��Ƶ Magazine - ��Ƶ

Building the We

vanessa_dezorzi@concordacademy.org — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:24:16 +0000

Anyone familiar with ��Ƶ knows how much this school values community. “We are a community” is the first phrase in ��Ƶ’s mission statement, balanced later by “honoring each individual.” How do we hold these commitments mutually? What does being in community require of us as individuals? What shared responsibilities and intentional relationships enable us to care for one another, grow together, and contribute to something larger than ourselves? What tools and mindsets are necessary for building trust, engaging in honest and respectful dialogue across differences, and supporting lasting habits of connection?

These are some of the questions ��Ƶ faculty, staff, and students are considering during the 2025–26 academic year, guided by the Council for Community Life’s theme: “Building the We: Responsibility, Connection, and Growth.” Extending last year’s focus on courageous conflict engagement and resolution, the council has asked the campus community to consciously shift from “me” to “we”—not by overlooking individuality, but by embracing mutual care and accountability.

In sharing these voices from campus, we invite you to reflect on how you engage in your communities, at ��Ƶ and beyond, and what relationships, habits, and structures you want to help cultivate this year.

Convocation

, a 25-year-old tradition introduced by former Head of School Jake Dresden, opened the school year. In his convocation address, Jeff Desjarlais spoke about the dynamic of common trust in this ever-changing community, drawing on his 27 years of experience at ��Ƶ. He suggested that the strength of ��Ƶ’s school culture comes from a continual dynamic of reflection and adjustment, and he emphasized the opportunity available in every moment to build lasting habits of care and connection.

“Remember, our character and culture don’t come from the pursuit of common trust—they come from a shared belief that common trust exists in the first place.”
Jeff Desjarlais
Counselor and coach
2025 Convocation Speaker

“I hope you find a way into sharing, and allow yourself to grow, to make mistakes, and to take advantage of the support here that will catch you and help you back up.”
May Zheng ’26
2025–26 Student Head of School

“In return for the space to be our own authentic selves, we are asked to respect, to listen to and to care for the other members of this community, even when we don’t fully identify or agree with them.”
Jen Burleigh ’85
Co-President, Board of Trustees

Chapels

Several mornings every week, the ��Ƶ campus community still starts the day in the Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel, where a member of the senior class has 15 minutes to talk about whatever is on their mind and in their heart. Occasionally, a faculty or staff member speaks as well. Here’s a small sampling of voices from the fall semester.

“Please, value the time you have with those you love. Go out of your way to check in on your friends, peers, coworkers. Life is too short to be apathetic, so care.”
Finn Uhrich ’26

“Find joy and beauty in the little moments. Embrace discomfort, learn, and laugh about it. Everything will work out!”
Olivia Kopelman ’26

“Take just a minute or two a day to watch the world. Whether that’s lying on the quad looking at the clouds, or sitting on your windowsill watching the moon, or just appreciating the sunset, our lives our so full of magic. Notice it.”
Caroline Espinosa ’26

“Every teacher I’ve interacted with here, even briefly, has taught me that every story is worth telling, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem.”
Sophia Primmer ’26

“Choosing happiness is giving yourself grace, recognizing the way you feel, and allowing yourself to work through it in the way that you need to; choosing happiness is choosing yourself.”
Danaliz Estevez ’26

“Let yourself be childish. Let yourself be excited by things. Indulge in Disney movies, dumb books, dissonant karaoke, reality TV, really whatever makes you tick. If it makes you happy, it is worth doing. You’d be surprised how many people might relate.”
Lila Abruzzi ’26

“There is a lot of ugliness and sadness in this world, but there is also a lot of good. The hardest and most beautiful part of being a person is that we can hold onto both at once.”
Lucy Targum ’26

“I have had the joy of hearing nearly 1,000 chapels, and while they do not all stand out clearly in my memory, each one has shaped how I think about the world. Whenever I sit through a chapel, I think of the line from Muriel Rukeyser: ‘The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.’”
Will Tucker
Science Department Head and Teacher

“The moments that shaped me most weren’t the big, dramatic ones; they were the random, small things that I didn’t pay much attention to at the time. And I think that’s what makes ��Ƶ so special. … Over time, we stop thinking of kindness as something we go out of our way to do—it just becomes the way we live here, and we should all be grateful for that.”
Misha Varlamov ’26

“Understanding yourself is just as important as understanding others. … Learn to feel your emotions; learn to understand them. And then let them lead you toward the things that matter most.”
Tal Richmond ’26

“The present is a gift—open it!”
Henry D. Fairfax
Head of School, Dresden Endowed Chair

“The thing that I find both comforting and overwhelming about geologic time is the idea that the fraction of time that we as humans have existed is so small. It reminds me to be grateful for the immense luck that brought us all here today—to sit here in this building that was painstakingly constructed by students before us when only 11,000 years ago it would have been covered in miles of glacial ice.”
Kiley Remiszewski
Science Teacher

“Take time to get to know yourself. You’re never the same person twice, and you are always more interesting than you think you are.”
Olivia Kim ’26

“Think about those around you who make an impact, who go out of their way to include you, who truly embrace the community they’re in. Tell those people you love and appreciate them, and try your best to emulate those parts of them.”
Lyle Waldeck ’26

Strive Workshops

To encourage open dialogue and connection throughout the school year, the Community and Equity Office invited the ��Ƶ community to propose and facilitate workshops to share their cultures, heritages, histories, or other aspects of identity. Six workshops, all aligned with the community theme, took place during the fall semester, with many sessions led by affinity group and student club co-heads. Topics included the experiences of women of color in the feminist movement; the influence of Black culture on fashion; the history of the Middle East conflict; and queer history in ancient, medieval, and Victorian times. One workshop even had participants cooking, as part of an exploration of Chinese American cuisine.

Common Read

In a September campus community meeting, English teacher Nick Hiebert introduced this year’s community read: a brief essay from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. After students took turns reading it aloud, Hiebert offered a personal reflection, then invited everyone to pair up and share an example of everyday care they’d witnessed at ��Ƶ. “Reading something together allows for a quality of attention that I think makes some magical things possible,” he said.

“The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”— From “The Sanctity of Trains,” The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

CONNECT

How are you centering responsibility, connection, and growth in your life? Share your thoughts with your ��Ƶ friends on social media or email magazine@concordacademy.org.

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Can We Mend Our Civic Fabric?

vanessa_dezorzi@concordacademy.org — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:43:12 +0000

��Ƶ alums share their approaches to better communication

By Heidi Koelz

Community work has never been easy. Now, against the backdrop of a hyperpartisan public sphere, listening to learn and engaging in dialogue rather than debate seem like rare skills indeed. What can the people who practice them teach us?

We spoke with three ��Ƶ alums who offer their distinct perspectives on communication, ones based on research, community-building leadership, and their own lived experiences. Their common thread is a commitment to creating more equitable and inclusive systems—and a focus on how we talk to one another to do so. Here’s what they’ve learned.

Katrina Pugh ’83

Kate Pugh ’83 has been studying dialogue for 30 years. She’s seen that facilitated discussions don’t often change people’s mental models, which reinforce assumptions and perpetuate othering. So as she was researching what kinds of speech deepen understanding and coordinate meaningful action, she wanted to develop a conversational framework people could internalize and self-facilitate.

“I don’t think you can have a mindset of ‘we’ if people haven’t stood back and said, totally neutrally, ‘Let’s look at what we just said,” says Pugh, a lecturer in the Information and Knowledge Strategy program at Columbia University. Even if people are willing to do that, she adds, they can benefit from a rubric that’s “practically defined and quantitatively justified.”

With a Columbia colleague, Nara Altmann, Pugh published a framework called “Conversation for Civility, Collaboration, and Creativity” in 2024. Based on Pugh’s doctoral research, this presents five “discussion disciplines,” or conversational features associated with rhetorical intent: courtesy (demonstrating goodwill and respect), inclusion (recognizing another participant or drawing them out), integrity (making informative or declarative statements), integrity-Q (inquiring or seeking clarification), and translation (summarizing or synthesizing what’s been said).

Using the framework, Pugh demonstrated that even a small shift in emphasis can dramatically influence conversational outcomes. In her doctoral research, she trained the first large language model, Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), to detect the five discussion disciplines and their impacts. Her research team had trained the model on data from public town halls about proposed aquaculture projects that had been hand-coded with the five discussion disciplines. Using the trained model, the team analyzed around 600 dialogues and evaluated the relationship between the shares of the discussion disciplines and the conversation outcomes.

“Sure enough, we found some really interesting relationships,” Pugh says. For example, when the share of inclusion increases by 10 percentage points, the likelihood of intent-to-act rises by 45%. Just as in “helping conversations,” greater acknowledgement and visibility make people more likely to take their roles seriously and commit to action. Similarly, with another dataset the team saw qualitative evidence that increasing proportions of questions and translation results in greater innovation.

These findings led Pugh to her mission to build a movement based on those five discussion disciplines. Even in in-person or online discussions dominated by indirection, disdain, or cynicism, they suggested, a group can move from transactional or defensive interactions to more curious, risk-taking, and forgiving dialogue.

In 2024, Pugh and Altmann co-founded the network, along with Columbia colleagues Eve Porter-Zuckerman and Steve Townsend. Its first meeting drew around 100 individuals committed to overcoming polarization through conversation. “People were genuinely ripe for attending to the features in conversation and how we can influence them,” Pugh says. Now she’s developing services and workshops for companies, nonprofits, and schools, as well as virtual trainings. Pugh says the framework is particularly applicable to organizations in transition; people in helping professions, such as teachers or hotline staffers; and nonhierarchical networks. But it’s broadly accessible too.

