Capstone

Capstone

The Community of San Rafael
May 27 - June 5, 2008

Marin Academy’s inaugural State of the Bay Capstone Project begins on May 27. The Class of 2009 will be the first to participate in this new, culminating educational experience. We are excited that San Rafael’s Mayor Al Boro and City Manager Ken Nordhoff will be at Marin Academy to address our students on the morning of the first day of the Capstone Project. Throughout the two weeks of the project, students will be actively involved in both on-campus and in-the-field research as they explore their chosen topics. They will create a presentation to be shared with the school community on Thursday, June 5.

The State of the Bay Capstone Project asks Marin Academy juniors to investigate and evaluate Bay Area communities; its mission is to promote interdisciplinary inquiry and collaboration, to deepen understanding of and connection to our home, and to produce a public archive to better shape compassionate and equitable communities.

Teams of Marin Academy juniors will develop and research essential questions about the state of the San Rafael community in each of six different topic areas: education, employment and industry, the environment, health, housing, and transportation. The research teams will consider the effect of factors such as race, ethnicity, and socio-economic class on community access to and impact on the topics of study. For example, the education team might consider access to quality education in San Rafael across racial, ethnic, and socio-economic lines. The housing team may investigate who has the ability to own homes in San Rafael, and who is left out of the real estate puzzle, with similar types of exploration from the other research teams.

With this experience culminating the junior year, we hope that Capstone will spark ongoing work for seniors at MA, potentially in the form of individual or group community action projects and/or Senior Projects that delve even further into the quality of life for all members of the local community. Further, we are excited about the potential for future junior classes to revisit this work, thus creating a longitudinal study of key equity and access issues over time in Bay Area communities and ecosystems.

We look forward to building on the community ties that already exist between Marin Academy and the City of San Rafael and to deepening the partnership with our local community that includes such school programs as Crossroads and the Marin Academy – Canal Alliance Sustainability Partnership.

For more information about the Capstone Project, please CLICK HERE.