Dear Parents,

I sincerely hope that you and your family members enjoyed a sense of peace and calm during Thanksgiving Week. I certainly did! Whereas I am accustomed to having large family gatherings during past years, this year my celebration of thanks was limited to 2 others, my son, Harrison and my wife, Shelley! My daughter, Sophia joined us via Zoom from London. I managed to get a few solo bike rides in during the week – distance routes in the mountains and during those rides I thought a lot about my teaching experiences at Odyssey School and two prior schools – a total of 40 years in all. I must confess that the last year has been the most unusual in comparison to all prior years. That said, when I think about what I am grateful for in my life, I always retrograde back to one solid anchor point. That is – I am always happy if I can find opportunities to improve the lives of students and families. It is really as simple as that.

Just for fun, I updated my Expedition spreadsheet that details my life’s expeditionary work of 40 years and I thought that you might be interested in a few numbers. The first metric is a count of how many “nights out” Odyssey students have spent away from home on Expeditions. When I first arrived at Odyssey on July 1, 2013 – I calculated that the cumulative student

“nights out” during the first 15 years of Odyssey’s history was approximately 7,000 nights. This meant that before my time, all students took 2 trips a year – an orientation trip and a short camping trip in addition to the Japan trip that was for 8 th graders only. The 7,000 metric is the product of the number of students each year multiplied by the number of nights out on trips multiplied by the number of years the school was in existence (15 years before my arrival).

Since 2013, Odyssey’s expeditionary program was developed and, as of June 30, 2020, the combined Odyssey student number of nights out now stands at 15,761! This is a huge increase in expeditionary impact on students, that’s for sure! I like the “nights out” analysis because it, in a certain sense, connects past students to present and even future students. I guess the ultimate question is…can our nano school ever achieve 1 million nights? I firmly believe that we can! A second number to appreciate is that during the last 7 years, Odyssey kids have hiked, biked, climbed and kayaked a cumulative total of 96,673 miles, another group milestone! This brings me to the topic of fundraising. An old friend and former president of the California Association of Independent Schools once wrote an article entitled The Death of Schools for the National Association of Independent Schools quarterly magazine and, in that composition, Jim McManus conveyed the brutal fact that across California and across the larger American landscape, independent schools fail at very staggering rates – 2 out of 3 perish in due course! The causative factors include mission fatigue, mission drift and change in leadership (either board or head of school). We might all assume that financial failure is the ultimate root cause for the demise of schools, but research shows that financial struggle is not the primary reason

at all. In fact, deteriorating finance is usually a tertiary if not quaternary reason for school failure. The primary reason for school collapse originates in either a mission or leadership malfunction that, later on, paves the pathway to the waypoint of financial insolvency.

This year is my 8th year at Odyssey, and I am proud and privileged to announce that our mission and its traction is even more viable than ever. This is superimposed on the fact that our board leadership is not only stable, it is cutting a groove with respect to the sustainability of California’s only fully accredited stand-alone middle school and nano-school! Both the Board and Head of School are committed to projecting Odyssey’s current success far into the future. We need your help to achieve this noble goal so hence this appeal for your financial support in our Annual Fund. I am enthusiastic and excited to announce that today is the first day of the

campaign.

This campaign is one of two major Odyssey fundraisers annually and it is essentially an email effort designed to urge you to “click the donate button" to submit your annual donation. Many independent schools across the country give guidelines for donations and expect current families to donate 10% of the cost of tuition but, quite honestly, that is not Odyssey’s style. We simply ask you to do the best that you can. The campaign gets underway in early December,

right after the Thanksgiving Holiday. In addition to this fundraiser, each year, during late April, we host our second annual fundraising event, Odyssey's Gala Dinner. Combined, the net revenues from this Annual Fund and next April's Gala will help keep Odyssey 's programs and people in place for future years to come.

There are many compelling reasons to support Odyssey School. Truthfully, there is a GAP between what it costs to educate our Odyssey kids in comparison to what we charge, and tax-deductible fundraising revenue can narrow this split. Additionally, it is important for Odyssey to maintain its CAIS accreditation and 100% participation by our current families will send the clear signal to our accreditors that Odyssey is here to stay! Finally, Odyssey’s current COA (cost

of attendance) is $15,000 less expensive than local area CAIS schools and, consequently, our COA represents an extraordinary value in the education marketplace. Today, in San Mateo County, there are only a few independent schools that are operating with kids on campus on a full-time basis and Odyssey is in that select and elite club. Please donate to this important fundraising campaign to help secure Odyssey School’s future as a great independent school in California!

"Full Speed Ahead: Our Outdoor Journey Continues!"

Warmest regards,

Steveo