“The goal is that anybody could say, ‘We need more questions in this conversation,’ or ask, ‘Is anyone doing translation?’” she says. “These are systems-thinking skills that help us be more versatile. The disciplines create space for us to break habits of disparagement and dismissal and recognize each other as co-creators.”

Pugh grew up in Lincoln, Mass. At ��Ƶ, she competed in cross-country and tennis, played flute in the chamber orchestra, and took part in a mainstage production. “��Ƶ was a really good, introspective place for me,” she says. “I could just be whatever I was.”

She majored in economics at Williams College, where she grew interested in understanding group interactions and wrote her senior thesis on the impact of unions on profitability measurement. Later, while earning a combined master of science degree and MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Pugh was introduced to organizational learning and the lens of dialogue: “I said, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is the language I’m speaking.’”

To every professional role, she has brought her interest in dialogue—the nucleus of collaboration. Early on, she worked for major firms such as PwC, J.P. Morgan, Intel, and Fidelity before transitioning into knowledge management consulting. When the stock market crashed in 2008, she took time off to write a book, Sharing Hidden Know-How, about how to use conversation to elicit knowledge. Since 2011, she has taught the science of communities and networks at Columbia, where for six years she ran the master’s program in information and knowledge strategy.

During the pandemic, Pugh returned to graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in ecology and environmental sciences in 2022 from the University of Maine. She now consults with corporations and organizations on change management and artificial intelligence (AI) design for sustainability. Since its founding in 2023, Pugh has also been a partner in Weaving Futures, a collective designing impact networks to create conditions for human flourishing.

What does she make of our contentious public discourse these days? “We’re in a terrible mess,” Pugh says. “First, we have a political sphere that is all about division and accusation. Second, we have a social media sphere that is all about reinforcing perspectives we already hold or amplifying them to be more edgy or negative. And third, we have AI, which can encourage us to settle for partial solutions and pull us away from social interactions.”

She offers some advice: “Remember that our conversations really do have an impact—from those conversations with a 2-year-old to those conversations with your bus driver. You could be the best thing that happened to them today.”

Even in our fragmented digital environment, she adds, “Pay attention to the composite of your interactions. You may also find an opportunity to use a new conversation muscle. Because no interaction is too small, you can be the one to sow new forms of civility.”

Turahn Dorsey ’89

Over his decades of leadership and coalition-building to bring about civic change, Rahn Dorsey ’89 has been motivated by curiosity. What new solutions can collaborative approaches to community development yield? How can we better communicate across differences?

As the president and chief executive officer of the Eastern Bank Foundation, Dorsey is driving its vision of building a thriving regional economy and more equitable and just communities in southern New England. With a mission focused on economic inclusion and mobility, the foundation works to improve early childhood education systems; integrate untapped talent in the workforce by lowering barriers to employment for immigrants, parents, and workers with disabilities; support small-business owners, particularly people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community; and increase the supply of affordable housing.

“If all those things take a generation to do, what should we be doing that cuts that time in half?” Dorsey asks. “Where can we accelerate and achieve what some of my colleagues and I have started to call ‘escape velocity’? What can create enough propulsion to help households break free from the gravitational pull of the conditions that entrench poverty?”

Dorsey is particularly interested in ideas that accelerate economic mobility. But as much urgency as he feels, he acknowledges that conversation is as indispensable as financial, political, and institutional capital—and that it only moves at the speed of trust.

“I’m very thankful that I was born in the Midwest,” says Dorsey, a proud native Detroiter. “For Michiganders, it’s not foreign to have long-standing relationships with people you don’t agree with ideologically, so you’re used to negotiating on a more human basis.” He says the agency, identity, and sense of belonging he developed thanks to his native city’s Black Power ethic and blue-collar culture have helped him negotiate boundaries of racial and class identity throughout his life.

As a teen, Dorsey came to ��Ƶ through A Better Chance and Midwest Talent Search, organizations that place high-performing students of color in independent schools. He says growing up in Black-majority Detroit gave him a unique perspective. “I actually didn’t have deep experience with the effects of political and economic segregation, because Detroit was, and is, an innovative place,” he says. “I came to Concord with agency, so it didn’t overwhelm me. I loved being able to reach out across difference, and I loved the challenge. I loved the opportunity to go searching for who I wanted to be.”

At ��Ƶ, he leaned into music, formed lifelong friendships, and got a crash course in time management. “I was notorious for never sleeping and wore myself down every year, but it taught me a life lesson,” he says.

Long before he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan, an apprenticeship began shaping Dorsey’s career. At 16, he started working for a suburban Detroit firm owned by a family friend, who taught him to be a professional researcher and consultant. By 19, he was managing projects for the state of Michigan and the City of Detroit. In 1995, Dorsey moved to Boston to work at Abt Associates, a global strategy, consulting, and research firm founded by Clark Abt P’90 ’93, where for 13 years he conducted public policy research, covering 42 states and, he says, “learning a whole lot about community-based influence and what that has to do with systems change and public policy change.”

Dorsey went to work for the Barr Foundation in 2009 before joining the Boston mayoral campaign of his friend John Barros. When Barros entered the Marty Walsh administration in 2014, Dorsey did too. For four years, he served as Boston’s chief of education, leading, among other initiatives, the design of the city’s universal prekindergarten system.

After joining the Eastern Bank Foundation as a Foundation Fellow in 2019, he became its president this summer. He says he believes the foundation has a critical role to play in helping to spur “a broader conversation about the civic purpose of wealth and to negotiate for the social contract we need to promote economic justice.”

Dorsey doesn’t make light of the obstacles to building consensus in these polarized times. “There’s almost a rapid spiral to the basest version of society right now,” he says. “This is not a moment for sitting on the sidelines. This moment needs every institution to think about its purpose, its relevance, and what it wants to contribute to a different world.”

In New Hampshire, Dorsey is part of a 10-member, Black-owned farm called Movement Family Farm. In their first year growing garlic, they bought seed from an older white farmer who seemed suspicious of them until he realized they needed to learn from him. When Dorsey’s wife mentioned to the farmer that she’s a pastor, they bonded over an unexpected connection: The farmer’s mother had also been a clergy member, at a time when very few women were. “It’s fascinating,” Dorsey says. “His background confuses the whole picture, because now if you want to put him in a box based on his political views, you can’t.”

Dorsey says that encounters such as these—conversations with individuals with whom, on paper, he might not have a lot in common—give him hope for accelerating “heart-to-heart work.”

He often reflects on the process of navigating impasses and finding points of agreement: “You aren’t going to discover the commonalities without having the conversation, so you’ve got to make some level of commitment. I have the great fortune—and I actually think about it as a source of wealth—that these conversations happen pretty regularly in my life. Now I have a deep curiosity that drives me to pursue them more actively.”

Eric Nguyen ’00

“It’s easy to affirm your values in the abstract, but hard to see that you’re not actually showing up the way you want to,” says Eric Nguyen ’00. As senior director of consulting and training at the nonprofit YW Boston, he works with corporations, organizations, and government agencies to help leaders and their teams understand their cultures and remove barriers to equity and belonging.

Nguyen and his colleagues conduct organizational assessments, make customized recommendations, and offer trainings on identity and bias, dialogue across differences, and giving and receiving feedback. They also model a highly participatory process of creating more inclusive decision-making structures. “The challenge is bringing together a diverse set of stakeholders, who each have their own needs and priorities, to clarify their values and define a shared vision,” he says. “We’re able to help people see things more clearly and communicate with each other in ways that are candid and honest, but also compassionate.”

Clients eager for solutions might request a two-hour workshop on microaggressions, for example. “We can’t really get to that until we do deep identity work,” Nguyen says. “The better we understand our own identities, which is where bias comes from, the better able we are to engage in dialogue, which—unlike debating—requires vulnerability, grace, and patience for hearing others’ perspectives. If we’re just thinking about being right, we’re only deepening divisions.”

He’s concerned that cancel culture has left little room for repair and restoration. “When people are operating out of fear, not wanting to say the wrong thing, you never get to what you need to talk about,” he says. “If instead you value a growth mindset, if you say, ‘We’re a learning organization,’ then you can think about putting practices in place to support that kind of culture. Helping people develop new schemas for communication is super exciting—it’s radically reimagining what the workplace, educational settings, and our relationships can be.”

Born in Boston to parents who had emigrated from Vietnam, Nguyen grew up in Lowell, Mass., and he watched his parents struggle to assimilate into American culture. He spoke Vietnamese fluently until he was 6, when they began encouraging him to speak only English at home and at school. “It came from their own experience of discrimination, of having their intelligence questioned because of their accents,” he says. “They didn’t want that for me or for my brothers.”

He regrets losing his first language and that deep connection to his cultural heritage, and he says it took a long time to unlearn the sense of superiority that accompanied his fluency in English.

When Nguyen transitioned from a racially diverse, working-class public school to ��Ƶ, he experienced culture shock. He did well academically and athletically, but socially, he was on the fringes. Though he says ��Ƶ was “ahead of its time” in having affinity groups, none existed for children of immigrants; being steered toward a group for Asian international students shaped his convictions about asking, not assuming, what community members need.

Still, with his advisor, Howie Bloom P’08 ’09 ’14, he found a second family. “Being seen, having adults I could go to, was powerful at such a vulnerable, pivotal time of life,” he says. “That relational piece of ��Ƶ is something I bring along, and even those moments where I felt like I didn’t belong have been really helpful for me.”

One Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Nguyen recalls, students wrote down identities that were important to them and wore them on lanyards to start conversations. “That was a moment when I got to define for others who I was,” he says. “And I got to see how other people defined themselves in less visible ways.”

After earning a degree in psychology from Amherst College, Nguyen taught at several New England independent schools. Over time, he began enjoying helping colleagues implement more equitable teaching practices. While teaching and working in admissions at Noble and Greenough School, he helped start Achieve, a program focused on closing the educational opportunity gap for students in Boston’s public schools through summer enrichment and academic-year tutoring.

