March 17, 2025

Dear PDS/USN community, 

All of us who treasure University School of Nashville have high hopes and big dreams for its long-term future as Nashville’s premiere K-12 independent school. Last academic year, our community embarked on a specific course to develop a strategic plan to align our collective goals and aspirations for our school. After many months of gathering your input, our Strategic Planning Committee is pleased to share with you USN’s comprehensive five-pillar plan, which identifies top priorities for our future. That future is Forward.

Forward is the culmination of thousands of ideas, observations, and constructive critiques from USN students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, and parents of alumni. We asked you to identify the strengths, challenges, opportunities, and aspirations that define our extraordinary school. You have made it clear that our community cares deeply about the future of USN and has bold hopes for the decades ahead. We thank you for the substantive feedback we received. You made this plan what it is. You will be integral to its success. 

The Strategic Planning Committee had the privilege of not only reviewing your input but also carefully assessing it as we imagined a limitless future supported by rigorous self-examination. Forward is meant to guide our administrative and operational decisions for years to come. Its pillars are to:

We are eager to share specific details with you about progress on each pillar in the months and years ahead. We do not intend to unveil our plans in a vacuum. The investigation, leadership transitions, and matters of this academic year delayed this launch and weigh heavily on the minds and hearts of everyone in our community right now. The findings and recommendations of the Barnes & Thornburg report, the Community Task Force, and Learning Courage will no doubt factor into discussions surrounding our strategic plan as the Administrative Team resumes the work it began last summer to develop measurable goals and a timeline for action with our consultants at Mission & Data. We anticipate sharing at usn.org/forward a dashboard to track progress and stories about our future successes. If you have thoughts you would like to share, please email us at forward@usn.org.

If we have learned anything while undertaking this extensive strategic planning process, it is that the USN community is unafraid of hard questions, fundamentally optimistic about our future, and committed to working together to develop solutions. This is who we are, and who we will be tomorrow, five years from now, and 100 years from now. 

As we prepare to discuss our school’s bright future, we hope you’ll watch this brief video and read this document to understand where we’re headed. The plan you helped create is greater than any one graduating class, bigger than any campus, and meant to stand the test of time. It will ensure that no matter what lies ahead for our community and our world, USN will always move Forward.

 

 

Together, let’s move forward,
The Strategic Planning Committee

Shanna Singh Hughey, Committee Chair, Trustee, Parent ’29, ’31

Mimi Bliss, Past Trustee, Parent of Alumnus ’22

Marcya Carter-Sheats, Trustee, Parent ’34

Reagan Farr, Trustee, Parent ’26, ’30

Lauren Gage, Fifth Grade English Teacher, Parent ’34, ’37

Benjamin Goldberg, Alumnus ’98, Board Vice President, Parent ’32, ’36

Amy R. Huffman, Trustee, Parent ’29, ’33

Alex Jahangir, Board President-Elect, Parent ’29, ’31, ’32

Eric Kopstain, Board President, Parent ’25

Robbie McKay, HS English Teacher, Parent ’25, Parent of Alumni ’20, ’23

Tina Modi, Board Past President, Parent ’25, ’26

Jennifer Russell, Trustee, Parent ’29

Stephen Schleicher, Alumnus ’01, Parent ’32, ’34, ’37

Kyleen Shyer, Fourth Grade Teacher, Parent ’37

Anne Westfall, Director of Development, Parent ’27

Kristin Wilson, Board Secretary, Parent ’29, ’32

Matthew Wolf, Alumnus ’99, Trustee, Parent ’31, ’33