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Hathaway Brown will soon be back in session and we couldn't be more excited! Students in grades 9-12 begin the 2012-2013 school year on Wednesday, August 22; Primary and Middle School students come back to campus on Thursday, August 23; and the Early Childhood Program will open on Monday, August 27.
In customary fashion, Head of School Bill Christ sent an email to parents on August 20 to give them an idea about what they can expect for the coming year. The text of the letter appears below.
Dear Hathaway Brown Families,
The other day my wife Diane and I were reflecting on how this will be the first fall in a long time when we won’t be sending one or the other of our boys off to a first day of school or college, the two of them now having been fully diploma′ed and licensed to make their ways in the world. I’ll miss telling them to turn around before blasting out the kitchen door or scrambling up the dormitory steps so I could take one of my dorky (but cherished) photographs marking those milestone moments in their young lives. Missing that small but meaningful ritual makes me all the more eager to hear the skirling of the bagpiper who will signal the beginning of our annual Convocation procession for Upper School students on their first day of school, bright and early on the morning of August 22.
I write to welcome everyone to a new year of unlimited possibilities. It’s a particular pleasure to warmly greet our new families, more than 120 in all, hailing from 40 different towns and neighborhoods. We’ll do our best to make you quickly feel at home.
Before the pageantry of HB’s 137th year begins, I wanted to share with you some special features of the coming year. I’ve also included an introduction to the talented people who will be joining, or assuming new roles within, our faculty and staff. Click here for brief bios that will help you get to know them.
HB Imagines
As you know, in our world of constant change, it is so important to cultivate the powers of imagination and creativity and make them a cornerstone of learning. HB is already well known as one of America’s most inventive schools. In fact, we owe our very existence to the revolutionary imaginings of our Five Founding Girls, who in 1875 dreamed that girls might one day claim an education of equal excellence to that afforded to boys. That thirst for more and for better sparked the genesis of the school that would grow into Hathaway Brown, which is why I believe that transformation is our oldest tradition, baked right into our DNA.
Over the years, we have naturally evolved an abundance of creative platforms that contribute to a culture of innovation and that embolden the girls to let their imaginations soar: Discovery Learning in the EC; Storyline and the Blazerbots in Prime; W.E.S.T. Fellowships and the Academies in Middle School; Strnad Fellowships in the Upper School – not to mention the all-school Institute for 21st Century Education, the splendidly rich arts programming and the originality that bubbles up each day in our classrooms. For the faculty, too, there are such incentifiers for breakthrough thinking as the Osborne Catalyst Fund (venture capital for great ideas), the Innovation Derby, and generous funding for professional growth and international travel. I don’t know of another school around that has purposefully designed such a propulsive educational architecture. The girls and their teachers absolutely revel in it, and its existence is one reason why HB girls reach higher and accomplish more than their peers at other schools.
Still, so much of American education continues to be driven by a fixation on standardized testing, which is hardly a liberating mechanism for intellectual reach or entrepreneurial chutzpah. Fortunately, there is a whole new science of imagination that is generating exciting insights about where creativity comes from – and how we can unleash more of it. One of the most important lessons of the new research is that the capacity for invention is not an otherworldly gift or the prerogative of an exclusive club of geniuses, but a potential embedded in all of us which can be cultivated, exercised, and strengthened.
In our view, imagination and divergent thinking are indispensable components of a great 21st century education, especially for young women, who will graduate into a world offering them unprecedented opportunities but also fresh challenges. That’s why we’ve declared “Imagination” as our school-wide theme this year. Over the summer, our faculty collectively delved into the latest research on innovation gleaned from brain science, the lives of inventors and artists, various studies of child development as well as the habits of legendarily inventive companies like Google, Apple, and Pixar. As a result of our studies, we’ll be imbuing school life with even more creativity and imagination. We look forward to a year of celebrating the imagination with the girls, and with you as well, exploring what we can do together to raise daughters of invention and daring imagineers who will use the magic of their powers to better our world.
Introducing HB’s New Center for Family Support
I was so intrigued by The Learning Circle, a new venture designed by Early Childhood teachers Mary-Scott Pietrafese and Kristen Wise, that I wanted to call it to your attention as a valuable resource for EC parents and as a model for other ventures in family support that we’d like to grow elsewhere in the School. Here’s how they describe its mission:
“The Learning Circle is a place for parents to connect and for children to play . . . While children will have the chance to explore play through a variety of different mediums, parents will have the chance to connect and share the many triumphs and challenges of raising children today. Our hope is to create a community of support through dialogue and parenting resources that will continue through your child’s Early Childhood years at HB.”
This summer saw a spate of new books and articles about the worries running through the veins of caring, highly educated parents about raising children in these times. Should I be a Tiger Mom or Dad, or an extreme nurturer? Run interference or allow them to grow from their mistakes? Are kids today spoiled or over-programmed? What in the world do we do about technology? Ultimately, how do we help our kids become the gritty, resilient, optimistic good citizens we want them to be? These are difficult questions to consider let alone answer definitively.
