Fall 2020 Brooks Bulletin by Brooks School

BROOKS

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“ To say this hasn’t been easy would be an understatement. We are learning every day from teachers, students who are on campus, students who are online, parents and the sum total of our community willing us forward. We knew this would be challenging, and variable and maddening at times. It has been, and we will continue to meet and overcome these challenges together … And when we get through this, as we ultimately, inevitably will, I believe we will look back on this time and see that this year and these challenges have added more meaning to our lives than we ever could have imagined. Those who are on our campus, and those who are studying remotely: We are all finding our way through this together. We are all, together, Brooks School.” Head of School JOHN PACKARD, in a video address to the Brooks community before Thanksgiving Break.

The Brooks flag flies in the Dalsemer Room.

B OA R D OF T RU ST EES President Steven R. Gorham ’85, P’17, P’21 Andover, Mass. Vice Presidents John R. Barker ’87, P’21, P’23 Wellesley, Mass. Whitney Romoser Savignano ’87 Manchester, Mass. Secretary Craig J. Ziady ’85, P’18, P’20, P’22 Winchester, Mass. Treasurer Valentine Hollingsworth III ’72, P’17 Dover, Mass.

TRUSTEES Cristina E. Antelo ’95 Washington, D.C. Iris Bonet ’90 Houston, Tex. Peter J. Caldwell Morristown, N.J. W. J. Patrick Curley III ’69 New York, N.Y. Peter V. K. Doyle ’69 Sherborn, Mass. Cheryl M. Duckworth P’22, P’23 Lynnfield, Mass.

Paul L. Hallingby ’65 New York, N.Y.

Juliane Gardner Spencer ’93 New York, N.Y.

Booth D. Kyle ’89 Severna Park, Md.

Alessandro F. Uzielli ’85 Beverly Hills, Calif.

Zachary S. Martin P’15, P’17 Wellesley, Mass.

Meredith M. Verdone ’81, P’19 Newton Center, Mass.

Brian McCabe P’18 Meredith, N.H.

A LUMNI T R UST E E S William E. Collier ’11 Chapel Hill, N.C.

Diana Merriam P’08, P’11 Boxford, Mass. Sally T. Milliken ’88, P’22, P’24 Byfield, Mass.

Anthony H. Everets ’93 New York, N.Y.

John R. Packard Jr. P’18, P’21 Head of School North Andover, Mass.

Nancy C. Ferry P’21 West Newton, Mass.

Daniel J. Riccio P’17, P’20 Los Gatos, Calif.

Shawn Gorman ’84 Falmouth, Maine

Belisario A. Rosas P’15, P’21 Andover, Mass.

H. Anthony Ittleson ’56, P’84, P’86 Green Pond, S.C. Michael B. Keating ’58, P’97 Boston, Mass. Frank A. Kissel ’69, P’96, P’99 Far Hills, N.J. Peter A. Nadosy ’64 New York, N.Y.

Ikenna Ndugba ’16 Boston, Mass.

Peter W. Nash ’51, P’81, P’89 Nantucket, Mass.

T R UST E E S E ME R IT I William N. Booth ’67, P’05 Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Cera B. Robbins P’85, P’90 New York, N.Y.

Henry M. Buhl ’48 New York, N.Y.

Eleanor R. Seaman P’86, P’88, P’91, GP’18 Hobe Sound, Fla.

Steve Forbes ’66, P’91 Bedminster, N.J.

David R. Williams III ’67 Beverly Farms, Mass.

James G. Hellmuth P’78 Lawrence, N.Y.

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36 Head of School John R. Packard Jr. P’18, P’21 Director of Institutional Advancement Gage S. Dobbins P’22, P’23 Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Programs Nicole Mallen Jackson ’95

Associate Director of Alumni Relations Carly Churchill ’10 Director of Admission and Financial Aid Bini W. Egertson P’12, P’15

Director of Communications and Marketing Dan Callahan P’19, P’20, P’23 Director of Publications Rebecca A. Binder Design Aldeia www.aldeia.design Alumni Communications Manager Emily Williams Director of Digital Communications Jennifer O’Neill

Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome. Opinions expressed in the Bulletin are those of the authors and not necessarily of Brooks School. Correspondence concerning the Bulletin should be sent to Editor Rebecca A. Binder: mail Editor, Brooks Bulletin 1160 Great Pond Road North Andover, MA 01845 email rbinder@brooksschool.org phone (978) 725-6326

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20 T he Class of 2020: Part One

02 M essage from the Head of School

This year-long, two-part feature honors each member of the Brooks class of 2020, and reflects on the ways in which each graduate contributed to campus life. The first half of the class is included in this issue; the second half will be included in the next issue.

28 A Socially Just Community

An accounting of the school’s efforts in diversity, equity and inclusion, and the steps Brooks has taken toward its goal of becoming an anti-racist institution.

36 B rooksians Battling the Pandemic

Brooksians in a variety of fields are battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, the Bulletin focuses on the work of four alumni in vaccine science, public health, education and global development assistance.

03 News + Notes 43 Brooks Connections 50 Class Notes

ON THE COVER: This Brooks flag was raised on the campus flagpole on the morning of March 7, 2020 — the first day of Spring Break last year. It remained flying even as the COVID-19 pandemic descended over the world and Brooks. It was lowered to half-staff in fall 2020 in remembrance of September 11, 2001, before it was removed. This flag, which kept watch over the Brooks campus from the time students left campus in March until the time boarders finally returned to campus in September, has been preserved in the Brooks Archives as an artifact of this particular time in the school’s history.

A MESSAGE FROM JOHN R. PACKARD JR. HEAD OF SCHOOL

Character and Resolve

“W hile difficult in so many ways, this has also been as inspiring a period of time as any I have been privileged to be a part of during my 31 years at Brooks. The school’s character and resolve are carrying the day.” 2

As we approach the final days of 2020, I find myself awestruck at what our community has managed to achieve in the midst of what might be the most trying stretch the school has ever experienced. Yet, in what has been an extraordinary year by any measure, the manner in which we have navigated our way through a spring, summer and fall with so much to carry will be what endures in my mind. As we head into an uncertain winter, still unsure about how the second half of this school year will unfold, I am not at all uncertain that we will find our way. I am certain in this feeling because I have witnessed students, colleagues, trustees, parents and alums demonstrate a capacity and willingness to step into the unknown and continue moving forward. While difficult in so many ways, this has also been as inspiring a period of time as any I have been privileged to be a part of during my 31 years at Brooks. The school’s character and resolve are carrying the day. As this calendar year began, we had no way of knowing how COVID-19 would turn our school upside down in the span of just 10 days in March. While all of us were thrown by circumstances that were profoundly unfair and beyond our control, the class of 2020 lost its final spring with no warning. Yet, the disappointment did not deter this group from finding ways to be with one another, to remain engaged from a physical distance, and to be the exemplary leaders and citizens they had always been. At the end of it all, with plenty of reason to be disappointed, a member of the class wrote to me: “I cannot be thankful enough for my four years here. It is, hands down, the best school in the world. Brooks was a dream come true.” It is this spirit that comes to mind when I think of the class of 2020; a spirit that makes clear this group’s character and resolve.

In January 2020, we were also months away from the long-overdue racial reckoning that continues to inspire all of us to seek ways to realize and embed equity, inclusion and anti-racism in our school culture. This responsibility and opportunity has never been more abundantly clear or compelling, and we have been thinking and working in new ways throughout the summer and fall at being a school that fosters full and confident belonging for all of its members. I have been moved time and again by all in our community who have stepped forward to encourage, support and partner with the school and its effort to be better in this regard than it has ever been. The commitment of those giving so much to the goal of ensuring our campus is a more inclusive and equitable place to be is character and resolve in action. I doubt any of us will lament reaching a point in time when COVID-19 is behind us and has become a period in our lives we recall as opposed to one we are experiencing. The same can be said for more fully realizing equity and inclusion for all members of our community in ways that we feel deeply and know beyond any doubt. I anticipate 2020 will be a year many will forever hold up as the most difficult year of their lives. This has been true in many ways here at 1160 Great Pond Road. Yet, this edition of the Bulletin will make clear that how we have continued to wrestle with a once-in-a-century pandemic, and how we have stayed in pursuit of equity and inclusion for all who are part of this community, are what will ultimately define Brooks School in 2020 — character and resolve at every turn. What a privilege it is to be part of such a community. I hope you all have a safe and joyous holiday season.

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NEWS + NOTES IN THIS SECTION 04 News from Campus 10 Campus Scene 16 Athlete Spotlight 18 Athletics News

A group of on-campus Brooks students gathers together to get an early start on assignments before study hours begin. Students were encouraged to spend time outdoors and in small groups this fall due to coronavirus regulations, and scenes like this became typical. “Last night the fields were littered with small groups like this as dusk fell,” explains English faculty Leigh Perkins ’81, who made this photograph. “Kids are taking advantage of every moment together, and it’s unexpectedly beautiful.”

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N EWS FRO M C A M P US

The Hybrid Classroom Fall 2020 brought change into the Brooks classroom, as the coronavirus pandemic caused faculty and students to embrace technology, a new schedule and new teaching methods in a combination of in-person and virtual learning. The Brooks faculty have always prided themselves on their relationships with students: getting to know them as people; working closely and collaboratively with them in class; and finding engaging ways in which to teach course content. The coronavirus pandemic placed those values into sharp relief. The question: How could Brooksians teach and learn in

an environment that required physical distancing, that limited interaction between students and teachers, that allowed only half a section’s students to be in a classroom at once, that dictated a severe choreography on where a teacher or student could sit, stand or move around a classroom, and that needed to accommodate student time zones ranging from Boston to Beijing?

The answer: By calling on the convictions that Brooks faculty are known for, by learning and using new technology, by adapting to a new schedule, and by treating each day as a chance to have faith in each other and in the school community. Faculty spent the summer learning how to integrate new technology — from iPads to webcams to online apps and browser extensions — into their classrooms

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<< History teacher Amanda Nasser and her students in Nasser’s classroom. Nasser and other Brooks faculty used technology to make the hybrid classroom as integrated and seamless as possible.

and courses, with an eye toward engaging and reaching students in their classrooms, in their dorm rooms and in their homes all at the same time. They developed a new daily schedule that focused on health and safety, on the emotional wellness of the community and also on allowing teachers to teach in new and flexible ways. It’s not perfect; the current pandemic demands concessions. One ideal the school hasn’t conceded, though, is the strength of its community and collective care for each other. Teachers who are close to retirement learned how to use iPads as teaching tools under the tutelage of their Millenial and Generation Z colleagues. Younger teachers sought the wisdom and guidance of their more experienced colleagues as they planned lessons and courses. Students who chose to attend school virtually are paired with peers who are on campus for projects. Students who chose to board on campus wear masks, wash their hands, fill out a daily attestation and strive to keep each other safe and well. The community is, as it always has been, in this together, pushing through challenges and determined to emerge stronger than it ever was. FOR MORE INFORMATION Please visit the school’s website at www.brooksschool.org for more and updated information on the school’s ongoing coronavirus preparations and continuous learning plans.

