HIGH EXPECTATIONS AND LOW PRESSURE DEFINE A COMMUNITY
Marc Liebowitz considers himself lucky to have found a position he enjoys at Princeton Friends School (PFS) in Princeton, New Jersey. “It was pure coincidence,” he marveled. “I started as a three-month temp, five-and-a-half years ago.”
We sat with Liebowitz during a lunch break at a recent iRUniversity event. iR asked him what sets the school apart. He described the unexpected contrast between PFS and his previous work environment.
“The values of the school were immediately apparent. The morning I arrived as a temp, I approached the school door, and a student held it open for me. He said, ‘Good morning.’ I said, ‘Thank you,’ and he replied, ‘You’re welcome.’ I walked through the door first.
“I thought, ‘This is different.’”
The culture of the school is defined on the school web site:
Princeton Friends School’s educational philosophy derives from the practice of Settling In as students and teachers together seek knowledge and understanding through engagement with one another and with specific subject matter. Through close relationships with their teachers, students are guided toward independence and a sense of responsibility as they participate in shaping their own learning experiences. Across the subject areas, the school fosters an atmosphere of high expectation for intellectual growth combined with low competitive pressure. Students are not grouped exclusively by age or skill level, nor are they assigned grades or exposed to standardized tests. As students come to understand that mistakes are part of the natural learning process, they are encouraged to take intellectual risks: to ask questions, to engage their imaginations, and to construct knowledge actively on their own terms.
The civil environment of the Quaker school was unexpected.
Before coming to work at Princeton Friends, Liebowitz had worked doing tech support in a for-profit setting. “I was needed only when something went wrong,” he explained.
Not so at Princeton Friends: “In the Quaker environment, I often hear, ‘Thank you, this is working well.’...‘Don’t worry, this is working well.’...‘Get to it when you can.’
Contemplation is part of the work.
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1979–1995
Princeton Friends School Advisory Board, 1985–1995
Time to think is one of the benefits for Liebowitz: “You do your job. You do it well. This environment encourages you to bring a lot to the table, so you can do things right. You have the time to give them exactly what they need. In this school community, the faculty and staff are patient enough to wait—and in the tech world, patience is good. There’s a lot that can go wrong when you don’t take the time to think. You can throw off the entire database if you miss one relationship. It’s the same thing with your work relationships, with your colleagues: you can break your working environment if you don’t take the time to think.“There are two of us in the PFS tech department. I do all of the hands-on work, and my colleague handles the business side. We work together to do the technology planning, along with the staff and faculty. Faculty may not always know what they need. Sometimes we surprise them by giving them capabilities they didn’t know they needed.
“Being Quaker, the school is community driven. Everyone has a say in how things are done, how things turn out. That plays into iR’s solutions. inRESONANCE also appears to be community-oriented, in that not only the vendor but also the client has a say in how a solution functions. The client’s IT staff and the end-user staff person define what they want to get out of the iR solution. Then they implement that in the software. They get the kinds of reports they need. They can send the same information to the faculty, but it may look different. You can easily give everyone what they need without messing anyone else up because you can customize. Especially in this job, where I have the opportunity to work thoughtfully, it’s a waste not to ask what the end-users need. I can deal with their questions, their problems and issues. I can try to think ahead and provide more. It adds a lot to your productivity when you can think things through.”
Liebowitz expressed his appreciation that inRESONANCE encourages open communication between the clients and the company. “The dialogue makes the client more knowledgeable. In answering client questions, inRESONANCE is not just pushing one way of doing things; the company takes the position that there is no one right answer. This software is not just designed for the multitudes. The client makes it fit his own situation.
“inRESONANCE software is very user friendly. A lot of the functionality is based on an office’s policies on who does what, who owns this set? There are office procedures that should be in place in order to use it well. The database is user friendly, but for whom? In our case, we had a high level of preparation, particularly for the Development office. GENERATIONS was built so well that the installation process helped improve our procedures and change certain mindsets. During the conversion, we had asked the Development office to wait and hold gifts until we were ready to enter them into GENERATIONS. We met with resistance from staff who worried, “I have all this to do, it will take days and days if I hold the gifts.” In fact, this person was surprised at the small amount of time it took to enter them after the installation. But it did involve the need to break some habits from using the old software. The preparation before a conversion is important.
“We had a positive transition to KEYSTONE and PORTAL. There was very little complaining (as in ‘I used to do it this way...’). The work flowed much better in the iR solutions, the screens played very well. We had to do a lot of customization just to bring in reports, directories, screens, fields. Even so, the implementation was very smooth. There was no grief period. KEYSTONE and PORTAL introduced a much simpler process into the work flow.”
Liebowitz expressed eagerness to take full advantage of iRU’s three days of professional development. “This is my first time at iRU. All the customizations up until this point, I have done myself. I have been my own little iRU, going back and forth with the iR support team. Now that I have this time at iRU and understand more about how these solutions are built, it will be easier to customize.”
In addition to the workshop sessions, Liebowitz would benefit from the networking: “One of the people I have met here at iRU has actually fixed a server problem I needed to solve. And I am very interested in attending a discussion later about the Auctions module iR is developing—iR is gathering a group to preview the new module and respond. It feels good, as a client, to be invited into the discussion. It makes you feel accomplished to participate in the building of a new solution.”
Princeton Friends School opened in the fall of 1987 with 19 students. Liebowitz described the school’s growth: “The founders of the school believed that a school guided by Quaker values and practice would offer families in the Princeton area an important educational alternative. Ten years later, with an enrollment of 120 students in Pre–Kindergarten through eighth grade, the school moved into the current Schoolhouse on the grounds of the Princeton Friends Meeting. In the autumn of 2000, Princeton Friends received accreditation through the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools. Today, there are 134 students enrolled in Pre-K up through Grade 8 at PFS. We have expanded, just this year, into a brand new classroom building.”
Click here to learn more about Princeton Friends School.