The Gordon Fund
The Gordon Fund provides essential resources that sustain and enhance the defining areas of a Gordon education and experience. Your gift will expand our diverse community, propel innovation in our classrooms, and help our students become courageous learners and compassionate leaders.
Direct your gift
As a Gordon Fund donor, you may now direct your gift to an area that is most important to you. Choose from one of the nine areas below.
Gordon's greatest need
Help sustain the Gordon experience for every child. Like any institution doing good and important work, Gordon has operational needs and strategic opportunities that evolve year to year. By choosing this designation, you are giving Gordon the ability to apply your gift to where it’s needed most.
Academic excellence and the library
Gordon's success is rooted in an academic program that challenges every student, at every age, to explore their world courageously and share their ideas compassionately. Gordon employs an interdisciplinary approach that acknowledges that children learn best when the academic program is engaging, experiential and applicable to the real world. Your gift will help maintain Gordon’s 6:1 student to teacher ratio and fund curricular innovation, instructional excellence and student-centered learning across all academic disciplines—in English and in Spanish, in the classrooms, but also in the art studios, the library, the theater, the field house, on the playgrounds and playing fields.
The arts
The visual and performing arts are essential to the development of a vibrant life of the mind. Gordon students experience the arts through an integrated curriculum, beginning at age three, in generous spaces dedicated to studio art, music instruction and theater. For a school whose mission encourages positive risk taking and compels students to find their voice, this work in self-expression through the arts is central to building students’ creative and collaborative skills as well as their confidence and belief in themselves. Your gift will support all aspects of the arts including, but not limited to, full-scale theater productions, musical ensembles, and art shows.
Athletics
85% of Gordon School Middle School students play on one or more of the school’s competitive, interscholastic athletic teams. Gordon’s no-cut policy and mission-centered coaching approach are designed to encourage students to challenge themselves and move beyond their comfort zones while ensuring that every Gordon Gator can find their place and grow as a valued contributor on a team. In addition to developing sport-specific skills, Gordon’s athletic program cultivates athletes who understand the importance of teamwork, fair play, integrity and school spirit. Gifts will go towards funding a strong athletic program, which requires skilled coaches, up-to-date equipment, reliable transportation, and well-maintained facilities.
Community engagement
The work in Gordon's classrooms is fueled and supported by courageous and compassionate students, supportive families and a dedicated faculty and staff. As Gordon’s diverse community continues to expand, it is essential that the school continue to develop thoughtful programming to connect our growing network of students, parents, caregivers, grandfriends and alumni. Your gift will support major community-wide events like the Fall Picnic, Homecoming and Carnival as well as the smaller, but no less meaningful, events that sustain the authentic sense of belonging that is a hallmark of Gordon School. These events, often sponsored by our Gordon Community Association, include Coffee in the Commons, grade-level gatherings and teacher appreciation initiatives.
Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging
Gordon has long been recognized among independent schools as a leader in equity and inclusion. This work has required a financial investment on the part of the school in the innovative strategies and approaches that will ensure that the identities, backgrounds and experiences of all members of the Gordon community are honored and affirmed. Most recently, these efforts have included affinity and cross-racial dialogues for students, parents, faculty and staff, Zoom conversations with nationally recognized speakers, community climate studies and outreach programs like the Institute for New Teachers of Color in Independent Schools. Your investment will fund continued support of professional development for faculty and staff, recruitment and retention of teachers from historically underrepresented groups, community outreach, and our multicultural education programming for all constituencies of the school.
Economic diversity
One of the most meaningful ways that an independent school can demonstrate its commitment to equity and inclusion is through its approach to tuition. To demonstrate the depth of its commitment to these values, Gordon created Family Individualized Tuition (FIT), a system that has equity and inclusion at its core. With FIT, every family can feel full ownership of the Gordon experience, knowing they are contributing to the school and investing in their child’s education at the level that is appropriate for them. The diversity of the Gordon community is its greatest strength. Your gift will support the school’s ongoing efforts to cultivate a diverse community where every member feels a deep and authentic sense of belonging.
Faculty and staff support
Gordon's mission requires a continuous investment in the school's professional community: administrators, teachers and staff who are both experts in their fields and inclusive, compassionate leaders. Professional growth and development is at the center of a mission that believes in encouraging intellectual leadership, fostering an empathic spirit and stimulating a drive for positive societal impact. Your gift will fund books and other resource materials as well as attendance at conferences and workshops with experts on topics such as multicultural pedagogy, environmental justice and working with neurodiverse students and their families. Your gift will also support initiatives focused on sustaining the health and wellness of one of the school’s most valuable resources: Gordon’s dedicated faculty and staff.
Sustainability
Since its founding in 1910 as a fresh-air school, Gordon has cultivated compassionate students who understand their role as stewards of the natural world, and the current climate crisis makes this work even more vital. Your support of sustainability at Gordon will ensure that our interdisciplinary curriculum and co-curricular programs foster in students the knowledge, skills and habits of mind required of the next generation of changemakers. Moreover, your gift will not only allow Gordon's twelve-acre campus to continue to serve as a living laboratory for this work, but it will also support the long-term and sustainably minded maintenance of Gordon's building and grounds.