A 360-degree camera made by Kandao. Teachers used these and other similar cameras to display a view of the entire classroom to virtual students.

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THE DAILY SCHEDULE Brooks developed a new daily schedule for use this fall. The schedule prioritizes consistency, and remains the same for on-campus, concurrent and fully virtual learning; prioritizes the physical health and mental wellness of the community; prioritizes community engagement through Chapel, advisory and dedicated affinity time; and allows teachers to use best teaching practices through small skills group instruction. The schedule includes seven academic blocks. Each course has four scheduled class meetings each week, and students are scheduled into three of the four meetings. For each course, students attend two concurrent class meetings a week as a large group, and one meeting a week in a smaller skills group. Ideally, on-campus students attend at least two out of the three weekly class meetings in person.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE CL ASSROOM Faculty used an impressive amount of technology to connect with in-person and virtual students in the hybrid classroom. Teachers made use of laptops, iPads, video conferencing software and 360-degree cameras to make sure that virtual students and in-person students could see and hear them, as well as see and hear each other and the classroom, as they learned together synchronously, in two different modes, and often from around the world. A teacher’s typical setup: Connect a laptop to a Zoom meeting with virtual students, with the teacher’s video feeding from a 360-degree camera; project that Zoom meeting onto an in-class monitor or screen; join the Zoom with an iPad running a notetaking or other app; share the iPad screen into the Zoom to serve as a whiteboard, visible to all the students.

Living in the Mansion [Ed. Note: Sixth-form journalism students reported on various aspects of current life at Brooks for a class assignment. The Bulletin is including some of those reports in this issue. These pieces have been lightly edited for style and word count.]

The mansion. A sprawling modern house located on the far left quadrant of the Brooks campus, overlooking the picturesque lake and surrounded by trees. The Brooks mansion, home to English teacher Ms. Perkins, has never been occupied by boarding students — until now. Chloe Leonard, Addie Branca, Brooke Rogers, Maddy Dombal, Lily Pflaum and Anna Weed are the fifth-form students who were assigned to live in the mansion for the duration of the fall. Students are living in the mansion for the first time ever this fall because of the dramatic increase in the number of boarding students after coronavirus eliminated the option of attending campus as a day student. Outwardly, it would appear that life in the mansion would be very different from average dorm life for obvious reasons, such as room size and location. Leonard and Branca have a large, carpeted room with a walk-in closet and their own bathroom, which includes a bathtub and shower. “The rooms are really big, and we have a lot of extra space and a walk-in closet for extra storage,” says Rogers, who lives in another room in the mansion with roommate Dombal. Another unique aspect of mansion life is its incredibly secluded location in comparison to all the other student housing. The walk to campus from the mansion is considerable, and a big adjustment from Hett West and East, where the students lived last year. “It’s way different than dorm life. In a way, I feel like a day student because we rarely go to campus except for when we go to meals. We all love it so much and are so happy we got put out here,” says Leonard. — Lucy Adams ’21

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Summer Learning Opportunities Two Brooks programs had a successful debut this summer. The Brooks community enjoyed two additional learning opportunities this summer with the introduction of Brooks Connects and Summer Session. Brooks Connects is an enrichment workshop and seminar series; Summer Session offers for-credit academic courses to Brooks students. The school plans to extend the Brooks Connects program into the school year. “This foundational summer for Brooks Connects has given us the tools to build community and learning experiences for our entire Brooks community,” explains history faculty Joanna McDonough, coordinator of the Brooks Connects program. “We’ve learned that the community would like to see this type of programming during the year as a point of connection and lifelong learning.” Brooks Connects offered programming guided by the school’s core values. For example, the program offered six-week sessions in painting, cooking, essay writing and a book club that featured books written by women of color, which was popular with students. A total of 25 Brooksians, including current students, parents and children of alumni, enrolled in the program. “It has been so inspiring to see adults and students engaged together,” says McDonough. The school’s Summer Session also drew interest with its series of intensive three-week courses taught for credit by Brooks teachers to Brooks students. “Students really dove into their topics,” says Summer Session coordinator and Chair of the History Department Michele Musto. In particular, she adds, “I have been so impressed with our new incoming third- and fourth-formers in these classes. Their enthusiasm and work effort has been tremendous!” “It’s clear that our current students are seeking opportunities to explore topics that might not fit within their course load during the regular school year, or are seeking practice or enrichment in a particular area,” Musto continues. “They’re also interested in topics that allow them to connect to their lives and current events as well. And summer is a great time to explore some of those topics.”

Members of the girls soccer program work out this fall. Director of Physical Wellness Alex Skinner ’08 launched a popular wellness challenge that reminded Brooksians to take time for themselves and their health.

A Feel-Good Challenge Director of Physical Wellness Alex Skinner ’08 encouraged all members of the Brooks community — on-campus students, virtual students, employees, parents and alumni — to remember their physical wellness this fall by launching the B Active Feel Good Challenge. The two-week October challenge awarded participants points for daily activities such as taking a walk with a friend, drinking 64 ounces of water and engaging in a formal workout. The students who collected the most points were Lana Gibbs ’24, Bella Hacker ’24 and Camilla Johnson ’22. The adults who collected the most points were Attessa Bradley P’24, Auxiliary Operations Manager Tim Enos and Allison Jackson ’93. “I was so proud of the Brooks community for its participation in the B Active Feel Good Challenge,” says Skinner. “During a busy time amidst a global pandemic, students, faculty, parents and alums took the time to take care of themselves and motivate others to do the same. The hope is that those who participated built habits that can keep them feeling great mentally and physically during these challenging times and beyond. Look out for information about our next challenge coming soon!”

BROOKS TALK: A THIRD-FORMER BRINGS HIS PASSION FOR AUDIO JOURNALISM TO LIFE AT BROOKS. Ryan Kelleher ’24 introduced his podcast, Brooks Talk, this fall. Kelleher hosts interviews with a variety of Brooksians who engage in life across the school. The interviews illuminate many aspects of the Brooks experience. Kelleher has dreams of working in sports broadcasting and journalism. He says he hopes to practice those skills while helping people learn about Brooks and its community. Brooks Talk is available to listen to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and through the link in the bio of the instagram account @brookstalkpodcast.

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This year’s fall play troupe took advantage of the Brooks campus to stage a spooky Halloween performance on the school’s fire trail.

A Halloween Experience “This year we are grateful for creative community events that feel like Brooks and not ‘Brooks in a Pandemic,’” Chair of the Arts Department Babs Wheelden wrote in an early November email to the Brooks student and employee body. Under that metric and every other, this year’s fall play was a massive success. The theater afternoon activities group came up with an ingenious solution to the COVID-19 health and safety measures that were in place on campus this fall. When it couldn’t gather in large groups indoors, let alone pack its typical full-house audience into the auditorium in the Center for the Arts, the group moved its efforts outdoors to stage a memorable, bone-chilling play on the fire trail over Halloween weekend. The physically distanced play was an original, immersive theater experience based on the gothic short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving. The script, a collaboration between the cast, Director of Theater Meghan Hill and local playwright Deidre Purcell, was custom-written for the cast, which included both on-campus and virtual actors. The audience was charged with solving the mystery of the disappearance of Ichabod Crane and with escaping the Headless Horseman. The audience engaged with the piece by walking in small, staggered groups under the guidance of the Detective down the fire trail, the wooded trail

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that follows the school’s lakefront. As the groups of audience members progressed down the fire trail and toward the boathouse, they came upon scenes that advanced the plot of the performance. The paranormal walk down the fire trail took each group of audience members around 45 minutes to complete. “This production was beyond brilliant: drama, comedy, unexpected shocking moments, fantastic props, virtual performances and bone-chilling (literally)

The Headless Horseman made an appearance on the Brooks fire trail this fall.

thrills,” Wheelden continued. “Oh, and it was in person on our beautiful snow-capped fire trail under a full moon. Spectacular!” Wheelden added that the play “was reflective of our entire fall. It was fluidly adaptive beyond expectations. These teacher and student creatives persevered and made the best of challenging circumstances, an unusual snow storm, mishaps, and a bit of mayhem. In the end, we all were entertained; we were laughing; and we supported each other.”

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N EWS FRO M C A M P US

How does your fundraising project work? It’s an art commission project. I take requests for portraits from people who have made donations to any organization that supports the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice movements. The size of the portrait is based on the amount of the donation.

What inspired you to think of using art as a way to help this cause? Art has always been really important for me. When I saw what was going on this summer, I felt that, as a student at a predominantly white institution, I had a responsibility to do what I could to help the cause. I think things like that aren’t always addressed by the school, so I think sometimes the responsibility shifts to other people like me. It’s really good to use what I have as a platform to do what I can to help out.

Fast 5 // Q+A Fifth-former Hongru Chen uses his artistic talent to raise money for social justice organizations. The Bulletin sat down with him to learn more about the project.

You’re an excellent artist. How did you become involved in art? I started making art at a really young age, probably four or five years old. I started taking lessons during elementary school, and it continued on from there. I just kept doing it. I think for the first couple of years it was a hobby, but now I feel that as my skill set progresses, it’s important to use it as a tool to do something bigger or to give back to my community.

What kind of response did you get to your call for contributions? Oh, I think the response has been pretty positive. I received around a dozen requests, some of which I’m still working on. I’m really busy with other stuff, but it feels really fulfilling to see how many people like that I’m doing it. The project has raised close to $1,000.

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Arts Students Adapt to a New Mode of Learning [Ed. Note: Sixth-form journalism students reported on various aspects of current life at Brooks for a class assignment. The Bulletin is including some of those reports in this issue. These pieces have been lightly edited for style and word count.]

A portrait of a friend of Hongru Chen ’22, which Chen painted following the friend’s donation to a social justice organization supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Is your project ongoing? Can readers participate? Definitely. I’m really busy, but this isn’t something I should do for just two months and then stop. So, I’m happy to keep making portraits, even if it takes a while. [Ed. Note: If you would like to participate in Chen’s project, please contact Bulletin editor Rebecca Binder at rbinder@brooksschool.org.]

