Dignity as a Core Value
By Jan Abernathy The Browning School • New York, NY
In the fall of 2023, our Director of Communications Jeremy Katz and I were throwing around themes for our upcoming issue of our school’ s magazine, The Buzzer. Having joined the Browning School in the summer of 2019, within nine months I had seen our communications work transformed by COVID, and previous issues of the magazine during my tenure had focused on learning through the pandemic,“ the new normal,” and traditional academic fare. Now, as we could begin to plan our content, rather than merely react to outside circumstances, we wanted to reflect something elemental about our school.
That moment seemed ripe for exploring our four core values: curiosity, honesty, dignity, and purpose. As we moved out of the initial phases of the pandemic, focus on these values had taken on a greater prominence in both our internal and external school communications. Like many schools operating in the newly uncertain environment of the early 2020s, we were seeking a return to the foundation on which a healthy community can be built, and started to very explicitly use our values as an anchor. Easy for both boys and adults to remember, we began to incorporate them into signage and slide decks, and they appeared more frequently in remarks and written pieces from our faculty.
Page 12 Winter 2025 CSEE Connections