2025 Look Ahead... From the Couch

BY ANDREW DAVIS

Inspired by a conversation about a tweet on X, I sat on our sofa on January 1 and drafted 2025 goals for four domains of my life: family, fitness, well-being, and, of course, work. While I have had fitness goals and school-year-specific, board-approved work goals in the past, this was the first time that I sat with a blank doc and pictured what I wanted to accomplish more broadly in the next 365 days.

While I am happy to share all of my goals – it would help keep me accountable – an MTS blog post seems like the right place to share the three school-related goals that immediately came to mind.

1. Create a new system of growth and evaluation for all roles ready for CAIS presentation in February 2026. In 2023, our Board of Trustees set ambitious goals to be leaders in the Bay Area in total compensation, and we have made good progress. And, as we all know and research shows, dollars are not enough to motivate and retain excellent employees. We all want to feel like we are growing and improving. While the work is underway, I want to develop and formalize a new system of growth and evaluation that inspires and retains our outstanding professional community. Further, I would like to share our work and lessons learned with other heads of school at the CAIS (California Association of Independent Schools) annual conference in 2026.

2. Raise at least $10M for our Into Action Capital Campaign. As you likely know, in 2023 the Board launched MTS’s first comprehensive capital campaign to raise funds for three priorities: ProComm compensation, affordability and access, and campus renovation and expansion. Our plans are ambitious, and our community, to date, has been exceptionally generous. Having recently crossed the $7M threshold, I hope to raise at least another $3M that we can dedicate to the people and spaces that will ensure MTS remains the outstanding school we know for decades to come.  

3. Have a well-defined industry-leading plan for AI@MTS ready for presentation at NAIS in March 2026. As MTS Board Chair, Jack Chou, said this fall, “AI is going to change everything about everything.” In the year ahead, I want to develop and begin to implement a plan for how we can leverage AI to more effectively educate our students, reduce friction and time-intensive tasks for our educators, and prepare our students to be effective and moral citizens in an AI-infused future. AI will disrupt education at most schools. I want it to accelerate education at MTS. Similar to goal #1, I would like to share our progress and initiatives with other educators, this time at the NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) conference in 2026.

I get excited to take action each time I write these down; they fire me up! Don’t worry, though, I am not abandoning the foundational work we are committed to at MTS; I continue to lead with passion on four fronts in my official 2024-25 goals:

• Outstanding academics
• Strong financial health
• Inclusion, equity, and belonging
• ProComm compensation and campus expansion

I share these MTS-related goals in the spirit of giving you a glimpse into what motivates me and to help be accountable for accomplishing them. I am, of course, happy to tell you more and be in dialogue about any of them. Maybe we could meet at the Tam High Track; one of my fitness goals is to run a fast mile, and I will be spending quite a bit of time running in circles over the next few months!

Goal setting with Strudel by my side (and yes, goal writing hairstyle).