“ Art has always been really important for me. When I saw what was going on this summer, I felt that, as a student at a predominantly white institution, I had a responsibility to do what I could to help the cause.” FAL L 20 20

Virtual classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic have left many students struggling to adjust to new forms of learning in all areas of school life. But beyond academic classes, many virtual students at Brooks this year have been forced to navigate the difficulties of online arts courses. These virtual classes range from introductory arts courses to AP Studio Art and Concert Chorale. Last spring, the transition to online learning drastically altered the arts curriculum at Brooks. In September, a majority of students were welcomed back to campus and have been able to participate in the arts under relatively regular conditions, following COVID-19 distancing and safety protocol. But many students enrolled in arts courses are virtual, a circumstance that no arts teachers have had to work within in the past. Chair of the Arts Department Babette Wheelden is currently teaching three visual arts courses with a combination of virtual and in-person students. “The biggest challenge is connecting, literally and figuratively,” she says. “We have huge screens and 360-degree video conferencing equipment to Zoom with online students. What is hard is that I cannot see what they are doing. Teaching visual art is about the process as much as the final project, if not more.” Another challenge in all forms of online art is the ability to give direct feedback. In regards to studio arts, Wheelden says, “In the studios, the students and I normally walk around looking at each other’s work. We inspire each other. That sort of awareness is possible but not as natural with the online situation. Students at home can take photos of their work and upload for us to see, critique and comment on, but there is a delay and it is not fluid.”

In the performance arts, instant feedback is also delayed. Students in virtual chorus classes submit recordings of songs individually for revision, in contrast to the immediate feedback a classroom setting provides. The ability to collaborate with others in choir virtually is also hindered, as virtual students have to be muted while singing due to Zoom’s delayed feedback. As a community, Brooks has become aware that some virtual students have felt left out of campus life this fall. Seeing others physically in the classroom while being online is a new experience for online learners. This applies to the arts courses as well when both virtual and in-person students are participating in the same class. “Seeing others in person and being online is difficult, but at the same time it comes with being a virtual student,” says Saisha Prabhakar ’22, who is taking Concert Chorale remotely. As arts courses are designed for students to progress over the course of the semester or year, it raises the question of whether or not that is possible for students who are unable to receive in-person instruction and feedback, or in the case of performing arts, learn new music material in person. “I think it has been [harder to learn new material] simply because doing choir over Zoom is a pretty difficult task. I think that learning the material has been fine in small groups, but it is a little difficult with our large class,” says Prabhakar. Despite the many challenges that come with the virtual arts, students in all areas of the arts have been able to participate and create pieces of work. “I have found the work the online students are producing to be absolutely amazing, so well developed and vibrant … they have all the engagement and enthusiasm of the in-person students,” says Wheelden. In her studio arts courses, students in person and online have been able to communicate and critique each other’s works — one example of how all of the arts are aiming to create as normal an environment as possible despite distance barriers. —Emma Tiedemann ’21

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C M P US S CEN EM P US NA EWS FRO M CA

Students at work in the Center for the Arts at night in November 2020. Brooks welcomed boarding students to campus in fall 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Welcoming New Faces Brooks welcomed new members to the board of trustees and a group of new faculty to school.

The school’s new trustees. From top to bottom: Iris R. Bonet ’90, Diana Merriam P’08, P’11, Sally Milliken ’88, P’22, P’24, Ikenna Ndugba ’16.

NEW TRUSTEES Iris R. Bonet ’90 lives in Houston, where she is director of admission at The Kinkaid School, a pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade independent school. Bonet has 26 years of experience working in independent school admission departments, and she’s been an independent school student, parent, administrator and trustee. She also was the first senior administrator of color in the history of two schools, each more than 100 years old. Bonet, who received her bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College, has extensive experience in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work: diversifying student bodies; supporting students, faculty and administrators of color; and advising schools in DEI strategic planning. While at Brooks, Bonet was a dedicated theater and music student who appeared in several musicals and participated in all of the school’s singing groups, including the choir, Serendipities and Madrigals. Diana Merriam P’08, P’11 and her husband, Peter, have owned Merriam Vineyards in Healdsburg, California, for the past 20 years. Their son Evan ’11 has served as the estate manager for the past three years. In 2012, Merriam formed the Kalambaka Educational, Literary, Cultural and Civil Not for Profit Company and built a three-story library in her fraternal grandparents’ hometown of Kalambaka, Greece. Completed in 2015, the library provides print and digital materials, as well as

educational programming for all community members, including school-age children, area farmers and monastery-dwelling nuns and monks. Merriam, who lost her mother to Alzheimer’s disease, passionately supports the ongoing research of Dr. Dale Bredesen through her Four Winds Foundation. She also supports the Youth Development Organization and Uncommon Threads, both in Lawrence, Massachusetts. This is Merriam’s second time on the school’s board of trustees, having previously served from 2005 to 2012. A current member of the board at Eagle Hill School in Hardwick, Massachusetts, she has previously served the boards of the Boxford Elementary School Trust in Boxford, Massachusetts, and Esperanza Academy School of Hope in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Two of Merriam’s four children, Stefan ’08 and Evan ’11, attended Brooks, as did her brother, Arthur DeMoulas ’77, P’10, P’12. She primarily splits her time between Boxford, Massachusetts, and Cape Neddick, Maine, while making frequent trips to California and Greece. Sally Milliken ’88, P’22, P’24 is a field teacher for the Massachusetts Audubon Society at the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary. She previously worked for the QuebecLabrador Foundation (QLF) in Ipswich, Massachusetts, as the intern coordinator and helped facilitate some of the first Students on the Forefront of Science experiences at QLF. Milliken has volunteered her

time on numerous boards and committees, including the board of Buzzards Sailing School in Pocasset, Massachusetts, and the Wings Neck Trust Land Use Committee. She chaired the Newbury Elementary School Outdoor Grounds Committee, served as vice president of the board of Merrohawke Nature School in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and co-chaired the Parent Association of the Newburyport Montessori School. During her time on campus, Milliken was a three-season 1st team athlete in field hockey, ice hockey and crew. She held several leadership roles, including co-captain of the field hockey team and captain of the crew team, dorm prefect of P.B.A. Hall, Chapel prefect and Cum Laude Society member. Since graduating in 1988, Milliken has been a steadfast Brooks volunteer, serving as class secretary, class agent, reunion organizer, and secretary and president of the alumni board. Numerous members of the extended Milliken family are proud Brooksians, including her father, Arthur ’47, and children Ella ’22 and Eben ’24. Milliken enjoys watching her children’s sporting games and theatrical productions, as well as making pottery and playing on the North Shore Panthers Women’s Ice Hockey Team. ALUMNI TRUSTEE Ikenna Ndugba ’16 is an NCAA Division I basketball player at Elon University pursuing a second bachelor’s degree in human services studies. During his previous stint playing Division I basketball for

Bryant University, he earned both a bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing and a master’s degree in business administration and general management. Over the past few years, Ndugba has become increasingly committed to helping young, underprivileged racial minorities within his community. In 2018, he founded a Boston-based non-profit, 617Peak, which promotes literacy and creativity by fostering students’ personal work in both written and spoken forms. This creative outlet, Ndugba says, gives innercity kids a safe, comfortable space in which to voice their concerns, thoughts and feelings, as well as develop more avenues and resources for long-term personal success. [Ed. Note: Ndugba’s work with 617Peak is profiled on page 88 of this issue.] Basketball was Ndugba’s outlet while growing up in Boston. He attended Mission Grammar School and Boston Latin Academy, where he gained an appreciation for education and community, before arriving at Brooks, where he developed an appreciation for the arts. While captaining the Brooks boys 1st basketball team, Ndugba was named Independent School League Player of the Year and the New England Class B Player of the Year. He also was a school prefect during his sixth form and, upon graduation, he received the Russell Prize for an outstanding single contribution to the life of the community during the year.

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NEW FACULTY Arts faculty Caio Afiune is originally from São Paulo, Brazil. He completed his undergraduate studies at Faculdade Santa Marcelina, where, at 16 years old, he became the youngest student to ever enroll in the music program. Afiune moved to Boston in 2011 to attend New England Conservatory, (NEC) where he is currently finishing his doctoral studies in jazz performance. Afiune was part of the NEC Jazz Orchestra, and has also performed extensively as a leader and a sideman in the United States and abroad. Afiune’s self-titled debut album, featuring exclusively original compositions, drew notice: “Prebenda,” the opening track, was awarded an ASCAP Young Composer Award, and “Dido,” the closing track, was an official finalist in the 2015 Hollywood songwriting competition and won the 2016 Downbeat Award for best composition. World Languages faculty Olivia Budd-Pearson ’15 attended Wesleyan University, where she rowed and served on the university’s Athlete of Color Leadership Council. BuddPearson lives in Merriman House. “I’m looking forward to rejoining the Brooks community in a different capacity, exploring the profession of independent school teaching, learning from my new colleagues, and doing my part to make the school a better place,” says Budd-Pearson.

“I hope to be able to use my own [Brooks] experience to connect and empathize with students about what it means to study at Brooks. I’m also looking forward to working alongside, continuing to learn from and getting to know the faculty — especially those that I didn’t have while I was a student, and who have arrived since I’ve graduated.” Arts faculty Max Nagel is a Boston-based art director and photographer. He has worked in New England on a variety of photography and film projects. Nagel earned a Studio Diploma from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts and a B.F.A. from Tufts University. “Art is a perfect tool to unpack the feelings and ideas that are developing during the distressing instability of 2020,” he says. “Coming of age today comes along with a new set of challenges. I hope students can find their individual voices through a stable art environment that encourages experimentation while also fostering the refinement of one’s skills.” A native of Seville, Spain, Nieves Rios-Moya transitions to teaching Spanish following 15 years in the business world. “From the first time I walked on campus to tutor a student, I fell in love with everything at Brooks,” she says. Rios-Moya is a former flamenco dancer and an avid traveler, and she also loves to cook and explore recipes from around the world. “My favorite thing about

Olivia Budd-Pearson ’15 is the school’s inaugural Davis Teaching Fellow. Established in 2020, the Davis Fellows Program joins the Davis Scholars Program that currently serves our student population. Named for Andrew Davis ‘81, the two programs honor his family’s commitment to supporting the futures of young people from underrepresented populations in independent schools. The work of the Davis Foundation and its transformative effect on Brooks will be highlighted in a future issue of the Bulletin.