In 2018, Nguyen began managing a scholarship program at Northeastern University. He was struck by how many students from underrepresented groups faced structural barriers to belonging, which he worked to address. “With some of our most vulnerable students, if they couldn’t get housing, that was it—they couldn’t continue to be students,” he says. “It opened my eyes to the impact we can have if we operate at the systems level.”

After serving as the director for the Center for Inclusive Excellence at Framingham State University, he joined YW Boston in 2023. He recently worked with a nonprofit grappling with community tensions that hadn’t consciously considered its values in decades, and his assessment of a government agency uncovered rifts between leadership and staff regarding psychological safety, communication, and decision-making. To address such sensitive topics, Nguyen often uses a facilitated conversational framework, LARA (Listen, Affirm, Respond, and Add). “There are times it feels kind of forced, but it requires all the parties to agree to using shared language,” he says. “Why not remind ourselves that we want to listen to each other and affirm when we find moments of connection before we respond?”

But Nguyen stresses that there’s no single way to engage with others. In addition to social identities, he asks his workshop participants to explore various change-agent identities. “Some people are vocal about articulating needs,” he says. “But we also need people who can create coalitions and people who think about solutions. Too often, it’s the same person trying to wear all three hats, so you see a lot of burnout. That’s part of building community too—recognizing you have something to contribute and you don’t have to do it alone.”

Since 2022, he has served on the board of the Natick Organic Farm, in his community in Natick, Mass., where he helped staff establish a shared vision for inclusivity. The farm recently installed multilingual signs in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, hiring native speakers to translate the text. This fall, it purchased an all-terrain wheelchair for members of visiting school and corporate groups to use.

Nguyen says the conversations the board and staff had were as important as those visible changes: “We’re all stronger when we’re able to think more broadly about who our community is and how we can help people feel part of it.”

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For Love and Learning

vanessa_dezorzi@concordacademy.org — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:18:20 +0000

Teachers Michael Sandler ’92 and Sara Langelier ’92 are paying it forward

Then-seniors Langelier and Sandler dressed for Formal in 1992.

Boston-area public high school teachers Michael Sandler ’92 and Sara Langelier ’92 have a “��Ƶ couple” story fit for a romantic comedy. Though they dated during their senior year, they’d been out of touch for more than a decade when, in 2003, they ran into each other on the street in Brookline, Mass. Three years after they renewed their friendship over a spontaneous lunch, they married.

Sandler has taught at Arlington High School since 2008. “I lucked into teaching psychology,” he says. After working in web design, real estate, and restaurants, he finally listened to friends’ suggestions: He earned a master’s in teaching from his undergraduate alma mater, Tufts, then landed his position. In April 2025, he was recognized with a Charles T. Blair-Broeker Excellence in Teaching Award by the American Psychological Association’s Committee of Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools.

“��Ƶ fanned the flames of wanting to learn,” Sandler says. “We had great relationships with our teachers—amazing teachers who got me thinking in ways I never had before.” He recalls being nervous as a senior, anticipating even greater challenge in college, only to realize how well he’d been prepared.

“As an adolescent, you’re making core memories and figuring out your identity—and what an intimate, accepting place ��Ƶ was to do that,” he says. “I really felt like I could be myself.”

It’s what he and Langelier hope to offer their students.

Langelier, who began teaching French at Wayland High School in 2001, says she’s particularly enjoying her current AP French class: “They’ve bonded and they’re really playful and fun, but they love French and they love learning.”

Though she wasn’t initially a great French student herself, she studied in Paris during her junior year at Connecticut College. “I wasn’t shy about talking to people, and that’s when it came alive for me,” she says. She went on to earn a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When she first started teaching, she says, she was touched that her former ��Ƶ French teacher Nicole Fandel invited her over to share materials and advice.

Langelier regularly leads student trips to France and French-speaking Canada, and she runs a student sewing club. “It’s a fantastic way to get to know kids on a different level,” she says. “With phones and technology, there are fewer opportunities for kids to interface with adults, and even to be in community with each other face to face. As educators, our jobs are more important than ever.”

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Activism Starts at Home

vanessa_dezorzi@concordacademy.org — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:31:00 +0000

Corie Walsh ’12 shares insights from her peacebuilding career

By Nancy Shohet West ’84

For Corie Walsh ’12, social change has always meant rolling up her sleeves and getting to work. She organized protests to raise awareness of ethnic violence in Darfur as a 10-year-old, and in middle school she undertook her first hunger strike in solidarity with refugees facing food shortages. During her teenage years, she helped out at a transitional housing program each week. As a young adult, she moved to Uganda to establish community programs, then to Yemen to implement humanitarian programs.

With parents who were both community organizers, Walsh grew up amid activism in Cambridge, Mass., which is home to many Sudanese refugees. “All the way back in grade school, they were my friends and my fellow community members, not simply a distant cause that needed our help,” she says.

In 10th grade at ��Ƶ, Walsh was co-head of Students Promoting Empathy, Action, and Knowledge (SPEAK) and a member of the ��Ƶ Service Activists (��ƵSA). As a junior, she took an influential class that explored models of social justice, taught by Elizabeth Bedell, and as a senior, she did an independent project on comparative genocide studies. In addition to her parents, Walsh credits her ��Ƶ faculty advisor, Shep Shepard, with providing steady guidance and mentorship throughout those years.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Walsh majored in peace, war, and defense. “Attending a large state school where many people were very different from me shifted and expanded my worldview,” she says. Her senior thesis was on civilian behavior during the Rwandan genocide.

“Among the questions that consumed me was that of how mass atrocities and genocide can happen,” she says. “War itself can have many causes: economic, geographic, political. But how do you get to the point where you are trying to eliminate an entire population? I knew the best way to find out was to build relationships with communities who were going through this.”

After college, an internship in Washington, D.C., led to a salaried position with the nonprofit Mercy Corps, for which Walsh moved to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, in 2019. Due to increasing conflict, it was at the time undergoing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. There, her work involved developing programmatic strategy and evaluating performance.

“One of our largest barriers in Yemen was that most of our donors and funders had not been in the country since the war began, and yet they were still setting our agenda,” Walsh says. “I knew that what we really needed to be doing was capturing the voices and expertise of the Yemenis themselves. People closest to the problem, in any humanitarian situation, should have a say in what the solution looks like.”

Ensuring that the right voices are part of the conversation has been a throughline of Walsh’s approach to peacebuilding work. She returned to the U.S. with Mercy Corps in 2020, and in 2021 she began working for Humanity United, a private philanthropic foundation that awards grants to organizations trying to find peaceful solutions to conflict. Now a senior portfolio manager there, she manages strategy and influencing efforts aimed at transforming philanthropy as well as budget and decision-making processes for the peacebuilding team. “The central concern that drives us is how to support the creation of a system that shifts power and agency to peacebuilders on the frontlines,” she says.

But with the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development in January 2025, among other large-scale funding cuts, everything changed. “The rug got pulled out from under us,” Walsh says. “USAID shut down, and funding for peacebuilding and human rights work around the world stopped suddenly.”

Walsh is currently working for Humanity United remotely from Paris while her husband completes graduate studies there, and she says the world is facing ever-increasing challenges: “We just completed a survey that looked at the global impact on peacebuilding organizations of the recent funding cuts. We learned that 55% of local organizations will soon be completely out of funding.”

Despite the political upheaval of our times, Walsh is not without hope. “Much as we might wish otherwise, we find ourselves in a profound moment of transformation,” she says. “We are compelled to think differently about how funding, decision-making, peacebuilding, and human rights resources should be organized, and we have an opportunity to build a more just way of operating.”

Observing so many people coming together to support neighbors in need, whether by donating, volunteering, or protesting, “helps to counter the negative social structures afoot right now,” she says. “The issues I have worked on around the globe are not so different from the challenges we now face at home. We need to keep sight of the fact that social change doesn’t happen in the voting booth every four years. It happens every day in our communities, and it comes from all of us.”

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Seeking Catharsis

vanessa_dezorzi@concordacademy.org — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:22:18 +0000

Annie Lareau ’86 translates personal tragedy for the stage

By Nancy Shohet West ’84

Why would anyone choose to relive the most traumatic moments of their life, day after day, reenacting those horrific memories on stage in front of an audience of strangers?

It’s a question Annie Lareau ’86 has answered often, ever since the premiere of her three-person play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in summer 2025. Fuselage explores a horrible experience from her past: the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. Eight of Lareau’s closest friends from Syracuse University were on that flight, including her best friend, Theodora Cohen. Lareau and her classmates had just completed a semester in London; she had chosen to fly home a day later than her friends.

Lareau says she was always a theater kid. As a little girl growing up in Denver, she attended plays and concerts with her mother, Marten Ann Poole ’58. In middle school, she joined the drama club. Her love of the stage blossomed during her three years at ��Ƶ, where she performed in productions including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, After Magritte, and several musicals. In her senior year, she tried her hand at directing for the first time.

“I spent almost every hour of my life in the P.A.C. during those years,” she recalls. “Theater allowed me to learn about moving and speaking and storytelling in a way that I don’t think would have been possible elsewhere. I could feel the iambic pentameter when on stage doing Shakespeare. Had I just been handed the book in a classroom, I wouldn’t have had the same experience. ��Ƶ gave me those opportunities.”

As a junior at Syracuse earning her BFA in acting and directing, Lareau spent a semester in London through the university’s study abroad program for theater majors. “We studied with actors from the London Academy of Performing Arts and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts,” she remembers. “We took classes all day and attended professional performances in the evening. I was having the time of my life.”

