The McGuffey Foundation School is dedicated to helping each student reach his or her creative and intellectual potential and develop constructive social values and behaviors in an environment that encourages the solution of problems through individual endeavor and group processes.

The mission of the school is to offer a community of trust and respect that provides educational opportunities which foster creative, resourceful, and expressive individuals, actively engaged in shaping their lives and contributing to the global community.

We value kindness, integrity, and true effort learning and the process of constructing meaning

• by actively encouraging curiosity and fostering the desire to know more, discover for oneself, venture into uncharted territory, and to seek alternative, innovative, and creative answers
• by encouraging the developing ability to identify what you know and to identify and communicate what you don't know
• applauding the courage it takes to tackle the hard stuff and the time it takes to practice and maintain hard-won skills
• believing that there is honor in attempting challenging material or a difficult task, reason for pride in small steps toward goals, with cheers for each success, not sighs for those skills not yet mastered.
• and hoping for honest humility and gratitude for serendipity, sheer luck, and unearned success!

process as well as product

• recognizing that often it is the journey, not the destination, that matters
• honoring a good attempt, regardless of outcome
• finding value and benefit in "messing about", wondering, inventing, and idle daydreaming
• encouraging safe experimentation as a means of "finding out"

learning as part of a community

• sharing the excitement and purpose of school
• working in a "community of scholars" of various levels and degrees of accomplishment
• learning in group settings, with consideration for others and fidelity to one's own tasks
• developing the ability to share the leadership role, to contribute to group effort, to brainstorm
• effectively, to listen to the ideas of others, and to plan collectively

learning as an individual endeavor

• as a personal quest for information, exploration, and mastery of uncharted territories
• with growing investment and ownership
• trusting one's own perceptions and intuitions
• with integrity and "academic honesty"

• serving as a teacher, regardless of age… mentoring, partnering, encouraging peers, and those both older and younger than oneself.
• collaboratively, as exploration, examination, dreaming, or for the joy of it, with or without a goal
• using writing, speaking, art, music and any other appropriate means

listening and responding

• with honesty, kindness, and respect
• with empathy, and considering other points of view
• respecting the privacy of the individual

personal and group responsibility

• for one's own learning, behavior, effect on others, share of the work, responsibility to others, and the good of the greater whole
• toward entities larger than oneself: family, home, school, community, nation, and world
• contributing, building, enhancing, or at least doing no harm