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teaching is the interaction with my students,” she says. “When you teach a language you are showing a different way of doing things, a different way of approaching things, a different way of explaining things.” Gina Sauceda joins the history faculty following stints at Pomfret School, Walnut Hill School for the Arts, Taft School and Maimonides School. The Williams College graduate lives in Concord, Massachusetts. “All of the faculty I spoke to during the interview process were incredibly kind and sincere, which stood out to me,” Sauceda says. “They provided me with a window into Brooks as a community I wanted to be a part of.” Sauceda says that she loves “being able to connect with my students as people. Teaching is a lot of work, but those connections make it all worth it.” Dr. Nova Seals joins the English faculty from her most recent post at St. George’s School, where she served as director of library services and archives and taught philosophy. Seals lives in Peabody House with her family. “The sense of community at Brooks was immediately apparent while walking through campus during my first visit,” she says. “Community — the idea of it, as well as the people that comprise it — has always been an important concept for me, because it really is the people that make a place or institution great.” Sarah Spollett joins the arts faculty as art technical director. She most recently taught technical theater and carpentry at Emerson College. She was part of a theater that won a regional Tony Award. “I’m so excited to get to build on a program that was just gifted with a beautiful new facility,”

she says. “My main goal is to make sure that students and faculty feel comfortable accessing the performance and shop spaces. Not many people grew up like I did, using tools from a young age, and it can feel intimidating,” Spollett continues. “It’s really gratifying when someone has a breakthrough that, yes, they can absolutely use the table saw (or jigsaw or drill)! These are life skills that can help you in myriad ways, and I love helping people feel comfortable and empowered.” Jiamu “Amy” Wang joins the World Languages department as a Chinese teacher. Born and raised in Beijing, Wang earned a degree in political science from Peking University and a graduate degree in education from Beijing Normal University. She has been teaching in China and the United States for the past 17 years, and her teaching career has brought her to places as far-flung as New Siberia and a small town outside of Yakutsk, Russia. Wang lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. She says that she’s excited to “get to know the community and learn about Brooks. I love teaching because it helps keep my heart youthful and my mind curious about the world.” Paul Willis has spent 30 years teaching math at nearby Andover High School in Andover, Massachusetts. He has a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in economics modified with math and a master’s degree in education from Salem State University. Willis enjoys playing, coaching and watching all sports. He has coached football, basketball, track and cross-country at various levels. Willis and his wife live in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and have three children, two dogs and a horse.

The school’s new faculty. From top to bottom: Caio Afiune, Olivia Budd-Pearson ’15, Max Nagel, Nieves RiosMoya, Gina Sauceda, Dr. Nova Seals, Sarah Spollett, Jiamu “Amy” Wang, Paul Willis.

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Brooks Adapts to Dining Hall Changes During COVID-19 [Ed. Note: Sixth-form journalism students reported on various aspects of current life at Brooks for a class assignment. The Bulletin is including some of those reports in this issue. These pieces have been lightly edited for style and word count.]

This year, there have been significant changes at Wilder Dining Hall due to COVID-19 restrictions, and students have a varying range of opinions on this transition. The dining hall and meal service must be in compliance with CDC guidelines and approved by the Board of Health, according to Director of Food Services Mike Giampa. “There’s a lot of cleaning and sanitizing that must go into place,” he says. New changes to dining hall protocols include sanitizing tables after every use, limiting numbers to four people per table, staggering meal times and implementing physicaldistancing protocols. Meals must be served either directly from staff or self-served through individually packaged items. According to Giampa, “The biggest sacrifice has been at lunch because of the number of students that we need to push through during those short windows [of time].” At the start of the school year, options for lunch typically were two or three kinds of sandwiches and salads with chips, drinks and desserts. The new dining routine took some getting used to. School prefects responded to dining hall concerns in an email to all students: “We have been hearing a lot of mixed reviews on the dining hall and are working to make a lot of changes ASAP,” the email read. “Some things that you will see in the coming days are more vegetarian

protein options and hot lunch options. As time passes we will be working on improving the food, but we hope these are a good start.” After the dining hall staff got into a routine in accordance with new changes, they were able to expand options for meals. “We are adding more and more as we go each day,” says Giampa. Additions to meals included a hot entree feature and more snack options. “It’s been getting better,” says Jack Frimet ’21. “The hot meals are so much better. Mr. G. is working hard, and I appreciate the dining hall team.” Many students agree with Frimet. “I think the food has been good. It’s improved a lot,” says Brandon SpectorTownsend ’23. Many students expressed that some of their favorite meals have been the most simple ones. Popular favorites include cheeseburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, chicken tenders and soft tacos. Other students feel there are still many improvements that can be made, particularly to lunches. According to Ryan Winchester ’21, “it’s best when meals are customizable.” Many students hope to see more hot meals for lunches, and more diverse options. According to Giampa, there are many new options students should be on the lookout for in the next few weeks. These include different snacks like caramel and chocolate apples,

Top: Wilder Dining Hall. Below: Dining hall staff introduced to-go options this fall, which are available inside and, shown here, outside the dining hall.

packs of cheese and crackers, grapes and fruit, and s’mores takeaway kits. The dining hall also plans to reintroduce the make-your-own deli bar as a part of daily options for lunch. This new dining hall situation also poses challenges to students with dietary restrictions. “As a vegetarian, I feel like I don’t have a lot of options because the main entree is usually some kind of meat,” said Emma Tiedemann ‘21. “It’s been a bit difficult, especially around lunch time, to find options that are appetizing to me.” Tiedmann gives advice to the dining hall: “I understand that there are a lot of restrictions because of COVID, but if there’s any way to bring a little more variety and color into the food options, that would be much appreciated by more people than they think.” Giampa says it has been helpful to hear feedback from vegetarian and vegan students, as that area is not a strong suit of his. He has been working with students to make changes and get new ideas out there.

He also noted that he would welcome students with dietary restrictions to email him with any more ideas they have to make improvements. One consensus among students is appreciation for the amount of work the dining hall staff has put in. “I think it’s important to understand how the new restrictions influence the dining hall. They are really trying hard, and honestly it’s sufficient,” says Racquel Baldeo ’21. “Thank you to Mr. G. and the dining hall staff for working so hard.” “The meals have been pretty good actually,” says Eleonore Kiriza ’22. “You can’t dismiss how hard they’ve been working.” The dining hall will continue to adapt to COVID restrictions and make improvements to the food options throughout the first semester. — Emma Houlihan ’21

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A Prize-Winning Spring Head of School John Packard recognized a group of students for its accomplishments during the 2019–2020 school year. Typically at Brooks, the spring semester gives way to May, and with it, Lawn Ceremony and Prize Day. Last spring’s ceremony was not held due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, Head of School John Packard announced the final set of last year’s prizewinners in a virtual School Meeting in October that was watched by every advisory. The mood was celebratory, as applause and cheers rang out of individual advisory classrooms and throughout the Classroom Building. Members of the class of 2020 who received prizes were awarded them at the conclusion of the last academic year. “The delay in getting to this moment in no way diminishes all that each of today’s prize recipients gave to a speech, a paper, an academic discipline, an entire course of study and their school community in general,” Mr. Packard said prior to presenting the awards. “All of these students, and one faculty member, have enriched our school in 2019–2020 through their hard work, their passion and by engaging fully in school life. They are continuing to do this in 2020–2021. We are proud of all of them.” The prizes awarded are as follows: Aileen Arias ’21 Leonard S. Perkins Prize, for contribution to the life of the school Jeffrey Ryan Clements ’21 Fifth-form winner of the Malcolm G. Chace III Prize, awarded to a third-, fourthand fifth-former who, in the judgment of the Head of School, has made the most personal progress during the year Yinuo “Nicole” Jin ’22 George A. Tirone Prize, awarded by Mrs. Randolph Muto in memory of her father, to a middle school student who shows unusual promise in the visual arts Yuto Sugiyama Lam ’22 A.G. Davis Philip Science Prize, given by the Science Department to an individual who has demonstrated an interest in, and who shows considerable promise in, science

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Zoe Maver ’21 Wilder Speaking Prize; The Charles C. Cottingham ‘08 Chinese Prize Molet Akinyi Otieno ’23 Third-form winner of the Malcolm G. Chace III Prize, awarded to a third-, fourthand fifth-former who, in the judgment of the Head of School, has made the most personal progress during the year Andrew Pesce ’23 Edmund Samuel Carr Prize in Beginning Latin Anya Harsh Sanchorawala ’21 Howell van Gerbig Jr. Prize, given for the best essay on the development of political institutions; the Harvard Club of the Merrimack Valley Prize, awarded to a fifth-former nominated by the faculty for high academic achievement, leadership and active participation in school affairs; and The St. Lawrence University Prize, awarded to a fifthformer who has displayed a

significant commitment to community service Jason Milton Silverman ’21 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Medal, honoring excellence in mathematics and science

Previously in October, during a Monday Chapel, Mr. Packard also awarded the form prizes to the top scholar in each form as well as the school as a whole: Third Form Prize Melanie Ann Kaplan ’23 Fourth Form Prize Yuto Sugiyama Lam ’22 Fifth Form Prize Anya Harsh Sanchorawala ’21 Prize for Primus Yuto Sugiyama Lam ’22

Jason Silverman ’21, the winner of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Medal, which honors excellence in mathematics and science.

Anna Lucinda Weed ’22 Fourth-form winner of the Malcolm G. Chace III Prize, awarded to a third-, fourthand fifth-former who, in the judgment of the Head of School, has made the most personal progress during the year History faculty Joanna McDonough Reverend George F. Vought Prize, to honor a member of the Faculty who in their first few years has made special contributions to the School and exhibited notable professional growth

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Martrell Stevens ’21 An elite wheelchair basketball player earns a college scholarship and reflects on the ways in which Brooks helped him on his journey.

Sixth-former Martrell Stevens is a lesson in determination and grace. A spinal cord injury at 4 years old changed the arc of his life, but it didn’t change the trajectory of it. A Chicago native, Stevens became one of the country’s best wheelchair basketball players and, this fall, he signed to play for the 15-time national champion team at the University of Illinois. He looks forward, he says, to experiencing a high level of play, potentially on the national and international level. He also looks forward, he says, to college, to the academic experience, and to “figuring out what I love to do, and what I lose track of time doing.” Stevens began playing wheelchair basketball at 6 years old, while he was still rehabbing his injury. “I was just a little kid ready to do something different,” he says. “I grew up playing the sport, and that’s benefited me. The people I play against have typically only been playing for a few years, but I’m only 17 years old and I’ve already been playing for 10 years.” Stevens acknowledges the hard work he’s put in and explains that, due to the sport’s rules on equity of player mobility, his low level of mobility coupled with his high level of skill make him a valuable player.

Stevens followed his older brother, Will Stevens ’18, to Brooks, and he says he’s found a home here. He transitioned from his home team to the Connecticutbased Ryan Martin Trojans, and he’s dedicated Saturday afternoons to traveling to and from practice. He’s also become a part of the boys basketball program at Brooks: “I took on the manager role,” Stevens says, “but as my game got more serious, I became less of a manager and more of a player working on my game with the team.” Stevens takes pride in his independence, but he credits several Brooks faculty with giving him support when he needs it: Boys 1st basketball coach John McVeigh; Stevens’s advisor, Lindsey McDowell; Director of Athletics Bobbie Crump-Burbank; and English faculty Leigh Perkins ’81, for example. He also heaps thanks on the Health Services staff, who help with physical therapy and other treatments. “Brooks has given me an advantage in helping me become independent,” he says. “As someone in a wheelchair, as a disabled person, we’re more prone to depending on others to function. Brooks has given me a head start on college and living on my own because I’ve been doing that for four years already.”