The morning of December 21, 1988, Lareau bid farewell to her five flatmates as they left for the airport. Alone in her London flat and packing for her own flight the next day, Lareau turned on the TV. With growing horror, she learned that the flight her friends had boarded that morning—Pan Am 103—had exploded into a ball of flames over Lockerbie. Among the passengers who perished were 35 Syracuse University students. “I knew all of them,” Lareau says.

Nearly incapacitated by grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt, Lareau somehow made it back to campus for the spring semester and again for her senior year. Looking back at a time she now calls “The Great Unraveling,” she recalls a phase marked by bad relationship choices, unsatisfying attempts at therapy, and unrelenting attention from the media, who stalked and harassed Lareau and other bereaved Syracuse students because of the story’s lurid appeal.

Upon graduating, Lareau had just two wishes: to embark upon a career in the theater and to get as far away as possible from Syracuse and the tragedy it had come to represent for her. Moving to Seattle, she performed with a national improv troupe, taught classes at Seattle Children’s Theatre, and adapted classic works of literature for the stage. Her growing interest in the intersection of theater and education led her back east for a year to earn a master’s in education at Harvard, where she studied Carol Gilligan’s work on the ways in which girls’ voices are metaphorically suppressed. When she returned to Seattle, she founded a nonprofit for teen girls that combined outdoor adventure and wilderness skills with art and music. In the years that followed, she was named artistic director of ArtsWest and then of Seattle Public Theater. She married a fellow actor and raised a daughter, who is now herself a college student in London.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down public performances in 2020, Lareau began writing a long-postponed memoir about the 1988 plane crash and its aftermath, incorporating elements of the trauma that had never fully left her, the grief over losing so many friends, and the poignant experience of visiting the town of Lockerbie in 2019 to meet some of the villagers whose lives had been impacted by the crash.

In 2022, Lareau left her full-time job with Seattle Public Theater to undergo treatment for breast cancer, then earned an MFA in creative writing. Empowered with more free time and the new degree, her thoughts turned to how she might adapt the yet-to-be-published memoir for the stage. The result was the 70-minute play that debuted at Edinburgh Fringe last summer. Over the course of a month, it ran for 25 performances, filling the 140-seat house each time. Lareau played the part of herself, and two other actors played all the other roles.

“People ask me how I could bear to go through this experience on stage, day after day,” she says. “I always answer that yes, it’s very difficult to return to that time in my life, but in doing so, I relive the good parts of it as well: the joyful, funny, crazy moments that my friends and I had together in college and during our months in London. I get to spend time with the memory of those friends: Theo, Miriam, Nicole. After years of holding those memories in my mind as something horrible, now I can revisit that time as something that was also wonderful.”

Lareau is currently planning for productions of Fuselage in Seattle and Syracuse and exploring possibilities for performances in New York City and London during the 2026–27 theater season. While she continues to work consistently as an actor and director across the country, she is also focusing on her writing, having recently published essays in HuffPost and the Brussels Review, among others. In addition, Lareau is working on a lighthearted novel set in the 1980s in Key West, Fla., a place she visited frequently as a girl.

“My background in theater has given me skills in my writing around scene building and dialogue that some people struggle with,” she says. “Going all the way back to my time at ��Ƶ, I’m a kinesthetic learner. As a director, I’m used to moving bodies around in space. And that has fed my writing in a lovely way.”

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ASL Symposium Adds a New Approach to Language Learning at ��Ƶ

vanessa_dezorzi@concordacademy.org — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:03:49 +0000

Many of the senior projects 12th graders complete during their final semester at ��Ƶ have real-world applications, but rarely does one benefit other students so directly. In spring 2024, Jenny O’Malley ’24 developed a proposal for introducing an extracurricular language opportunity at ��Ƶ. Their plan for a foundational American Sign Language (ASL) class became a reality this fall, when the support of a generous alum allowed the school to offer the eight-week symposium. The course drew so much interest that two sections ran simultaneously.

Taught by visiting instructors from The Learning Center for the Deaf in Framingham, Mass., the course enrolled 35 students, as well as two members of ��Ƶ’s faculty and staff, who served as coordinators while also participating as learners. Meeting on Monday evenings in ��Ƶ Labs, both sections prioritized fun and interaction.

Each week, the class began with finger spelling review, then practice signing words, numbers, and basic phrases, which contextualized the vocabulary they were learning. Within a lesson, students might progress from learning signs related to time (morning, Saturday, January) and family relationships (daughter, father, aunt) to reviewing numerical signs and, finally, putting them together into sentences (On Sunday, dad turns 50.) Students used whiteboards to ask questions and write responses to vocabulary quizzes, and they got plenty of practice signing throughout each class.

Joy Xu ’26 says the course was a “bonding experience” that helped her form new friendships with classmates, and she especially enjoyed the few times both sections combined. “Everyone was learning and struggling together,” she says. “While we were figuring things out, we’d laugh a lot, because sometimes we would sign something wrong and it would be really funny.”

When that happened, one of the instructors might shake her head with a comically pained expression, then write on the whiteboard: “You just signed hamburger.” The lighthearted approach made it appealing for students to keep engaging.

Joy says the symposium format also freed her from the pressure to get good grades, allowing her to enjoy the experience for its own sake. “I looked forward to it every week,” she says.

While the course was short and necessarily limited, she adds, she learned important skills for communicating using ASL: “I know how to spell my name, and I know the alphabet and basic signs. I know how to say ‘I’m confused’ or ‘I’m stressed’—I can express myself signing my daily emotions.”

Joy adds that she loves studying languages, but the physicality of ASL helped her learn in a different way. “You’re doing it with your hands, and doing it with your body actually helps you remember,” she says.

Another student, Emmy Summers ’28 agrees that learning ASL is different from other languages. “It’s intimate, because you’re not using spoken words—you’re much more vulnerable. It’s like learning another language, but you have to use much more emotion when you speak.” For that reason, she says she finds the symposium an ideal format.

Emmy had previously known a bit of ASL, since she started learning to sign when she was young to communicate with a family member. Having not needed it in years, she had let her skills atrophy. But when she saw ��Ƶ was offering the course, she jumped at the chance to reconnect with the language.

She says she most enjoyed the games they played, such as telephone: “We would start off with a super complex series of words and then, by the end, it would be like ‘sun,’ ‘drive,’ ‘car.’”

“The teachers did a fantastic job with the instruction and creating a fun, warm space,” says Monica Ripley, ��Ƶ’s ceramics teacher and one of the adult course coordinators. She adds that she often noticed students practicing together outside of class and discussing the course with others.

Carmen Welton, head of the Modern and Classical Languages Department, says the ASL Symposium wasn’t intended to be as robust as language acquisition through formal classes but rather an opportunity for students to explore something they could be passionate about. Welton was O’Malley’s senior project advisor when they proposed the plan for this course. “Jenny’s idea, from the beginning, was to offer something outside of the academic structure,” Welton says. “When we decided last spring to try to do it, it was pretty easy to incorporate. Jenny had done all the work, and they did it well.”

O’Malley, now a sophomore at New York University, was excited to learn that their idea had come to fruition. Currently studying Latin, ancient Greek, and Arabic, they say their love of languages started in middle school and blossomed at ��Ƶ, so the focus of their senior project was a natural choice. But just as much of a factor was their interest in institutional operations. “I was curious about how the school worked, how curricular decisions were made, and how students could get involved,” they say.

��Ƶ’s relational culture made it easy for O’Malley to approach administrators, who welcomed their questions. “I went into it pretty ignorant about what I wanted to do or how things work, but people were excited to help me and took time out of their days to show me their processes and give me suggestions,” they say. “It was cool, because it was a different type of guidance than I was used to, and I learned a lot.”

At first, O’Malley considered modeling an extracurricular language program on individual music instruction, thinking students could take private lessons with tutors for partial credit. But they would miss the benefits of speaking in groups.

Welton suggested a different existing structure: the Environmental Symposium. Its once-weekly evening format seemed promising to adapt, but it would limit the school to offering a single language outside of its regular curriculum. O’Malley wanted to propose something many students would take an interest in. Originally anticipating a language such as Russian or Arabic, they didn’t even consider ASL until a friend suggested adding it to the options in a student survey. It emerged as the most popular choice. So O’Malley began researching options for local instruction and contacted The Learning Center for the Deaf.

“I couldn’t imagine doing something like this at any other school,” O’Malley says. “I’m really glad I got the opportunity and that something came out of it. I’m glad so many people are interested in something I was able to create.”

Welton says she would like to see the ASL Symposium set a precedent—as a format for future ASL courses building on the basics, and potentially for other languages at ��Ƶ.

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Hall Fellow Rayner Ramirez ’88 Champions Deep Listening and Responsible Storytelling

vanessa_dezorzi@concordacademy.org — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 20:58:17 +0000

When 2025–26 Hall Fellow Rayner Ramirez ’88 visited ��Ƶ on December 5, he came bearing gifts for ��Ƶ’s library: a boom box, some of his old mixtapes, and a copy of Working, Studs Terkel’s 1974 oral history of regular Americans discussing their work, which Ramirez had encountered as a ��Ƶ student. He said that reading it planted the seed for his documentary filmmaking career: “It was the first time I realized that ordinary people’s stories are amazing, and I wanted to be part of telling them.”

��Ƶ named Ramirez this year’s Hall Fellow to honor his thoughtful, purpose-driven storytelling about the human experience, focused on marginalized communities. An Emmy and duPont award-winning producer, he has combined investigative journalism and cinematic techniques to explore complex causes of conflict and uplift stories of compassion, resilience, and recovery. For two decades, he worked as a network news and documentary producer for Dateline NBC, NBC News, and CBS News, and he helped launch the cable channel Fusion, a joint venture between ABC News and Univision. In 2016, he and Amber Payne, his wife and business partner, co-founded the production company . Its mission is to create documentary films with depth and integrity that can change perspectives.