I recently asked journalist and scholar Paul Tough, author of the excellent book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (which I highly recommend), for the advice he’d give to today’s parents. He said, “First of all, relax! Most parents are doing most things right.” (More good news: he’ll be speaking at HB in October at our Innovation Summit.)
We agree that “staying calm and carrying on,” as the saying goes, is a great first step. And of course for years the School has provided many programs and services for parents. But the stakes seem higher now, and we suspect that in addition to wanting the best possible education for their girls, our parents also chose HB for their own education and support. So building on The Learning Circle idea, beginning this fall, we’re launching “HB’s Center for Family Support.” We’ve asked Amy Spiedel, who has a great following as a parenting coach and child development expert here at HB as well as locally and nationally, to help us design and coordinate this initiative.
We feel that the Center for Family Support will help to build an even better bridge between the School and our families as we strive to shape an outstanding partnership of care and knowledge to help our girls and EC boys thrive. The Center will offer our families (not only parents but grandparents and other family caregivers) a more coordinated array of educational opportunities, discussion groups, expert speakers, practical coaching in childrearing and other services, all of them linking in our classroom teachers as well. Amy will be working with our faculty, administration and Terry Dubow, our director of strategic projects (and Prime and Middle School parent), to nurture the Center along, and we look forward to updating you on its progress.
Everybody’s Children
Thanks to the generous support of the Edward E. Ford Foundation and the Klingenstein Fund of New York City, a number of national and local corporate sponsors, and our own Parents’ Association, we are very pleased to host our third annual Education Innovation Summit at HB on October 4 and 5. The Summit is an extraordinary gathering of scholars, journalists, policy-makers, teachers and administrators from U.S. independent, public, private, parochial, and charter schools – some of the best and brightest minds in education today. In 2010, more than 600 educators from 110 schools in 30 U.S. states and Canada took part. This year’s version promises to be even more exciting. Its focus this year is Everybody's Children: Independent Schools, Educational Reform, and the Future of Teaching.
We have a phenomenal lineup of speakers, including Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, who will deliver the keynote address on Thursday evening, October 4, and the already mentioned Paul Tough, our keynoter for the morning October 5, whose appearance is sponsored by the HBPA. Other presenters include Linda Darling-Hammond, of Stanford University; Pearl Rock Kane, from the Klingenstein Center at Columbia University; Jim Shelton, from the Office of Non-Public Education at the U.S. Department of Education; Patrick Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, and many others. One of our points of focus will be the Cleveland Municipal School District’s historic Transformation Plan – how it came together and what it means for all of us and the future of Northeast Ohio. CMSD superintendent Eric Gordon and other major players in the formation of the plan will be on hand to tell us the inside story.
The aim of this gathering is to address some of the key issues today’s educators face. What will it take to level the playing field for all American students? What can we learn from other countries? Where is the profession of teaching headed? How can educators leverage the power of technology? What are the best tools for collaboration? What place do independent schools have in the debate over education reform? At the Summit, we’ll not only raise and debate these questions, but we’ll also develop real and collaborative action plans for the future. For the latest on the Summit, please go to www.hb.edu/summit12. We very much hope you’ll attend some or all of it.
Whether or not you're able to attend the Innovation Summit, we’re confident that you’ll reap the benefits from a school so committed to wading into the big issues of the day. We hope the summit models for your daughters how they can engage with complex challenges and participate in developing solutions. These summits also make us a better school because of the incredible opportunities they provide for us to lead and learn – two traits we hope we pass on to each and every HB girl.
Let’s Start at the End of Last Year
As the countdown narrows toward liftoff of the new school year, my thoughts go back to the glorious Commencement Exercises we held in June for the Class of 2012. Those young women are in our hearts as they begin their careers at the most fortunate colleges and universities in the United States. (You should know that 80 percent of these exceptional young women earned admission to their first choice college or group of colleges, if they named more than one. And, remarkably, more than 60 percent were accepted at one of US News and World Report’s Top 30 National Universities or Liberal Arts Colleges, a group whose average rate of admittance is 25 percent.)
At the ceremony, Claire Ashmead ’12 addressed her fellow seniors and an audience of parents, relatives, and friends, which numbered more than 1,000. As she spoke, she demonstrated once again that our most important innovations are the young women we love, teach, and prepare to follow their own path in life. Claire spoke about how, moment by cumulative moment, she has been defined by her HB experience: “The person I am is the person that all of you have created. None of us has done this alone. Every graduating senior here has been shaped by dozens and dozens of others. We are all collections of moments . . .”
I hope you're as excited as I am to start collecting those moments again. Here’s to a fabulous year.
With warmest wishes,
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William Christ
Head of School