Martrell Stevens ’21 (right) was congratulated by boys 1st basketball captain and school prefect Tyler Whitney-Sidney ’21 at Stevens’s signing ceremony this fall.

A Chicago native, Stevens became one of the country’s best wheelchair basketball players and, this fall, he signed to play for the 15-time national champion team at the University of Illinois.

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Martrell Stevens â&#x20AC;&#x2122;21 was joined by loved ones on Zoom for his signing ceremony this fall.

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Members of the boys lacrosse program — typically a spring sport — at practice on Trustey Field in fall 2020.

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Afternoon Activities Adapt When the Independent School League (ISL) ruled out the possibility of traditional interscholastic competition for the fall season due to the coronavirus pandemic, the school responded by introducing a modified afternoon activities program that allows Brooksians more choices than they have ever had.

This year’s fall afternoon activities program met two goals: First, it allowed fall athletes an opportunity to continue to practice with their teams and refine their skills. Second, it allowed students to also engage with activities and sports that are not typically offered in the fall, or usually at all. The program allowed students to participate in a sport or activity of their choice — designated their “base” activity — either six days a week or four days a week. The four-day-a-week choice provided students the opportunity to also do one or two “two-day” activities, consisting of enrichment offerings and winter or spring sports. (The school took advantage of the ISL’s temporary waiver of coach-athlete contact restrictions that would normally preclude out-of-season practices.) The fall’s “base” activities included traditional fall sports and activities, and also intriguing new offerings: boats, disc golf, outdoor club, and skateboarding, which proved particularly popular. The fall’s “two-day” activity options included traditional winter and spring sports, the new offerings listed above, and also aquatics, e-sports, “Healthy Habits for Life,” leadership lab, Model U.N., speech and debate, nature walking, and yearbook. Virtual students participated also. Eight activities offered a virtual option: Cross-country, drama, fitness, e-sports, Model U.N., speech and debate, yearbook and yoga. Angelina Lieberman ’23, a virtual student this year, took on speech and debate and Model U.N. this fall. “These are two passions of mine, and I had so much fun,” she says. “Yes, it’s a tough situation, but I explored new things and I loved them both very much.” The athletics department embraced the challenge of creating a modified afternoon activities program from scratch. “We are so pleased and thankful for the support and creativity from our entire faculty in regards to the various programs that have been added to our afternoon activities,” says Assistant Director of Athletics Kerry Baldwin. “Our vision came to fruition as we took

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advantage of many spaces on campus that were not utilized in the past. We feel lucky in so many ways.” Students flocked to the new offerings. For example, the newly installed on-campus skate park was a huge draw for students. Ari Barua ’23 selected skateboarding as his two-day option, and he enjoyed learning the mechanics of the sport. “[Arts faculty Max] Nagel was a great teacher,” Barua says. “By the end of the first week, I was able to bomb down hills all over campus. Now I’ve gotten so used to skating that it’s become my way of getting between my classes and my dorm, and it saves me lots of time every day. The new style of afternoon activities was really fun because I was able to try new things alongside playing my fall sport, and it helped us all make better use of our time since we couldn’t play interscholastic sports or leave campus. I hope that skateboarding continues as an activity moving forward.” Baldwin says some of the new offerings could remain on the docket in the future. “We feel that many of our new offerings this fall will outlast the current pandemic,” Baldwin says, “as they are going to bring fresh ideas to campus while fostering building blocks for lifelong skills and interests.”

“ We feel that many of our new offerings this fall will outlast the current pandemic as they are going to bring fresh ideas to campus while fostering building blocks for lifelong skills and interests.”

Assistant Director of Athletics KER RY BALDW I N

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Last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s graduating class wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t able to engage in the usual pomp and circumstance that marks spring at Brooks because of the COVID-19 pandemic that caused the campus to close in March. The class bid farewell to Brooks through a virtual ceremony held in May. The school looks forward to welcoming the class of 2020 back to campus for the Prize Day ceremony it deserves. In the interim, in this special, year-long, two-part feature, members of the Brooks community offer thoughts on the graduates, and on the ways in which their individual contributions to life at Brooks collectively made the school a better place. The Bulletin includes half of the class of 2020 in this issue; the second half will be included in the next issue.

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Maddie Abraham

Charlie Alcorn

Morgan Arakelian

Brian Barker-Morrill

Gabe Barreto-D’Silva

Seamus Barrett

Anoosha Barua

Molly Boltin

“ He was one of the few students to audit a course and make it better than it would have been without him. He’s a wonderful bass player and a great kid!” CLAUDIA KELLER ON NICK CARABATSOS ’20

A Note: The quotes included in this piece were collected from Brooks employees at the end of the last academic year.

Maddie Abraham played field hockey, participated in dance and was a School Meeting prefect. Her advisor, Chelsea Clater, says, “She’s a genuinely awesome human who always keeps it real. Maddie’s wisdom and kindness are going to carry her to amazing places.” Charlie Alcorn played ice hockey and golf at Brooks. “Charlie is kind and liked by all, especially his floormates in Thorne House,” says his advisor, Dave Price. “I was so happy that he took advantage of his opportunity to shine during his sixth-form season on the hockey team!” Morgan Arakelian played field hockey and lacrosse, and was also a tour guide at Brooks. “I will miss having her as a part of my advisory,” says her advisor, Ashley Johnston. “I am proud of her, and I can’t wait to see all the things she will accomplish in college and beyond!” Brian Barker-Morrill was a member of the jazz band and also played football and squash at Brooks. “I’m going to miss his awesome sense of humor,” says music faculty Claudia Keller. “I’m so lucky to have taught him for four years. What a great kid!” Gabe Barreto-D’Silva ran cross-country, played basketball and served as an equity and inclusion prefect and in student government. College counselor Kristin Moody

commends his ability to engage in all areas of life at Brooks, “whether it be a funny lip sync or a contribution to Community Conversations.” Seamus Barrett, a basketball and baseball player, participated in the community service program and the economics club while serving as a Chapel prefect. “Seamus

is a terrific Chapel perfect, amazing dorm resident and a humble young man with an electric arm,” says his baseball coach Andy Campbell. Anoosha Barua was a school prefect, dorm prefect and head of several campus clubs. She also played field hockey and tennis, and “has been a good friend, teammate and

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<< The class of 2020 sits for its formal class photo in fall 2019. Each of the members of the class left their mark on Brooks.

mentor,” says club advisor Gage Dobbins. “Her ideas and follow-through spark ideas and action in others. I cannot wait to see what is next for her.” Molly Boltin played field hockey and made her mark on her dormitory at Brooks. “Hett East will not be the same without her,” says dorm parent Claudia Keller. “She is a model of

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positivity and respect who will be sorely missed.” Mary Boshar was a soccer, squash and tennis player who served as arts prefect and also co-headed Brooks’s feminist and intersectional art magazine, Spectrum. “Her dedication, determination and leadership are exemplified on and off the field,” says soccer assistant coach and

history teacher Amanda Nasser. “Mary is tough, physically and mentally. She is a true role model.” Kobe Briand played football and lacrosse for Brooks. “His mental and physical toughness has gotten him through a lot at Brooks, but what stands out most of all,” says Nurse Leader Stephanie Savarese, “is the respect he shows toward all members of the Brooks community.” Jack Callahan is an outdoors enthusiast who participated in the sailing and snow sports afternoon activities programs at Brooks. “It was a huge privilege to work with Jack,” says his advisor, Tim Benson. “He is his own guy — a great way to be! I look forward to hearing about his next adventure.” Becca Cami was a Chapel prefect and Women in Business club co-head, and a field hockey and lacrosse player. She “was involved in everything,” says her advisor, Andrea. Heinze. “In only two short years, Becca has left her mark on Brooks with a great attitude and positive energy. She helped make Brooks and those around her better every day.” Nick Carabatsos was a school prefect and admission prefect who played

Mary Boshar

Kobe Briand

Jack Callahan

Becca Cami

Nick Carabatsos

Jon Carafotes

Finn Carey

Juliana Cervizzi

“ Only when you pair Emily’s formidable intellect with her easygoing, warm and inclusive nature do you have the full picture of what makes her so special!” SUSANNA WATERS ON EMILY CHOE ’20

Taylor Charpentier

Emily Choe

Audrey Chung

Jenn Connolly

Brooke Cordes

Matt Costantino

Nick Crary

Madeline Delaney

“ Brooke has been one of the most positive and impactful students I’ve encountered in my time at Brooks. She cares deeply about the school and everyone around her. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and she is a terrific servant-leader.” JOHN MCVEIGH ON SENIOR PREFECT BROOKE CORDES ’20

squash and tennis and participated in jazz band, peer tutoring, crew and soccer. He had a hand in all parts of life at Brooks. “He was one of the few students to audit a course and make it better than it would have been without him,” says music faculty Claudia Keller. “He’s a wonderful bass player and a great kid!” Jon Carafotes was an Art Association member who played ultimate frisbee, ice hockey and baseball, in addition to participating in sailing and yoga. “Jon was a great teammate,” says dorm parent Willie Waters ’02, “and we will miss him in Chace House. He connected with kids of all ages and always had a smile on his face.” Finn Carey was co-head of the investment club. He also played ice hockey, lacrosse and ultimate frisbee, and was a tour guide at Brooks. “Finn is loved and respected by his teammates and coaches alike,” says lacrosse coach Dean Charpentier. “He overcame every personal challenge and always put the team first. He’s a great young man, and I am so pleased he was a member of our program.” Juliana Cervizzi shined in Brooks’s winter musicals “Cabaret” and “Hairspray,” as well as in the campus a cappella group Serendipities, when not playing soccer and engaging in field hockey and lacrosse, yoga and dance. Science faculty

Laura Hajdukiewicz calls Cervizzi, who also worked in the Writing Center and community service program, “such a talented young woman. She has a heart of gold.” Taylor Charpentier was a sustainability prefect who played soccer, ice hockey and lacrosse and headed up the Bishop’s Bells Choir. “Taylor approaches everything she does with incredible grit and grace, whether it’s a lacrosse game or her math class or helping a younger student in need,” says her advisor, John McVeigh. “She always leaves everything better than she found it.” Emily Choe was a school and equity inclusion prefect who headed up the GSA, Spectrum magazine, yearbook, students for mental health and math clubs, and who served as an alumni ambassador, peer tutor and member of AAA and international club — while also participating in theater, yoga and squash. Dean of Academics Susanna Waters calls the ranking scholar “an academic weapon.” But, she adds, “only when you pair Emily’s formidable intellect with her easygoing, warm and inclusive nature do you have the full picture of what makes her so special!” Audrey Chung played squash and served as an arts prefect. Also a musician, she was head of the poetry club, the school’s Spectrum magazine, and served as Brooks’s editor of