Though others entrust him with their stories every day, when he spoke at ��Ƶ, Ramirez said telling his own was “kind of uncomfortable.” Perhaps that’s why he began talking about his childhood by establishing historical context: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the U.S. for the first time to non-European immigrants—people from Asian, African, and Latin American countries—including his family, who came from the Philippines. His uncle emigrated first, then his mother, who worked in New York for two years before she could arrange for Ramirez and his sister to join her. At 10, having previously attended a strict Catholic school in Manila, he found New York City’s streets and his public school chaotic. In junior high, he began to get into some trouble.

“If it weren’t for this one teacher who believed in my potential, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. That teacher connected him with A Better Chance, a scholarship program that helps prepare and place students from underserved communities in independent schools.

“I was amazed and impressed by this place,” Ramirez said. Right away at ��Ƶ, he got into the visual arts, photography, and filmmaking, which spurred his interest in visual storytelling. One of his first classes was an animation course; he made a film about a glove missing its match—its “one true glove.” Later, he made several narrative Super 8 films before trying his hand at documentary filmmaking his senior year.

One of his final projects for a film class was a documentary about the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted asylum to 3 million people. He interviewed migrants who had come to Boston to work and were pursuing citizenship. “It was a terrible, terrible production,” Ramirez said, “but it opened up my mind to being a teller of other people’s stories.”

He also said ��Ƶ’s “culture of learning” expanded his sense of possibility. Designing an independent study to learn about the history of the Philippines, he said, “showed me that I could actually be the activator of my own learning and my own education.”

After graduating, during a gap year in New Mexico, he read an article in the New York Times about Pagsanjan, a village in the Philippines where Apocalypse Now had been filmed. He knew the place: His grandmother had grown up nearby.

“It was told in this sort of orientalist point of view, and that article just bothered me,” he said. “I thought I could tell the story from a different perspective.” He raised a small amount of money, including $300 from ��Ƶ—enough to get him into preproduction and hire local crews to film in the Philippines for three days. A year later, he returned to ��Ƶ to present the film.

After graduating from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School, Ramirez worked as a carpenter while making independent documentaries, before earning his graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University. He went straight into a job at NBC News. “I had this academic pedigree, a very pretentious film pedigree, and I was reading the New York Times and the Economist—I had not watched TV news in years,” he said. “My North Star in being at the networks was to make sure that underrepresented people’s stories were on the air.”

His first pitch was about the Filipino veterans who had fought alongside U.S. soldiers during World War II and had never received the benefits they’d been promised. “I had lined up everybody,” Ramirez said. “I was really excited. I was going to get the story on air, and they were like, ‘No, sorry. It’s not big enough.’”

Ramirez weathered many more disappointing responses from the networks, and he worried he had sold out, working for a corporate media conglomerate. “But it never stopped me,” he said. “I just kept pitching and pitching.”

He also made the most of opportunities that came his way. In his first assignment for Dateline NBC, over the course of a summer, he followed a family of migrant berry pickers (U.S. citizens) from their home in the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas, to Michigan. Recalling that their van regularly broke down along the way, Ramirez said, “The hardest part was being an observer, standing back and filming the whole time. It was really difficult for me to do, but it showed me the resiliency of the children.” He kept in touch with them; several years later, he did a follow-up story about the kids who had traveled and picked berries alongside their parents, after many of them had graduated from high school and college.

For 20 years, Ramirez produced stories about immigration, terrorism, health care, climate change, drug wars, human rights, and natural disasters. But he found the networks confining. “Broadcast news is very limited in terms of storytelling,” he said. “It’s often binary. There’s always good versus evil. You have to find the bad guys in the stories, and it’s not like that. It’s always much more complicated than that.” He took a leap to become an independent producer so that he could tell stories the way he wanted, “from a perspective of asset-framing, not deficit-framing,” he said.

The first documentary Tilt Shift Media produced was about the Harlem Children’s Zone, which interwove interviews with video shot by kids in Harlem in the 1980s and ’90s. “They had been sitting on this for decades because they wanted to tell their own story,” Ramirez said. “For years, Harlem had been depicted by the press very negatively, while people there were working to change and transform these communities. We wanted to tell stories about people of color.”

The project gave Ramirez a chance to look back at the New York he had grown up in during the ’80s, to tell its story from the perspective of communities coming together. “I beat the odds, right, coming from New York City, from an immigrant background,” he said. “Their concept was changing the odds for this community, rather than beating the odds for individuals.”

For Ramirez, it was a paradigm shift. “These stories of people making transformative change in their communities, it’s infectious, it’s inspiring,” he said. “You want to do it—you want to make a change. That opened up our whole world.”

He said that one of the great privileges of his work is listening to people: “There’s a lot of division—we’re all living in different silos—but I think we all want the same thing for ourselves, for our kids. We all want to feel good about doing something for our community, for others. Some people may disagree about what that action is, but you want to feel good about yourself. I think deep listening to understand is one of the hardest things we can do, especially these days, but we could use a lot more of it.”

Ramirez said responsible storytelling means not being arrogant when entering a community, being open to “even the craziest pitches,” and getting the facts right. “The journalism industry is under attack, and we need to be as factual and as truthful as possible,” he said. “Fact-checking is key right now to gain back trust in the process.”

He reflected on the rise of social media and the decline of trust in traditional news sources as disinformation, artificial intelligence, and algorithms have complicated how we stay informed. Ramirez said he’d like to see kids being taught media literacy at a younger age and journalism considered a skilled trade rather than a lofty endeavor. He also highlighted opportunities for young people “to use their phones in a positive way” to learn the skills of fact-based storytelling. “And you guys have a full-fledged studio here in the C.A.C. now,” he said. “It’s really impressive. You should use it.”

Noting the numerous writers and filmmakers in ��Ƶ’s alum community, he advised students to tap into the ��Ƶ network. “And read Working,” he added. “It’s just one of those great books that leaves a mark on you and sends you on a trajectory, even if you’re not sure where to start.”

The ��Ƶ Board of Trustees established the Elizabeth B. Hall Fellowship in 1963 to honor the legacy of former headmistress Betty Hall. For more than 60 years, this endowed lectureship has brought distinguished individuals to speak on campus, many of them ��Ƶ alums, including recent Hall Fellows Adam Geer ’99 and Caitlin FitzGerald ’02.

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Space and Support for Creative Collaboration

heidi_koelz@concordacademy.org — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:53:00 +0000

This community’s investments in our campus and endowment will benefit every ��Ƶ student

When Fay Lampert Shutzer ’65 returned to ��Ƶ in May to celebrate the completion of the Centennial Arts Center (C.A.C.), she was surprised by what moved her. A co-chair of the Centennial Campaign and former president of the Board of Trustees, she had helped plan the project since its inception. The view before her matched what she had seen in the architects’ sketches, seamlessly complementing the existing campus architecture. But she hadn’t anticipated its effect on her.

“The C.A.C. was positioned so beautifully it seemed that it had always been there,” Shutzer says. “It also made the Chapel seem larger and more important, because it wasn’t hidden—you don’t have to get up close to see it.”

Culminating decades of master planning, the construction of the C.A.C.—the largest capital investment in the school’s history— reshaped 40% of ��Ƶ’s campus. The adjacent Academy Village faculty housing area, new open space, and a reconfigured Academy Garden were all created in coordination with it. And now the Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel stands at the heart of campus.

The C.A.C.’s completion concluded the successful Centennial Campaign. In addition to raising funds for the capital project, the community boosted ��Ƶ’s endowment to over $100 million. This substantial investment has bolstered ��Ƶ’s long-term financial stability, allowing the school to better support the faculty and students who contribute to the depth and diversity of a ��Ƶ education.

Shutzer is a staunch advocate for ��Ƶ’s endowment; financial aid has always been closest to her heart. In addition, she supported the C.A.C., naming the music recital hall in memory of her mother. A school can’t attract and retain students and faculty without appropriate spaces for growth and learning, Shutzer says: “We have something wonderful at ��Ƶ, and we need to take care of it. Whether it’s a building or an endowment for financial aid, the goals aren’t so different. They really are toward the same end.”

Campaign co-chair Andy Ory P’16 ’21 and his wife, Linda Hammett Ory P’16 ’21, also supported both the C.A.C. and the endowment. “When our kids first set foot on campus, they benefited from almost 100 years of hard work, support, and stewardship,” he says. “We felt strongly that we wanted to be a link in this chain, to pay it forward.”

The new Hammett Ory Theater, which offers staging flexibility and technical theater learning opportunities, reflects their family’s love of the performing arts. It’s a space where students can explore the full potential of theater, dance, music, and design—and build community.

“The magic happens between the stage and the audience,” Ory says. “Especially as the world becomes digitally hyperconnected and can feel so lonely, showing up—being emotionally and intellectually present—is more important than ever.”

He says he’s thrilled when he looks back on what this community accomplished: “This campaign required so much from so many, for so long. What we’ve done together will have profound impacts.”

The C.A.C.’s soaring double-story hallway, filled with natural light, offers new ways for the ��Ƶ community to connect.

Left to right: Fay Lampert Shutzer ’65, Andy Ory P’16 ’21, and Carol Moriarty P’02 ’05 ’07, campaign co-chairs, in the new Centennial Arts Center’s Kingman Support Shop.

On June 5, ��Ƶ hosted a celebration in the C.A.C. for community members who had contributed to both the Centennial Campaign and the Annual Fund in 2024–25. Jennifer Pline P’13 ’15, co-president of the Board of Trustees, said that while the C.A.C. provides an inspiring new physical space for the community to thrive, “quietly, powerfully, the endowment supports our people and sustains this community.”

