Steevie's Notes

A Blog upon the return of our good students, the returning students and the new, starting Monday, August 29, after the hurricane excitements that thankfully did no damage to our campus and gave us only a brief loss of electricity.

The summer went too quickly for the administrative team, here throughout the summer and working on preparing for the fall’s return of students and new activities for each of them.  Jon Lamb has been working on a schedule that will do well for all, and Al Lewis and his team are ready for the first group, our new international students, and the fun for them their first week with us. Andre Green has his Mountain Center well organized to fit each student appropriately and well, and our new faculty, quite a young group, have settled in and are eager for it all to begin.  Jim Leppla has been in touch with almost all our seniors and will in a week start working with our juniors as well in the quest for appropriate and challenging next steps in colleges and universities or wherever the next steps should be for each of our students.

We are starting the year with a reinvigorated outdoor program, one we used to have a few years ago but are eager to invest in for each student this year.  There are five faculty members, and four administrators eager to help in all of this. Jon Lamb, Al Lewis, Joanna Evans, and I, and then Taras Ferencevych, Scott Simontacchi, Jeremy Freeman, Cory Bova, and Kristen Casey.  We will be offering an outdoor program and a cultural program every weekend and expect boarders and day students to participate each trimester.

For health, optimism and a stronger sense of self and independence these programs will be vital to each student even within the academic demands that surround each day.  There is the opportunity of a new perspective when the reality of a river trip, a hike, another biodiversity problem in science is before you for you to comment upon and looking right at you on a weekend in the woods. There are real challenges to body, soul and intellect for each of our young women and men.

We think we have a rare group of returning and new faculty, all of whom are beginning to know each other these first few weeks. And we are, each of us, most eager to learn who each student is who will be joining us, knowing that the summer has transformed the returning students in ways we must discover and respect, and that our new students must be welcomed by all, so as to learn soon that they can trust us and their peers for unlimited respect and caring.

To our parents and guardians we wish a good and wise year, one in which they must ask us questions whenever these arise, and learn who we are and how we will be able to help them with sons, daughters, and the young women and men in their charge.  The idea here is that we want each student to gain the confidence and the skills to ask questions of us and of each other so that they grow into greater wisdom and more measured ways to make choices for themselves. Ambition, creativity, curiosity, debate and discussion will find a place here and be respected.