The Tavern, an interscholastic digital magazine. “She always has a smile on her face,” says athletic trainer John King. Music teacher Claudia Keller adds, “Audrey is one of the most thoughtful students I have ever met, not to mention brilliant — and funny.” Jenn Connolly “brings laughter and joy to every aspect of dorm life,” says dorm parent Claudia Keller. At Brooks, the school spirit prefect played volleyball, basketball and softball, as well as field hockey. “Jenn has been a significant contributor on the court, in the dorm and in the classroom,” says her advisor, Gage Dobbins. “I will miss her cunning sense of humor and her care for others around her.” Brooke Cordes served as senior prefect and as an equity and inclusion prefect, and played soccer and basketball. “Brooke has been one of the most positive and impactful students I’ve encountered in my time at Brooks,” says her advisor, John McVeigh. “She cares deeply about the school and everyone around her. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and she is a terrific servant-leader.” Matt Costantino played football, basketball and lacrosse at Brooks. “Matt’s work ethic is an example for every young student at Brooks,” says his lacrosse coach, Dean Charpentier. “He has made himself into a solid student and standout athlete through effort and determination.” Adds

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trainer John King, “In all the years I’ve been working with athletes at Brooks, he jumps to the top of the list of most competitive and hardest worker.” Nick Crary was a Thorne House dorm prefect and was on the cross-country, wrestling and tennis teams. “He is the man,” raves Sheila Konovalchik of the admission office, for which he also led tours. “In wrestling, as in life, you need to be dependable, and Nick always showed up. As a tour guide, that is the best quality you can have! Plus, he was great with all of the kids and families.” Madeline Delaney is “honest, insightful and articulate,” says her soccer coach and advisor, Kerry Baldwin. The marine biology club member also played lacrosse and ice hockey. “Madeline’s dedication to the success of her teams was unmatched,” adds lacrosse coach Carly Churchill ’10. “She did whatever it took to perform at her best and strove to bring her teammates along with her.” Taylor Denson took to the stage at Brooks. The arts prefect and Room X head participated in theater, rock band, and dance and step clubs, while also playing tennis and managing the volleyball and baseball teams. The BSU head and math team member was an “amazing ambassador” for the Exchange Program after her trip to Hungary, says program advisor

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Lisa Saunders. Dean of Teaching and Learning Mary Jo Carabatsos adds, “Taylor is a remarkable young woman and has left her mark at Brooks.” Elizabeth DeSimone “grew so much in her time at Brooks,” says Associate Director of College Counseling Kristin Moody. A dorm prefect in P.B.A. Hall, she played volleyball and softball while also serving as an alumni ambassador and tour guide. Advisor Tracey Costantino says, “She demonstrated leadership both in the dorm and with the volleyball team, as well as in the classroom. I am so proud of her.” John Donahue played football, ice hockey, lacrosse and ultimate frisbee at Brooks. “As sure as the sun will rise, you will see JohnDon with his Brooks Yoga hat on!” says Dean of Academics Susanna Waters. “From the ceramics studio to the robotics lab and Blake House to the lacrosse field, John was a fun and friendly person to connect with around campus.” Advisor Tote Smith adds, “I am especially proud of John’s growth this challenging sixth-form year and will miss his smile and contagious laughter.” Alec D’Orio played ultimate frisbee, ice hockey and golf at Brooks, where his advisor, Andy Campbell, says he enjoyed getting to know him. “Alec is so genuine, and he deeply loves his school

and this community,” says Campbell. “He is as hardworking and friendly as they come.” Eliza Dwinell was a member of the marine biology club who played soccer, squash and lacrosse. “Funloving and caring, Eliza knew how to keep things light on the lacrosse field,” says lacrosse coach Carly Churchill ’10. “But she could also turn on the seriousness and make some goals happen!” Isaac Eberly was a football, basketball and baseball player who also did yoga and was a part of jazz band and the musical “Hairspray.” “It was so much fun to listen to Isaac play for the community at Chapel and in the bands,” says Registrar Lisa Saunders. “Isaac always had a warm smile on his face,” adds Nurse Leader Stephanie Savarese. “He brought a genuine warmth to those around him.” Nashr El Auliya was a Whitney House dorm prefect who headed up Brooks’s international club and participated in cross-country, basketball and crew. In the classroom, “Nashr’s questions always took us to a new level and a broader perspective,” says Latin teacher Deb Davies. “He made me learn new ways to explain concepts, which brought joy. I will miss our conversations after class.” Jeff Feng is a talented violinist. “Not only does he have great technique, but he always plays with

Taylor Denson

Elizabeth DeSimone

John Donahue

Alec D’Orio

Eliza Dwinell

Isaac Eberly

Nashr El Auliya

Jeff Feng

“ Nashr’s questions always took us to a new level and a broader perspective. He made me learn new ways to explain concepts, which brought joy. I will miss our conversations after class.” DEB DAVIES ON NASHR EL AULIYA ’20

Myles Foster

John Fritz

Abhay Gandhi

Ali Graham

Cam Greenwood

Quin Healy

Maddie Hesse

Stephen Higgins

“ While missing the spring of his sixthform year, Sam was most concerned about the thirdformers in our advisory who were missing their first spring at Brooks. He is a great kid.” MICHELE MUSTO ON SAM KIM ’20

heart and soul,” says music teacher Claudia Keller. Feng also played football and participated in Fitness Club. “He is thoughtful and a wonderful friend,” says his advisor, Amanda Nasser. “Jeff never backs down from adversity. He is also an excellent writer. His written reflections are moving and exemplify his compassionate nature.” Myles Foster played ultimate frisbee and basketball at Brooks, participated in Fitness Club and was a member of the Community Activities Board. “He is charismatic and personable,” Susanna Waters says, not to mention fully “engaged in the classroom, tenacious on the court, easygoing in the dorm and a friend to many.” John Fritz was a school and CAB prefect who served as an alumni ambassador and admission prefect while also playing football, ice hockey and baseball. His advisor and coach, Pat Foley, says the Brooks Brothers and Sisters member “has been deeply involved with so much in his four years at Brooks and has approached all of it with a goal of excellence.” Abhay Gandhi was an investment club and community service program member, as well as a soccer, basketball and squash player. The admission prefect “attracted many families to Brooks with his warm personality,” says soccer coach Willie Waters ’02. “Abhay worked as hard

as he possibly could every practice and game for three years on the soccer team. His teammates loved him and were inspired by his effort.” Ali Graham was a day student prefect who served on the honor code committee and played soccer, ice hockey and lacrosse. “Ali is an amazing young lady who has an incredibly bright future ahead,” says her advisor and coach, Kerry Baldwin. “She is thoughtful and compassionate, yet driven and determined.” Cam Greenwood was a school prefect and hammock club founder who “cares deeply about Brooks School,” says Willie Waters ’02. As student government president, the soccer, ice hockey and baseball player, who also participated in dance and ultimate frisbee, “was always encouraging students to try new things or simply find ways to enjoy time with each other on this beautiful campus.” Quin Healy “brought so much to Hett East dorm life,” says dorm parent Claudia Keller. The dorm prefect played field hockey and ice hockey, and participated in Fitness Club. “We are so proud of the way she took on leadership and made Brooks better for everyone around her, on the field, in the dorm and on the ice,” says her advisor, Gage Dobbins. “We will miss her.” Maddie Hesse played field hockey and lacrosse and also served as an

admission prefect. “Confident, articulate, personable, welcoming — she is all that,” says the admission office’s Sheila Konovalchik. Lacrosse coach Carly Churchill ’10 agrees. “Maddie is one of the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of coaching,” she says. “The leadership skills she developed over the last four years brought our Brooks teams to new heights. She has a lot to be proud of.” Stephen Higgins “made history as one of our first-ever school spirit prefects!” says dorm parent Willie Waters ’02 of the ultimate frisbee, ice hockey and lacrosse player. “He’s an easygoing guy who would hang out with everybody in the dorm. I can’t imagine Chace without him.” Nikki Iamonaco played soccer, field hockey and squash and rowed crew, and that’s just one aspect of the school prefect’s involvement in campus life. “Nikki put her heart into everything here at Brooks,” says her advisor, Joanna McDonough. “From her classes, to her work as head peer tutor, her reach was broad and powerful. Nikki has inspired us all. While she will be deeply missed, she leaves a legacy of advocacy for others, determination and school pride that will continue to unite us.” Greyson KayeFlemming participated in sailing, basketball and crew, while also serving in

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the admission office — for which Sheila Konovalchik will be forever grateful. “He answered the call,” says the admission office administrative assistant. “Anytime we needed a guide, Greyson was there. Sometimes, for the first tour of the day, he came to school early just to give a tour! He is amazing.” Sam Kim “is such a thoughtful guy,” says music faculty Claudia Keller. “Just a sweetheart.” The leader of Club HYO, a service club, ran cross-country, did yoga and played tennis, and always had great “concern for others,” adds his advisor, Michele Musto. “While missing the spring of his sixth-form year, Sam was most concerned about the third-formers in our advisory who were missing their first spring at Brooks. He is a great kid.” Amelia Kovacs is “a beautiful artist and photographer,” says Registrar Lisa Saunders. The head peer tutor and math team captain also participated in soccer, squash, yoga, crew and sailing. “Her passion for learning and the arts defines her,” adds faculty Deb Davies, “and her desire to give back to the community, through peer tutoring and student government, has been impressive. She even made a profit for student gov with the Saturday Perfecto’s run! She contributed in so many ways. I thank her for sharing her gifts with us.” Lila Leonard was a field hockey and lacrosse player who also participated in

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Fitness Club and dance as well as the marine biology club. She will be sorely missed in Hett West, says dorm parent Mary Jo Carabatsos. “Her upbeat and calm nature brought a much-needed breath of fresh air when hanging out in the common room!” Her advisor, Gage Dobbins, adds, “Her hard work has paid off, and I can’t wait to see what is next for her.” Herbert Liu is “a gem,” the admission office’s Sheila Konovalchik says. The investment club president and weight room prefect led tours at Brooks, in addition to playing football and squash and rowing crew. Liu’s advisor, Andrew McLean, adds, “Humor, drive and resilience are some of his main character traits. Herbert’s hard work and perseverance make him someone to watch now and in the future.” Chris Lyman is a “lifelong learner who is curious about many things and who has matured so much as a scholar, an athlete and musician during his four years at Brooks,” says his advisor, Kihak Nam ’99. He was a day student prefect and jazz band member who also participated in sailing, ice hockey and crew. Molly Madigan was a Chapel prefect, served as a peer tutor and contributed to the Haute Binger fashion blog. She also ran cross-country and played soccer, basketball and lacrosse at Brooks. “Molly is someone who can always make people smile,” says

her advisor, Amanda Nasser. “She lights up the room, and her positive attitude is infectious. Our community is better because of her. She is really something special.” John Manzi shows “honesty and thoughtfulness,” says music teacher Claudia Keller. The admission office’s Pat Foley, who coached Manzi in football, agrees and adds, “John was so fun to coach. He is incredibly hardworking and talented in so many areas, but also incredibly humble. It is a fantastic combination!” [Ed. Note: The remaining members of the class of 2020 will be highlighted in the next issue of the Bulletin.]