Her co-president, Jen Burleigh ’85, reflected that though the campus changes over time, what endures is ��Ƶ’s “culture, its community, and its truly special approach to giving young people the tools they need to pursue their passions, which is what this building is all about.”

“��Ƶ is a place where students learn who they are—and who they might become,” said Head of School Henry Fairfax. Together, he added, the new building and strengthened endowment create the “foundation and the fuel for us to plan boldly for the future.”

A few weeks earlier, Carol and John Moriarty P’02 ’05 ’07 surprised Don Kingman, ��Ƶ’s director of campus planning, design, and construction, when they revealed that they had named the theater support shop for him in honor of his retirement. The Moriartys have helped spearhead the development of ��Ƶ’s campus since 1998. Over the same period, “��Ƶ had the good fortune of having Don Kingman be a wonderful steward of facilities and operations,” Carol says. “He also cared about every member of the ��Ƶ community.”

Kingman says seeing the plaque—and a quote from his 2024 convocation address on the wall of the support shop—was a jolt, of the best kind. “When have you seen a beautiful space like this named for someone in a role like mine?” he asks. “To me, it says a lot—that the community I’ve cared so much about for so long also cares about each person’s contributions to the school.”

The Moriartys also honored Amy Spencer and Richard Colton P’13, former co-directors of the dance program, who instilled a love of movement, discipline, and creative expression in generations of ��Ƶ students. The Spencer and Colton P3 (Process, Presentation, Production) Lab, dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary creativity at ��Ƶ, is the Moriartys’ fitting tribute to Spencer and Colton’s legacy.

“We were aware early on that the arts were a huge part of the ��Ƶ magic,” Carol says. “The existing P.A.C. was not adequate for the outstanding work that Amy and Richard were producing. We only wish it hadn’t taken this long for the C.A.C. to become a reality. We felt Amy, Richard, and Don should be recognized and thanked for their incredible contributions to ��Ƶ, and we appreciate everything the advancement team did to make these recognitions happen.”

Colton says he and Spencer “had not imagined such a beautiful thing” as their names gracing the P3 Lab. He remembers when they began teaching at ��Ƶ in 1989 in a low-ceilinged room that limited dancers’ leaps, and how the addition of the dance studio 10 years later opened possibilities and raised the program’s profile. He and Spencer worked with students to produce operas and other multimedia works alongside painters, singers, and instrumentalists, but finding appropriate spaces for such projects was always challenging.

“The P3—the whole building—represents a merging of the arts,” Colton says. “It couldn’t be more exciting to have film, theater design, and visual artists able to work in these spaces with dancers, actors, and writers.”

Interdisciplinary work isn’t easy, Colton adds, but that’s precisely why it’s valuable. It offers a productive template for a society that has become atomized through specialization.

Spencer says the arts are unique in cultivating multiple intelligences at once—linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and more. She highlights the holistic focus of the Moriartys’ long-term leadership in reshaping ��Ƶ’s campus for the future. “From the beginning, they have understood why balance is so important—they know that’s a critical aspect of what makes ��Ƶ different from other schools,” she says. “They have been tireless in their commitment to help ��Ƶ realize its mission and its full potential— they put in the time, and they don’t give up.”

While head of ��Ƶ’s Performing Arts Department, Spencer spearheaded a collaborative design process for the C.A.C. with performing and visual arts faculty and the architects. After retiring in 2021, she served as the Centennial Campaign arts liaison, supporting campaign co-chairs in their efforts. She recalls the benefits to the entire school when the Moriarty Athletic Campus opened in 2012 and ��Ƶ Labs replaced an aging science wing in 2016. Now she envisions the C.A.C. attracting faculty, visiting artists, and students who are eager to experiment within and across disciplines.

“If you don’t have the tools at hand for exploration, the barriers for innovation are set,” she says. “The C.A.C. will give all ��Ƶ students the means to realize their creative potential in many different forms.”

The C.A.C.’s music recital hall provides a beautiful setting for concerts, with acoustics that allow musicians to sound their best.

The Spencer and Colton P3 Lab supports cross-disciplinary creative collaboration, and it doubles as gallery space for visual artwork

A Historic Collective Achievement

��Ƶ’s new Centennial Arts Center is the most visible outcome of the Centennial Campaign, but the growing endowment also demonstrates a commitment to sustain the school, expand access to a ��Ƶ education, and support its people and program. Both show that this community’s purposeful collaboration, creative engagement, and love of learning run deep.

More than 730 individuals and families collectively contributed over $53.3 million, surpassing ��Ƶ’s goal and bringing the most ambitious campaign in the school’s history to a successful conclusion.

The community invested $26.8 million to redevelop West Campus and build the Centennial Arts Center, a creative hub that will enhance the education of every ��Ƶ student.

With $17.6 million raised through this campaign, ��Ƶ’s endowment has surpassed $100 million, allowing the school to continue to attract and retain exceptional faculty, provide financial aid, and maintain its commitment to educational excellence for generations to come.

And $8.9 million in unrestricted gifts demonstrated profound trust in ��Ƶ to use the community’s resources where they are most needed.

Campaign Leadership

The success of this campaign reflects the contributions of a community deeply invested in the future of ��Ƶ. It would not have been possible without the dedication of these visionary leaders.

Centennial Campaign Co-Chairs

Jane Du P’15 ’16 ’23
Andy Ory P’16 ’21
Carol Moriarty P’02 ’05 ’07
Fay Lampert Shutzer ’65

Centennial Campaign Steering Committee

Kate Agarwal P’23 ’28
Annie Bartlett P’24
Sam Bartlett P’24
Amy Cammann Cholnoky ’73
Jamie Wade Comstock ’82, P’17
Mike Firestone ’01
Alexis Goltra ’87, P’26 ’27
Kerry Hoffman P’14 ’20
Bradley Lewis P’24
Kristen Lewis P’24
Claudio Lilienfeld ’80
Kevin Parke P’12 ’15
Ashley Shih P’21 ’25
Linda Shih P’21 ’25
Jorge Solares-Parkhurst ’94
Carolyn Stafford Stein P’11 ’14 ’17
Ly Tran P’22 ’23
Nina Urban ’80, P’11 ’17
Peg Walker ’63

Catwalks above the Hammett Ory Theater give ��Ƶ students full access to a technical theater education.

Dan Kramarsky ’79 at the June 5 campaign celebration.

Investing in Transformative Education

One of many ��Ƶ community members who contributed to the Centennial Campaign, Dan Kramarsky ’79 shares why he supported the endowment. A career educator with 20 years of experience in independent schools as a teacher and administrator, his philanthropic goal is to support faculty development and financial aid.

Kramarsky says he was too immature for boarding school when he arrived at ��Ƶ—a smart kid who “weaponized” his intelligence. “I thought I knew it all when I was 9, certainly when I was 14,” he says. “I did not know it all when, at 18, I left Concord.”

What made the difference? He says it was partly ��Ƶ’s environment of common trust and “tremendously daring and wonderful” fellow students. At ��Ƶ, Kramarsky learned to use humor effectively; he found space for expression as a theater kid, a joke-teller, and a singer. He also found teachers who modeled love of learning.

Among those transformative educators were Stephen Teichgraeber, Ronald Richardson, Janet Eisendrath, and Sylvia Mendenhall, all skilled at collapsing the intellectual hierarchy in a classroom. “These were teachers who were learning as they taught, who were forever students,” Kramarsky says. “The great ones consistently taught us that what they were teaching was the basics, and that we had a long way to go—and that they’d take that journey with us.”

The Centennial Arts Center’s eastern entrance to Academy Garden.

A view of the Centennial Arts Center’s rooftop solar array, with the site of the new meadow beyond the building.

Sustainably Built

It’s not just the electric vehicle charging stations out front that reflect ��Ƶ’s commitment to sustainability. The materials and systems used in Centennial Arts Center have helped reduce the school’s environmental footprint even as its built environment has expanded.

Constructed to LEED Silver standards, the C.A.C. is insulated with 15-inch-thick walls and fully waterproof membranes. The all-electric building is 100% free of fossil fuels and draws from a 46-kilowatt rooftop solar array.

The building is also self-monitoring: Light, heat, and air conditioning levels automatically adjust to conserve energy when it’s not occupied. Night-sky friendly, it darkens from dusk to dawn. And a 3D-modeling program with powerful educational potential allows real-time insight into its operational systems.

The C.A.C.’s rear deck overlooks the boathouse and new meadow, dedicated by Amy Cammann Cholnoky ’73 and John Cholnoky in honor of Nancy Cammann P’73 and Dorothy Cholnoky, and pollinator meadow, dedicated by the class of 1969 in memory of Lucy Eddy Fox ’69 and in honor of their enduring bonds and shared love of the land. This haven for biodiversity will encourage scientific exploration and provide a serene spot for contemplation.

Space for Possibility

The Centennial Arts Center introduces high-tech, discipline-specific tools to ��Ƶ’s curriculum, and many parts of the building have been designed for maximum flexibility. With recording capabilities throughout, rooms for collaboration, rehearsal, performance, and exhibition, and nooks for gathering, this building presents no foregone conclusions, just possibilities. Like a ��Ƶ education, it inspires curiosity and exploration.

Carol and John Moriarty P’02 ’05 ’07 were honored to name the support shop and the P3 Lab, leaving a legacy for ��Ƶ faculty and staff who, as they say, “shaped this place that means the world to us.”

The Kingman Support Shop, which connects with the P3 Lab, provides a loading dock, enclosed paint booth, and space for storing tools, lumber, and sets under construction. It stands ready to use to make anything, from architectural studies to art installations.

