And, the Tinkering School's Mars Mission project expanded to the Pajaro Valley School District, integrating robotics into their programs. 

Over the summer, three staff members departed under the leadership of the outgoing Executive Director, including the change from a part-time, Brightworks-focused Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion lead to new full-time IAT leadership team position for the Head of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. These changes – and their timing and mode of communication – opened up cracks in the community and fueled distrust between staff, families, and the board. These have taken significant time and work to even begin to repair.

2023-24

In the fall of 2023, the IAT welcomed a new full-time Executive Director to enhance our impact while preserving the quality of our core programs. Brightworks shared its new mission, vision, and core values, including a strong stance on anti-racism, and launched a new literacy program in the lower school. 

We also saw the consequences of the summer’s staff and family departures and weaknesses in our own communications, connections, and leadership through difficult times. This was all set against the backdrop of heightened racial tensions globally and shifting educational priorities as families emerged from the pandemic. At the same time, the withdrawal of a new middle school collaborator days before the start of school left us short-staffed, and we were slow to find the right person and make changes to our program. This highlighted the way in which the middle school program needed to evolve to better address the learning and developmental needs of its students and ways for us to improve hiring and onboarding of collaborators into our unique environment.

By the completion of admissions in April, our projected enrollment for the following year was down by 30%. While schools across San Francisco saw a general decline in enrollment and school-aged families in the city, we also took to heart the need to refocus on the strength of our core school programs and team. It became clear that we needed to adjust our financial picture to ensure stability for Brightworks and the families depending on us. To do so, we made the difficult decision to lay off the recently added leadership layer working on expanding the nonprofit org and focus instead on stabilizing our school, Brightworks, and strengthening its leadership team and staff. In this change, we prioritized the experience for our students and the staff working with them directly. It’s never easy to shrink, but we are leaning into this opportunity to reflect and evolve. 

We had begun the search for a new Head of School in December, and ran a strong and open process to select Dr. Sean Hamer, who brings a wealth of operational and pedagogical expertise. We also elevated a strong leader and collaborator from within our community, Michlene Cotter, to Assistant Head of School.

Like many schools in the Bay Area, we have felt the economic shifts. Maintaining financial stability and long-term operations is a top priority for the IAT. Brightworks and IAT are committed to transparency and prudent financial management, investing in sustainable growth that supports our mission without compromising our financial health.

LOOKING FORWARD

As we plan for the year ahead, we welcome new leadership who have been working diligently this summer to get ready for the fall. We have one of the strongest teams of dedicated educators we’ve brought together in our history. This team is so enthusiastic to continue to work and co-author learning with our students. We also have students who are thriving and doing amazing things, from building subterranean robots to inventing their own currencies and languages, and we are thrilled to see how each of them continue to grow and impact the world around them.

We are positioned to take off into the new school year as a more refined and stable organization with committed and energized new leadership. The budget and IAT-level staffing changes we made last year have put us in a position to continue to operate an amazing program at Brightworks through the next school year and beyond at our current size, and to reinvest more again when our student body grows. We hand Dr. Sean and Michlene, our team, our students, our families, and our new board members a beautiful set of ideals and values and a strong foundation – along with a lot of hard-learned lessons and well-honed practices – to build on in the years ahead.

We are excited for you to join us as we move forward and hope you find some clarity and inspiration through this retrospective on our path to where we stand today. It’s never a straight line, but some of the wonder and magic are in the twists and turns. Brightworks and the IAT are committed to building a resilient, innovative, and inclusive community that thrives on curiosity and creativity. 

Thank you for being part of our Brightworks family as we look back and think forward!