Nikki Iamonaco

Greyson Kaye-Flemming

Sam Kim

Amelia Kovacs

Lila Leonard

Herbert Liu

Chris Lyman

Molly Madigan

John Manzi

“ Molly is someone who can always make people smile. She lights up the room, and her positive attitude is infectious. Our community is better because of her. She is really something special.” AMANDA NASSER ON MOLLY MADIGAN ’20

A SOCIALLY JUST

COMMUNITY AN ACCOUNTING OF THE SCHOOLâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S EFFORTS TOWARD DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION AS BROOKS PRIORITIZES ITS WORK TOWARD BECOMING AN ANTI-RACIST INSTITUTION. 28

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The American writer and activist James Baldwin, who spent his life advocating for racial, sexual and class justice, wrote that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Head of School John Packard built on Baldwin’s thought in a letter to the Brooks community sent on June 18, 2020, the second of two letters Mr. Packard sent in the days after police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed George Floyd, a Black man. ¶ “There is a moral imperative in front of us to face the systemic racism that has oppressed the Black community for centuries,” Mr. Packard wrote. “While our immediate ability to change the country might be limited, when it comes to changing Brooks School we are only limited if we allow ourselves to be. This must be the beginning of a transformational movement on our campus.” ¶ This space in the Bulletin intends to update the Brooks community on the state of that movement. The school intends to build on the previous good work of individuals at Brooks, and also on its own longstanding commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as it works in new ways; as it tries differently and with a clear goal of becoming an anti-racist institution. This space is an accounting of what the school is, of what the school wants to become, and the steps we need to take along the way. ¶ We have been fallible, and we remain fallible. We will, even with good intentions, misstep. We do not seek your praise for what we have done; we hope, though, for your insight, your partnership and your faith in our ongoing effort. ¶ These pages describe mostly top-down, administrative actions: committees we formed, statements we drafted, rules we hammered out, mandatory trainings in which the faculty engaged. We are proud of those steps. We are also cleareyed about the organic, ground-up culture shift that needs to occur at Brooks in order for those committees, statements, rules and trainings to effectively improve the dayto-day experience of our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) community members. We are committed to creating an accountable community that promotes social justice; a space in which that culture shift towards anti-racism can build over time. ¶ This summer’s renewed attention to this country’s ongoing fight for social and racial justice led to new, urgent and necessary conversations on the experiences of many of our BIPOC community members. Brooks is a predominantly white institution, and we acknowledge the seen and unseen work that BIPOC employees and students have done for so many years — work and weight that the school has not adequately honored or helped to carry. These Brooksians entered into this work with love and care for each other and the school. We plan to build on that individual work on an institutional level. Our objectively and relatively few BIPOC faculty members, along with our Black Student Union and Alianza Latina affinity groups, have been sources of support and safety for our students. It is time for the school to make it an institutional priority to share this work and weight, and to make carrying it the collective responsibility of our entire community.

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AT T H I S M O M E N T, the school has a clearer understanding than it may ever have had before of what it means to be an anti-racist institution, and of the gap between what it is and what it needs to be. In his June 18 and November 6, 2020, letters to the Brooks community, Head of School John Packard gave readers a sense of the current demographics of the school, described ongoing work in diversity, equity and inclusion, expressed goals that the school wants to achieve in the 2020–2021 school year, and noted actions that had been taken to date to achieve those goals. GOVERNANCE AND LEADERSHIP In order to engage effectively in diversity, equity and inclusion work, the school has dedicated resources, time and the endorsement of its leaders through a new board committee, the diversification of key leadership, and the creation of a larger and dedicated team of faculty tasked with leading the school in its efforts. • A Board DEI Committee. In spring 2020, the Brooks School Board of Trustees confirmed the creation of a board-level committee focused on diversity, equity and inclusion at Brooks. The DEI Committee was populated and began work over the summer and into this fall. The committee’s task is to partner with school leadership to define goals and hold the school accountable as we aim

AMPLIFYING YOUR VOICES

In future issues of the Bulletin, we hope to highlight the good work that our BIPOC alumni have done and continue to do to confront systemic racism and to fight for racial equality. If you would like to be profiled, or if you know of someone who you think might like to be profiled, please contact Associate Director of Alumni Relations Carly Churchill ’10 at cchurchill@brooksschool.org.

to achieve those goals. The DEI Committee is chaired by school trustees Cristina E. Antelo ’95 and Belisario Rosas P’15, P’21. Antelo and Rosas have been attending a range of committee and community meetings at school over these last few months. All community members are welcome to contact the board’s DEI Committee with their questions, concerns and suggestions via email at boardDEI@ brooksschool.org. • The Diversification of Leadership. In June, the school made a commitment to diversifying school leadership, including the board of trustees, the alumni board and the school’s senior administration. At present, the 28-member board of trustees includes four trustees of color. The board plans to add two additional trustees of color to the board by July 1, 2021, and has taken active steps to do so. The alumni board has formed a DEI advisory group to support on-campus initiatives and the addition of alumni of color to the alumni board. The hiring process for senior administrative and faculty positions for the 2021–2022 school year has not begun yet; however, the school will post openings for faculty in

each academic department in the hopes of widening its candidate pool and attracting potential BIPOC faculty to Brooks without waiting to react to specific departmental need. • The Expansion of the DEI Team. Over the summer, the school added Kenya Jones and Michael Veit to the school’s DEI team, alongside Dean of Community Life Ashley Johnston. Jones became the school’s director of multicultural affairs and outreach. Veit became the school’s director of DEI curriculum and programming. The DEI team coordinates and organizes events to address DEI issues; connects and works with the school’s alumni office; supports affinity groups and promotes DEI values within the Brooks community; collaborates with senior leadership in the development of DEI initiatives in the school’s curriculum; and is currently developing a set of equity grievance protocols through which Brooks students and employees will be able to address microaggressions and macroaggressions through a formal, standard process. The group meets regularly with Mr. Packard and Associate Head for Faculty Affairs John McVeigh.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT A large part of our effort to become an anti-racist institution rests with our faculty. For too long, Brooks faculty have been able to “opt in” to working toward greater equity and inclusion in the classroom, the dorm and day-to-day life on campus. That choice is no longer viable and is no longer available: All Brooks faculty are now expected to understand and contribute to the school’s goal of becoming an anti-racist institution.

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BY THE NUMBERS

• Faculty Learning Opportunities. Beginning in August 2020 and continuing through fall 2020, faculty attended two required virtual workshops aimed at giving them tools to create an anti-racist community. Dr. Ali Michael, who is the cofounder and director of The Race Institute for K–12 Educators, spent a day with the Brooks faculty. She presented a set of sessions and workshops titled “How Race Matters: Building an AntiRacist Classroom.” In addition, four faculty are being coached by Michael in preparation for leading white anti-racist learning spaces and creating a white anti-racist group for adults on campus. All faculty also engaged in a series of three workshops by Dr. Liza A. Talusan: Faculty trained on how to move DEI work forward through productive conversations; acknowledging and dismantling their own problematic biases; and leadership and change management. Talusan has also held implicit bias training sessions with academic department chairs and faculty members directly involved in the hiring process. • Faculty Attendance at Conferences. In addition to the required attendance at the professional development described above, 15 faculty chose to attend the Association of Independent Schools of New England’s (AISNE) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Conference this fall. In addition, Brooks sent a cadre of faculty to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) People of Color Conference in December, and the school prioritized the attendance of BIPOC faculty.

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The school’s leadership team is predominantly white. The senior administrative team includes one person of color. One of six academic department chairs is a person of color, as is one of six endowed faculty chair holders. ¶ Over the past nine years, the school’s domestic student of color population has grown from 67 to 95, in the 2019–2020 school year. Of these 95 students, 27% identify as Hispanic/Latinx; 25% identify as Asian American; 20% identify as Black/African American; 15% identify as Multi-Racial; 11% identify as Indian American; and 2% as other. In total, BIPOC students make up more than 25% of the student body. In addition, we have 32 international students from 12 different countries at Brooks this academic year. ¶ The most substantial recent step the school has taken in pursuit of its goal of diversifying its student body is the creation of the Davis Scholar Program in partnership with Andrew Davis ’81. The program, which has benefited Brooks for four years, currently supports the tuition of 12 students, each of whom is a person of color who will be the first person in their families to go to college. As of this year, the program also sponsors a Davis Faculty Fellow. Mr. Packard emphasizes the transformative effect of the Davis Scholar Program. “While work remains on how we foster belonging and inclusion of BIPOC students once they are in our care, we have not had a donor who has done this much to ensure our opportunity to make Brooks accessible to first-generation students in the United States,” Mr. Packard says. The Bulletin will feature the Davis Scholar Program in a future issue. ¶ In the 2019–2020 school year, our full-time faculty members of color made up 9% of the school’s overall full-time faculty. Full-time faculty members of color in 2020–2021 are 18% of the overall full-time faculty. ¶ We have increased our financial aid budget substantially over the past 10 years, which has allowed us to grow the percentage of students receiving a need-based grant from less than 23% to more than 32% in the 2020–2021 school year; 55% of the school’s 2020–2021 financial aid budget is being used to support domestic students of color; 43% of students receiving a need-based financial aid grant are domestic students of color. ¶ We continue to partner with a range of organizations and schools in our effort to recruit some of the exceptional BIPOC students we are so fortunate to have at Brooks.

WE ARE GRATEFUL FOR THE CONVERSATIONS THIS TRANSFORMATIONAL MOVEMENT AIMED AT STAMPING OUT RACIAL INJUSTICE HAS GENERATED ON OUR CAMPUS AND AMONGST SO MANY IN OUR COMMUNITY WHO ARE RIGHT TO EXPECT ACTION MORE THAN SENTIMENT. WE ARE GRATEFUL TO THOSE OF YOU WHO SHARED YOUR OWN STORIES AND EXPERIENCES THAT ILLUMINATE IN POWERFUL WAYS THE OPPORTUNITY AND RESPONSIBILITY OUR SCHOOL HAS TO BE ACTIVELY ANTIRACIST. I WANT TO BE EXPLICIT AS I BEGIN THIS LETTER: BLACK LIVES MATTER. WE ARE COMMITTED TO BEING ACTIVELY ALIGNED WITH THIS MOVEMENT AND ALL EFFORTS SEEKING TO ACHIEVE EQUITY AND JUSTICE FOR THE BIPOC COMMUNITY.” Head of School JOHN PACKA R D in his letter to the Brooks community on June 18, 2020.