With a robust digital production lab for creating music, films, and podcasts adjoining a flexible space suitable for any set, the Spencer and Colton P3 (Process, Presentation, and Production) Lab will serve students at the intersections of performance, film, and the visual arts. Doubling as an exhibition space, it will provide critical interdisciplinary support for ��Ƶ’s academic program.

In the Hammett Ory Theater, retractable seating allows for limitless staging configurations for mainstage productions, dance performances, and more. The Donohue Theater Control Room gives students learning technical theater the access they need. The theater’s flexibility also makes it a fine space for school dances, class meetings, and other community gatherings.

In the music recital hall, ��Ƶ finally has a beautiful concert space, which Fay Lampert Shutzer ’65 and Bill Shutzer named in memory of Irma Lampert P’65 ’69. This acoustically optimized music hall overlooks the meadow, creating an ideal environment for performances and master classes. In the hallway outside, a monitor shows a livestream of concerts.

With acoustic panels and large windows overlooking student houses and Academy Garden, this room is designed for large ensemble rehearsals doubles as a classroom and event space.

Cozy nooks on the first and second floors welcome everyone in the campus community to gather with friends or curl up with a book.

The new Jasmine Music Practice Room, dedicated by a group of ��Ƶ families, and practice rooms for percussion, jazz, and chamber music isolate sound and create ideal environments for rehearsal.

The C.A.C.’s lower level has dressing rooms, make-up stations, a shower, and plenty of space for creating and storing costumes and props.

Photos by Cole and Kiera Photography, Leah LaRiccia Photography, and Nicholas Pfosi

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A True Romantic Response

heidi_koelz@concordacademy.org — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:51:00 +0000

Through collective projects, ��Ƶ students connect imagination, the sublime, and their own inimitable experiences

Story by Heidi Koelz

To say that English Department Head Sabrina Sadique gives her students creative license would be putting it mildly. Her British Romantic Poetry class calls for degrees of creativity and collaboration that are exceptional even at ��Ƶ.

For their final project, she assigned her two fall 2024 sections a “collective and co-creative vision” based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Just as Coleridge looked back to a 1613 travelogue, Purchas his Pilgrimage, and Keats to the ancient Greek Elgin Marbles, which he viewed in the British Museum, Sadique asked her students to use the two poems as anchoring points and synthesize the core themes and concerns of Romanticism artistically—and to do it together as a class. Installation or anthology, musical score or short film: The choice of form was theirs.

What they produced in one week exceeded her expectations. Grading each section as a whole, Sadique also assessed students’ individual artist statements. She says her ability to evaluate this way testifies to “the experiential rigor and possibility in our classrooms.”

Close reading forms the backbone of the course, and students also wrote more typical analytical essays earlier in the semester. But Sadique says to fully engage the concepts of Romanticism they needed to create something together—not merely discuss Keats’ notion of negative capability and Coleridge’s theories of imagination, but give them form.

“I knew they actually wouldn’t understand the concepts until they delved into this experimentally,” she says.

A vase made by Isaac Chan ’25; the vase at the moment of shattering, photographed by Libby Brown ’25; the broken pieces that reveal Isaac’s fractured signature, in another of Libby’s photos. Inset: Isaac holds a fragment of the vase, which he both created and destroyed; as part of a triptych Libby created, she explores this as an image of negative capability, in which Isaac’s face, his identity, is inseparable from his art.

The infinite imagination

Sadique calls the first section’s project, a website interlinking a source-derivative chain of creative works, a “graduate-level accomplishment.” We begin with de-creation: A ceramic vase shatters against a rock. Photographs and video of the fracture influence collages and a drum solo. Paintings on the pottery fragments inspire poems, a wire-and-ribbon sculpture, a projection-mapping display, and a burial quilt. The hyperlinks between these creations map processes of derivation and inspiration, much like Keats’ ode calls to mind his tracing of a 19th-century engraving of the Sosibios Vase, a marble urn a Greek artisan made around 50 B.C.E. in the Roman style.

The project, “” invokes the Ouroboros, a snake devouring its tail—an ancient symbol Coleridge used to describe the infinitely cyclical nature of narratives. As Noelle Obenshain ’26 and Gabe Silverman ’25 explained in their curators’ statement, “Much like the original urn before its transformation, the website serves as a vessel for memories and imagination … an ouroboric loop of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” As Noelle and Gabe identified themes, facilitated discussions, and integrated their 13 classmates’ creative works into a cohesive final piece, they discovered their “web of connections transcended simply tracing who inspired whom; it also revealed links between works through shared themes and ideas.”

“If anyone hadn’t done their part, it would have all fallen apart,” says Kefan Cui ’25, who made an experimental 30-second film about the vase, which Isaac Chan ’25 both created and destroyed. Kefan threw himself into editing. Learning about negative capability—what Keats described as the capacity of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and which Kefan interpreted as a state of deep unity with the object of attention—helped him name “an experience I’d already had but had just thought of as being in the zone.” His film incorporates elements of haunting, defamiliarizing the moon and clouds and nighttime woods in a play of images of the vase.

Kefan worked with Jack Ehlinger ’26, who recorded a drum piece, merging straight time and swung time for a jazzy, multilayered film score that incorporated an audio clip of the urn breaking. “What was unique about it was that they overlapped,” Kefan says. “It was like a palimpsest. We layered a lot of different styles and rhythms.”

Initially stymied by the assignment, Jack saw when he began experimenting on his drum set that he didn’t need to prove he understood the material. “I realized this was secondary imagination and negative capability in their purest form,” he wrote in his artist statement. “I didn’t have to think about any movement I had to make—I was in such a frenzied, transcendental state that I could hold the contradicting ringing of the cymbals, booming of the kick drum, and snapping of the snare in balance without any proprioception or even a sense of identity.”

Jack’s piece inspired Gitanjali Belleau-Bhowmik ’25 to paint a river on a fragment of the urn—one of many pieces she painted that became part of other artworks. She says she couldn’t have imagined in advance how the collaborative project would take form. “We were definitely skeptical at first—like, there are going to be kids who aren’t going to do anything!” she says. “Sabrina kept telling us, ‘You’re going to have to trust people to the fullest,’ and after a while, we realized we were trusting each other, just trusting no matter what, and it actually worked very well. I feel like it’s common trust in its best form in the classroom.”

Gitanjali says she loved using her hands in an English course. “This showed us that your hobbies can be useful in mastering a concept,” she says. “Making the project hands-on was a more effective way to learn these super-complex concepts than just writing a paper or giving a presentation.”

“I keep teaching this course because of the long echoes.”

— Sabrina Sadique

Coalescence

Sadique’s other section also played with cycles of creation and destruction. Those students used a human knot—a shape-shifting chain of hands—to enact the formation and dissolution of a tree, with allusions to “Kubla Khan.” In the short Charlotte Goltra ’26 edited, shapes form and come undone, fingers and arms intertwine like vines, hands brace across a gap. As curators Drew Michaeli ’25 and Leo Cunningham ’25 wrote, superimposing images of branches and bridges creates a “chain reaction,” “digesting” and “refracting” landscapes and architectural elements.

The project’s emotional heart is by Sophia Peng ’25 and Abbie Deng ’25. The music introduces competing creators who repeat a cycle of imitation that leads to a melodious fall. “We wanted to play with the concept of overstepping—a Khan, a human, trying to assume the place of a creator,” Sophia says.

Her bawu, a Chinese wooden flute, leads, its assertive tone assuming the decreeing voice of Kubla Khan, the emperor. Then Abbie’s piano overtakes the melody, the right hand reproducing it while the left hand harmonizes with its exact opposite, a sort of aural mirror image. Abbie had the idea to reverse the harmony and melody.

The two instruments use different musical notations, so Sophia began writing in the Chinese style, laying down a line of numbers and, below, flipping their order. She played with fifths and thirds to create harmonies. “Then I consciously wrote a melody that would sound good with its opposite note,” she says. “It was a bit difficult, but it came more naturally than I thought it would.”

In addition to uniting aspects of Eastern and Western composition, the piece literalizes a dynamic of conscious competition and subconscious harmony. “Just as Romantic poets have documented their dream states in words, ‘Coalescence’ means to sing the imaginative and (re)creative force into music,” Sophia wrote in her artist statement.

She says the class changed her outlook on literature and her own life. “More than anything, it was just slowing down and taking things step by step, especially during senior fall,” she says. “I had a chance to spend an hour a day appreciating nature and reflecting on personal experiences (one of the assignments), connecting them to these century-old ideas.”

“Immersive” is what Sophia calls Sadique’s classes. “You’re affected by how passionate she is about what she teaches, and she gives you so much information so you can understand something to the fullest extent, then come up with your own interpretations,” she says. “I’ve told her her classes are spiritually exhausting—in a very good way.”

Sophia Peng ’25 and Abbie Deng ’25 wrote an original musical score for their collective class project reflecting on British Romantic poetry. Below: Sophia’s handwritten musical notation in the Chinese numbered style shows the mirroring of melody and harmony.

Taking the form of a burial site, this quilted work by Eliya Ganot ’26 surrounds a vase fragment painted
by Gitanjali Belleau-Bhowmik ’25.

How to read a poem

In 2016, when Sadique joined ��Ƶ and taught British Romantic Poetry for the first time, she offered it as a broader survey. But as she taught it every other year, she began narrowing her focus to fewer poets so that students could deepen their understanding of Romanticism as a philosophical ideal and more thoroughly explore these literary works as conceptual responses to the revolutions— technological, industrial, and political—that defined their historical context.

“I keep teaching this course because of the long echoes,” Sadique says. “We’re seeing the same thing now—the rise of environmental literature as a reaction to technological advancements, the exponential growth of AI, and the evolution of late-stage capitalism. This evolving course is a response to our collective burnout.”

