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Dear SAAS Community,
When SAAS launches the 2025-26 school year, we will, for the first time in our school’s history, come together on a campus that we own. A campus with buildings designed not just to house learning but to ignite it. Spaces imagined and created by SAAS, for SAAS, to bring our mission to life.
That’s a big moment. But only if we rise to meet it. Only if we get it right.
Buildings alone don’t create community and even the most inspiring mission statement is just words—unless we make them real. What matters most is what we do with our spaces and our words.
So what does it mean to “get it right” as we step into this next chapter of the SAAS story, opening the doors of our new Home of the Upper School?
The writer and anthropologist Michael Meade says, “The job of the parent is not to figure out the genius of the child; that’s the job of the community.” That’s a truth we live by at SAAS. It speaks to the heart of our work: a deep belief in the unique, creative, and powerful potential of every student and the responsibility we share, as a community, to help them uncover it.
Meade’s words also remind us that it’s not enough to believe in kids. We must act together. At SAAS, that action begins with our guiding principle “Know the Kid.”
Education, at its best, is a living network of relationships: People from different backgrounds, with different stories, learning to work together—not despite their differences but through them and because of them. Individuals discovering who they are, while recognizing they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Education at SAAS is about people, because learning happens together in community. We’re a dynamic weave of ideas, values, and action, stitched together with care and purpose.
So what will that look like in our new home?
It looks like a central courtyard that brings the campus together: where students gather for meals, recharge under the Seattle sky, meet for study sessions, or simply pause to catch their breath. A courtyard where friendships form, teachers greet students, and concerts, film festivals, and student speeches fill the air with energy.
It looks like classrooms wrapped around small-group spaces where students collaborate, and Study Skills classes just down the hall when they need extra tools for the journey.
It looks like inviting places to eat, read, laugh, think, and connect.
It looks like teachers who have space to talk about kids, their teaching, and their ideas—fueling each other’s growth.
It looks like conversations sparked in class spilling out into the hallways and courtyards, where learning doesn’t stop when the bell rings.
It looks like a teacher noticing that a kid is having a rough day, and making the time to check in and offer encouragement, or a student who seeks out a teacher to say “thank you” for feedback that made a difference.
It looks like the living, breathing SAAS community:
Dynamic. Vibrant. Uniquely us.
A community that is cohesive, not fragmented.
Connected, not isolated.
Growing—not just as individuals but together.
As Michael Meade reminds us, we have work to do. Important work.
And now we have the space to do it—over forty years in the making, designed for this very purpose, in service of a mission that has only grown stronger with time.
One school. One block. One Mission.
Dynamic and vibrant.
Cohesive and connected.
Welcome home, SAAS. We can’t wait to launch this next chapter with you.
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