The transitions take place all around me—within a week, Class I students will have given final answers to colleges and will be starting on projects. Even now Class II leaders have begun to take their places. The evidence of growth should give us pause and pride. We—parents and school—are witnesses and, we hope, accessories, to some wonderful transformations. I see students who, a couple of short years ago, could barely keep track of their assignments, now able to run publications or organizations while engaging deeply in rigorous academic pursuits, students who had trouble negotiating the structure of residential life now ready to shepherd and help new students in their houses. As a house parent, I have sometimes looked at a group of Class IV students thinking that the whole house would collapse when they became the leaders, only to find those same students wonderfully responsible and caring when their time came to lead. From such experiences, profound hope is born, as is the conviction that what we do matters. We adults furnish standards to reach and the support that enable our children/students to grow. Here, towards the end of the school year, we take a fresh look and can see how far they have come.

Today, my personal celebration of our students’ growth was heightened as I attended “the Bisbee Tea”. The occasion, named after a beloved and retired history teacher, allows one student from each section of the second level courses (US History and US and the Modern World II) to present his or her research paper to the History faculty and to each other. As Interim Principal, I was allowed to crash the party and found it well worth my time. Such an event, where students are acknowledged as fellow travelers on the road to understanding, is one of the more special aspects of the school. The faculty showed great respect for and interest in the students’ research. Of course I greatly enjoyed hearing the fruits of the students’ research—from events before my time, like the Dawes Act or the relationship between the suffragette and abolitionist movements, to those that I should understand more deeply, like the Iranian hostage crisis. More than the information, I valued the passion with which the students spoke and the range of interests they represented. There was a student new in class III and one who had been present from Kindergarten, varsity athletes and award winning performers, students active in social/political groups and a leader of the Classics Club. Our students are multi-faceted and wonderfully interesting. I listened, fully aware that each section could have provided many more students whose work was scholarly, passionate and worthy of wider recognition.

Incremental growth can be hard to see. This is a good time of year to step back and see not just the inches grown but the intellectual and emotional gains made over the course of this school year. As always, thank you for entrusting to us your sons and daughters. We think they have accomplished much and are ready for the next challenges.

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