All ��Ƶ students read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 9th grade, and British Romantic Poetry builds on ideas established in the core English curriculum. Sadique begins the course with the origins of Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s 1798 collection of poems, Lyrical Ballads.

“Wordsworth witnesses the French Revolution,” she says. “He sees all these democratizing ideals animating the political realm that are also animating social realms, and he translates that spirit and vision into his poetry. He brings the stories and passions of ordinary people from the margins to the center, reimagining poetry very spaciously as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’” She helped her students understand the composite form as the melding of the emotion-charged lyric with the story-driven folk ballad—feelings and individuality take center stage in the poems.

The class also discussed the problems of idealization that come with the territory of Romanticism. “Within that infinite capacity of imagination Coleridge is so keen about, students also need to understand the possibility and paradox of exoticization,” Sadique says. Students read the romanticized “pleasure-dome” in “Kubla Khan” alongside the dome in the first creation account of Genesis that separates the waters above and below. And they compared Coleridge’s “Xanadu,” a reimagining of the Yuan dynasty emperor Kublai Khan’s garden in Shangdu, with an account of the biblical Garden of Eden (which means “delight”).

In her syllabus, Sadique prioritized juxtaposition with contemporary work. Students held Wordsworth’s notion of “a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused” in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” alongside the Indigenous concept of the “grammar of animacy”—language that affirms human kinship with the natural world—described in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. After they read Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known,” they listened to Rhiannon Giddens’ “Little Margaret,” a reenvisioning of an Appalachian ballad, performed with the daf, a Middle Eastern frame drum. “The echoes are uncanny,” Sadique says.

“Sabrina’s classes always feel like an adventure. Her enthusiasm is energizing and contagious. You know you’re going to unravel a lot of deep ideas together, … but because she’s so keen on leaving nobody behind, anyone can go into her class without fear of difficult concepts.”

— Alex Zhu ’25

By combining original images with photos taken by Libby Brown ’25, Sophia Gruhl ’25 explores in her collage the liminal space of the “caverns measureless to man” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” shaped by her memories of the California coastline.

The class’s relatively narrow focus allows for a pace that enables all students to engage with the material at a high level, regardless of their previous literary exposure. How does Sadique ensure that? “I go extremely slowly for the first three weeks,” she says. “I refuse to compromise intellectual rigor, but I think intellectual rigor can actually be accomplished through incremental scaffolding work. You learn, very quickly, what the literary needs of each student are, and then you modulate instruction.”

In all her classes, Sadique distributes a practical guide she developed: “How to Read a Poem.” On one page, she outlines clear expectations—among them, numbering the lines, reading the poem aloud, and close-reading and annotating the title and first and last words before analyzing patterns, images, and literary devices. Some students say it has helped them understand themselves as literary critics and revolutionized how they approach studying poetry. Alex Zhu ’25 is one of them.

“Sabrina’s classes always feel like an adventure,” Alex says. “Her enthusiasm is energizing and contagious. You know you’re going to unravel a lot of deep ideas together, and Sabrina is like the explorer in the front, holding a torch and leading us through this labyrinth. But because she’s so keen on leaving nobody behind, anyone can go into her class without fear of difficult concepts.”

Alex’s contribution to his section’s website project dovetailed with a departmental study he was completing with ��Ƶ Latin teacher Benny Abraham. Sadique had asked her colleague if he knew of an English transliteration of the poem “On the Wretched Lot of the Slaves in the Isles of Western India,” which Coleridge wrote in Greek. Unaware of any, Abraham guided Alex as he painstakingly deciphered a scan of Coleridge’s handwritten manuscript to create a new transliteration, whose source-derivative provenance was deftly woven into the website.

“The act of transliteration preserves the poem’s original structure and sound—the ‘truth’ of its form—even as the end project becomes incomprehensible to an English reader,” Alex wrote in his artist statement. “The beauty lies in the paradoxical coexistence of familiarity and mystery, where the viewer confronts the poem as both an artifact of beauty and a fragment of unknowable truth, a sublimity.”

Through this project, Alex says, he realized that in translating, transliterating, or analyzing poetic texts, he is “actively participating in the same creative process that the Romantic poets championed.”

Sadique says it’s only fitting that the final assignment stems from the poets’ philosophical ideals. “Romanticism invites our gaze away from individual profit,” she says. “The way to make a true response to it—a Romantic response—is to look inward and co-create, engage in a way where there is no hierarchy of imagination and everybody’s creation depends on another person’s creation.”

A still from a collective video project, edited by Charlotte Goltra ’26, that overlays dance scenes with images of movement in nature.

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A Fond Farewell

heidi_koelz@concordacademy.org — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:46:21 +0000

These two retiring staff members have left lasting impressions on ��Ƶ

Don Kingman

Director of Campus Planning, Design, and Construction

It’s not often this community bids farewell to someone who has so thoroughly—and literally—shaped the school. Over 31 years of living and leading at ��Ƶ, Don Kingman’s responsibility for the campus and its operations encompassed care for the community.

Shep Shepard, director of major and planned giving, calls his mentor a “consummate communicator, always open to suggestions,” and a natural relationship-builder with everyone from contractors to trustees. Kingman “touched every square inch of this campus,” Shepard adds. “He always thought about how these spaces sing together, and how the community could benefit.”

Before coming to ��Ƶ, Kingman earned a master’s degree in higher education administration, worked in college residential life programs, and directed planning and property management for Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont. When he was hired in 1994 as ��Ƶ’s director of operations, he assumed responsibility for a campus in need of renewal.

Kingman oversaw capital planning, physical plant maintenance, security, and, initially, other facets of school life, including food services and summer camp, before narrowing his focus in 2017 to complete an ambitious campus transformation. During his tenure, he supervised renovations of student houses, faculty residences, the Student-Faculty Center, the Performing Arts Center, the Student Health and Athletic Center, ��Ƶ Labs, and the J. Josephine Tucker Library. He also oversaw the construction of Moriarty Athletic Campus and the new West Campus and Centennial Arts Center, whose Kingman Support Shop is a tribute to his unassuming influence.

“I’ve looked at myself as a steward of this property, and I’ve tried to shepherd it for future generations,” Kingman says. Conscious of setting a tone of collective responsibility with students, he supported their initiatives, never taking himself too seriously (he even lip-synched in a music video to encourage energy conservation).

Chief Financial and Operating Officer Amy Miller-Fredericks P’20 says that above all, Kingman has been a great partner: “Don developed such deep connections within the town and here at ��Ƶ. He was always available to help, making sure everybody was safe, asking what would be good for the students.”

Former Head of School Tom Wilcox P’01 says, “Easily one of my best hires and closest partners, Don exemplifies the ��Ƶ standard of excellence and common trust. He loves and is loved by every member of the community. He has brought all perspectives to the creation of ��Ƶ’s uniquely beautiful and efficient campus. He joins the pantheon of ��Ƶ greats.”

Speaking at Convocation in September 2024, Kingman reflected on common trust, the intentional work of building community, and the “tugboats” who quietly support the school. He likened ��Ƶ to a stone wall whose integrity depends on every rock: “This is not unlike how all of us arrive at ��Ƶ as individuals—stone by stone, figuring out where we fit and how we work together as a whole.”

We have only to admire the craftsmanship of the stone walls in Academy Garden to think of him.

John McGarry

Director of Financial Aid, Associate Director of Admissions

Over his 27 years at ��Ƶ, John McGarry P’22 ’23 developed a financial aid program prioritizing experiential equity, which became a model for other independent schools. McGarry recognized that ensuring all students have the same opportunities to learn, travel, and participate in sports and weekend activities was both aligned with ��Ƶ’s values and essential to creating an inclusive school community. He says the ever-increasing complexity of financial aid kept him engaged and that getting to know students and parents as an “ambassador for the school” was immensely rewarding.

“John helped countless ��Ƶ families navigate what can be a confusing process, always with patience, clarity, and kindness,” says Trish Saunders, associate director of admissions and financial aid. “He elevated the way we think about access, equity, and the power of education to change lives.”

She recalls McGarry’s collegiality in sharing his expertise with fellow admissions and financial aid officers at other schools and his service as a founding member of the Association of Financial Aid Officers. “He’s a true thought leader in the world of independent school financial aid,” Saunders says.

McGarry came to ��Ƶ in 1998 from Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley, Calif., where he had directed residential life, taught math and economics, and coached soccer, basketball, volleyball, and baseball. Previously, he had been a ski instructor at Killington Resort in Vermont and at Breckenridge and Crested Butte in Colorado. What drew him to ��Ƶ was a blend of opportunities: to promote the school, improve access, and continue to listen to and learn from students—as both an administrator and a coach.

Alongside his admissions work, building ��Ƶ’s Alpine ski program was a labor of love for McGarry. Beginning in his first year with half a dozen formerly leaderless skiers, he supported decades of student-athletes through dry land training and competition. The program has had considerable success in the Central Massachusetts Ski League and the Class B New England Preparatory School Athletic Council championships. But much more important to McGarry than the banners in the gym was developing a deeply supportive team culture, he says: “Encouraging students to improve their fitness and skiing ability, learn about themselves and their teammates, keep a healthy mindset, and balance challenge and relaxation has been a massive source of enjoyment and growth.”

“The magic of this program has been John’s ability to provide a rewarding, engaging, fun, and competitive experience for each of his teams over the years,” says Athletics Director Sue Johnson P’20. “It’s been a pure pleasure to watch, and no doubt his former skiers carry many fond memories of building connection and community on the slopes.”

Saunders sums up McGarry as an “all-in ��Ƶ person, deeply invested in the life of the school”—a campus resident, coach, advisor, administrator on duty, and generous maintainer of campus bikes. “John has fully shared himself, and his family, with the ��Ƶ community,” she says. “He will be missed, more than words can say.”

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