A Discussion With Matthew Gould, Head of School at Community School, Part I

Matthew Gould is head of school at Community School in Ladue. He was elevated to that position in 2004. Holding a doctorate degree in education from the University of Chicago, Gould is one of the key leaders in the independent school movement in St. Louis.

Community School will celebrate its 100th year of service in 2014. Presently, former students and school parents are forming committees to celebrate the centennial of the oldest school in Ladue.

This is the first of a two-part interview with Gould. The head of school addresses the heritage and traditions celebrated at Community, the worth of his faculty and other important topics.

Ladue-Frontenac Patch: The school dates back almost 100 years. How do you manage to keep things pretty much on an even keel?

Matthew Gould: That’s a great question. The centennial celebration of this school will be in the spring of 2014, and so we are already planning events around this date and hope to have a wide reach of our constituents who have been a part of this school for many years. And we will do outreach to our alumni spread around the country and faculty and former board members, and that preparation will begin for our big 100th anniversary. I think Community School has been an important institution in Ladue. It was in Clayton from 1914 to 1930 and moved to this location in 1931.

We’ve been a part of the local community for a long, long time, and a lot of families have come through our doors.

On one hand, we want to remain true to our traditions, and on the other hand also be progressive and looking forward. We are traditional in many respects, and our alumni come to see if our family-style lunch or our woodshop or some of the science programs are the same, but at the same time we are constantly changing our curriculum.

We just changed our math program to a Singapore approach which we imported from Asia and think is very, very challenging to our children, and this is an example of being very current and looking forward. Another example is for the first time, we are going to offer a half-day nursery school program. We are hearing from our families they’d love to have their babies in our program, but not necessarily for a full day, and we are offering a part-day option for our families.

Patch: The heart of success of any school is the value of its faculty. Please elaborate on that.

Gould: The most important people in the school are the teachers, no doubt about it. So we are really fortunate not only to have an enthusiastic group of teachers, but ones who are passionate, bright, and educated and have a passion for working with elementary-aged children. We’ve hired elementary aged experts.

We have a wide variety of teachers from all walks of life who bring different variety of talents to our faculty. Most have advanced degrees. When I hire, I look for a: natural intelligence and academic background and b: I want to see that fire in their eyes and in their bellies who want to work with young children. Our teachers care very deeply about the institution.

The average length of teaching is 16 years, and 10 years length of service here at Community School. That is remarkable. It tells us these people really want to teach at this school. Its also a very cohesive group of folks.

Patch: I understand this is not a good place to be if all a teacher is thinking about is those retirement years?

Gould: We are a high-energy community. The expectations of the students are high, and the expectations of the teachers are high. These teachers could be working in public schools. But they want to be around colleagues who are just as passionate as they are.

If someone is coasting in an environment like this, they just stand out so much. There is a high degree of self selection to teach here. If you want to work hard and be in an environment where there are good kids and supportive parents, Community is the place to be. Our teachers have many duties. They have to eat lunch with the students every single day. They help out with the carpool before and after school. There are duties outside of teaching, especially with their curriculum development and our initiatives, whether it is diversity or sustainability and those sort of things.

All of our homeroom classes are team taught. There are two teachers in every classroom with about 20 children. What that does it put two professionals together and creates a nice energy with the two teaches, and they can feed off of each other, and the children hear two voices throughout the day. And not only does it lower the ratio to give kids individual attention, and the kids like having all that adult contact. This is true from our nursery school program through the fourth grade.

In the fifth and sixth grade we are more departmentalized. We may have three teachers or one teacher working with a much smaller group of kids.

These teachers have to plan together and conference with parents together. There is a lot of communications that has to happen.

Patch: Please comment on how Community School integrates the arts program with the core curriculum program.

Gould: Art integration is really big here at Community School. Actually, on April 25-26, Community School is hosting an arts integration initiative. A group is coming from Arizona is going to help us run it. We are expecting 100-150 educators from around the region to join us for this conference. Educators will be with us for 12 hours these two days. The reason we are hosting it is because integrating the arts with the curriculum is a passion of ours.

This holiday time of the year, our kids are doing instrumental programs, It is fairly remarkable for an elementary school to have the level of the arts and drama we do. Whether it's social studies, science or math, it becomes exciting for children.

When they are studying ancient Egypt, they can actually make jars out of clay or they might actually study the process of mummification. In drama, they might actually do a production of an ancient Egyptian death. Literature, science, math, its all integrated with the arts here.

We find children will retain a foreign language better if they are active, so we brought this to our PE program. Kids will take gym class where they can converse only in French.

Tuesday, Matthew Gould speaks about family involvement, family-style dining and the joys of working at Community School.