• Heads of School Anti-Racism Working Group. Mr. Packard is part of a Heads of School Anti-Racism working group that has met periodically this year. AISNE coordinates these conversations, which are facilitated by DEI consultants and school practitioners.

THE DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION MISSION STATEMENT

• Future Bias Grievances. Brooks has retained the Suffolk University Center for Restorative Justice to train the school’s DEI team and senior administration on handling future bias grievances.

privilege. With this document, Brooks rests on the pillars of

• An Outside Consultant. Brooks has retained Cecilia Ramirez ’01 to consult with the school in its effort to advance DEI work and move toward becoming an anti-racist institution. Ramirez is the chief of staff at Equal Justice USA, and she has been a race equity trainer and practitioner for more than 15 years. In her consultancy for Brooks, Ramirez will serve as a race equity coach and resource for the board of trustees, senior administrative team, DEI team and Mr. Packard. She will also help the school assess data it receives from its first distribution of a climate survey (the details of the climate survey follow).

THE DIVERSITY LEADERSHIP COUNCIL

The Brooks School Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Mission Statement can be read in full at www.brooksschool.org/school-life/dei. The following excerpt is the mission statement’s preamble:

We, the Brooks School community, collectively acknowledge that Brooks was founded to educate boys who hailed from a base of economic, social, and political power and its existing school-wide mission statement and core values to affirm that a socially just community that is diverse, equitable and inclusive is essential to the well-being and meaningful experience of all members. This statement also makes clear that Brooks creates and bestows privilege on members of its campus and alumni community just as much as it operates under larger systems of privilege. As such, the school honors and welcomes its duty to educate and prepare students to lead the way toward further equity and inclusion in our diverse society. This duty is a collective one; it is the common responsibility of our community, for which we are each jointly accountable.

POLICY AND PROTOCOL DEVELOPMENT The school moved a large amount of policy and protocol forward this summer and fall. Our challenge now is to adhere to the letter and spirit of these policies and treat them as expansive, while also continuing to review, refine and draft protocol as we actively and continuously move toward our goal of becoming an anti-racist institution.

The Diversity Leadership Council (DLC) is composed of adults at Brooks who support and advise the school’s affinity groups, and those adults who are deeply engaged in the work of diversity, equity and inclusion at Brooks through their professional roles at the school. The DLC was formed more than a decade ago. Apart from the general goals of the large group, DLC subcommittees recently focused on drafting bias grievance protocols, drafting an anti-racism statement, and drafting policy to help students and adults engage in the 2020 presidential election thoughtfully and with empathy. The DLC’s ongoing work will include more focused work done by subcommittee as the school’s needs and action items continue to take shape. The DLC is chaired by Dean of Community Life Ashley Johnston, who can be reached via email at ajohnston@brooksschool.org.

• A Mission Statement. In February 2020, the school’s DEI mission statement committee began work on the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Mission Statement. That mission statement has been adopted; part of it is excerpted in the box above this text, and it can be viewed in full on the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion page on the school’s website at www.brooks school.org/school-life/dei. • An Anti-Racism Statement. Over the summer and into the fall, a subcommittee of the school’s Diversity Leadership Council (DLC) drafted the school’s AntiRacism Statement, which is included on the next page. The statement was incorporated into this year’s Student Handbook and Community Directory.

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AS THE COUNTRY AND WORLD WRESTLE WITH A RELATIVELY NEW PANDEMIC DRIVEN BY A DEADLY VIRUS, AND A RACIAL INEQUALITY PANDEMIC THAT HAS BEEN WITH US FOR CENTURIES, [FORMER MASSACHUSETTS] GOVERNOR PATRICK URGED US TO NOT RETURN TO ANY VERSION OF NORMAL THAT HAS PERPETUATED THE PAINFUL INEQUITIES THAT HAVE PREVENTED THIS COUNTRY FROM BEING TRUE TO ITS HIGHEST IDEALS … THERE IS AND WILL BE IMPORTANT INSTITUTIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL DISCOMFORT ALONG THE WAY, AND THEREIN IS THE OPPORTUNITY FOR THE SCHOOL TO KEEP FINDING ITS WAY TO HIGHER GROUND.” Head of School JOHN PAC KA RD in his letter to the Brooks community on November 6, 2020.

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• Modifications to Existing School Policy. The DLC subcommittee that drafted the school’s anti-racism statement this summer also modified three sections of existing school policy to further the school’s goal of becoming an anti-racist institution. First, the subcommittee drafted a “Racist Actions” policy that mirrors, but is separate from, the school’s existing policy on bullying, discrimination and harassment. Second, the subcommittee modified the school’s dress code with an eye toward inclusion and equity. Third, the subcommittee classified intentional racist actions as a violation of a major school rule, subject to the

purview of the school’s Discipline Committee. These policy modifications have been adopted and are in effect. • Development of Bias Grievance Protocols. The DEI team is developing bias grievance protocols to ensure that students and adults at Brooks have recourse when confronting microaggressions and macroaggressions. These protocols continue to be refined through structural and professional development considerations, and the DEI team has already been able to use the protocol framework to address grievances this year.

THE ANTI-RACISM STATEMENT

This summer, a subcommittee of the Diversity Leadership Council drafted the following anti-racism statement, which appears in the Student Handbook and Community Directory:

Brooks School strives to be an anti-racist school, understanding that this work is continuous and is central to our role as an educational institution. Racism and other forms of systemic oppression are deeply rooted in all institutional and societal structures: We condemn institutional racism and white supremacy in all forms, including those that exist at Brooks. As a community that values each member’s sense of belonging, our goal is to foster an inclusive environment in which everyone can live, work and learn free from prejudice, discrimination and marginalization. While we recognize that racism occurs both intentionally and unintentionally and is often a result of unconscious bias, we also know that its presence hinders our ability to provide the most meaningful educational experience our students will have in their lives. Therefore, at Brooks School we are united in the fight to identify, acknowledge and dismantle systems of oppression and inequality. In order to do this work effectively, we will draw on our foundation: strong community, core values, and commitment to the care, support and growth of every member of the community.

• Land Acknowledgement. Last year, the school debuted its land acknowledgement, which was drafted by a third-form Winter Term class studying the history and current struggles of Native Americans from the land that Brooks School stands on today. The school noted and displayed the land acknowledgement throughout last spring and into the fall on formal occasions, both in print and in speech.

Ashburn Chapel at Brooks. The school’s work toward anti-racism and a socially just community is critical to the school’s mission of providing students with the most meaningful educational experience they will have in their lives.

ONGOING WORK In addition to the initiatives described above, the school is committed to continuing its DEI work. Our goal of becoming an anti-racist institution is, by definition, ongoing. • A Climate Survey. The school distributed the Assessment of Inclusivity and Multiculturalism to the entire school community over the course of the fall. The assessment was designed by the National Association of Independent Schools. Brooks will use the data and findings from that assessment to guide its DEI work in the near future, and will

distribute the assessment on a bi-annual basis moving forward. • Self in Community Curriculum. The Self in Community curriculum will be reorganized to dedicate more time to intentional conversations about race, white privilege and active anti-racism. • Time and Space for Affinity Groups. In order to help affinity groups meet more regularly, the school reserved a biweekly affinity group meeting block in the academic schedule. As physical distancing

THIS IS A TIME WHEN WE NEED TO ASCEND TO A HIGHER PLANE, AND MAKE CLEAR OUR FIRM COMMITMENT TO TAKING GREAT CARE OF ONE ANOTHER. THIS MUST MATTER TO ALL OF US.” Head of School JOHN PACKARD in his letter to the Brooks community on June 2, 2020.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

restrictions and the COVID-19 pandemic ease, the school will explore finding dedicated physical space in which affinity groups can meet to find community, and a sense of permanence and place at Brooks. • Continued Review of Policies. We will continue to review the school’s discipline and behavioral policies to ensure that they are fair and equitable, both on their face and in their application and impact. • Vendor Relationships. The school will strive to cultivate relationships with external vendors who are committed to anti-racism, and will pursue relationships with Black-owned businesses and businesses owned by members of the BIPOC community. • Conversations with Law Enforcement. We will reach out to local police departments to understand their policies on anti-racism and their commitment to ensuring the safety of our BIPOC students and employees.

Please visit www.brooksschool.org/school-life/dei to learn more about the school’s ongoing work toward creating a socially just community, to read Mr. Packard’s letters in full, and to read the complete text of the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Mission Statement.

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BROOKS SCHOOL COM M I TS I TSELF TO

CREATING A SOCIALLY JUST

COMMU N IT Y THAT IS DIVERSE,

EQUI TABLE AND INCLUSIVE,

BECAUSE DOING SO IS CRITICAL TO PROVIDING

the Most

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LIVES. E X C E R P T E D F R O M T H E S C H O O L â&#x20AC;&#x2122; S D I V E R S I T Y, E Q U I T Y A N D I N C L U S I O N M I S S I O N S T A T E M E N T

BROOKSIANS

A large number of Brooksians are using their talents to battle the COVID-19 pandemic in a variety of fields. Here, the Bulletin focuses on the work of four of those alumni who work in vaccine science, public health, education and global development assistance.

INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED BY REBECCA A. BINDER, JENNIFER O’NEILL A N D E M I LY W I L L I A M S

38 Hannah (Nichols) Landsberg ’08 39 Jason Fraser ’90 40 Folwell Dunbar ’84 42 Dr. Charles Walworth ’78

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IL LU ST RATI ON BY C ACTUS CR EATIVE ST UDI O

BATTLING THE PANDEMIC

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KEEPING BOSTON UNIVERSITY HEALTHY As the director of case management and contact tracing at Boston University, Hannah (Nichols) Landsberg ’08 manages a broad effort to keep the population of a large, urban university healthy as the COVID-19 pandemic rages. So far, the university’s COVID-19 mitigation efforts have been largely successful: Between July and Thanksgiving, the university population’s overall positive test rate was 0.1 percent. Boston University launched a new organization, Healthway, to respond to the threat COVID-19 poses to its students and employees. What’s your role within Healthway? Healthway is an extension of student and occupational health services managing the university’s COVID-19 clinical and public health response. Boston University (BU) has its own lab, which processes more than 6,000 COVID-19 tests a day. My department has more than 60 new staff, and together we operate three divisions: symptom surveillance, through nurses triaging symptom surveys submitted daily by students and employees; case management, in which healthcare specialists follow up daily with people who have tested positive for COVID-19; and contact tracing and case investigation. What are the benefits and challenges of trying to do this work within the context of a large, urban university? One main reason for our success is the fact that we’ve been able to build this entire organization, this new system, over the past few months. BU has dedicated both financial and personnel resources to this. Our strong surveillance testing has been key, because 50 percent of the positive cases we’ve seen have been asymptomatic cases. BU has its own testing lab; we don’t have to wait long for results, and we’re able to effectively contact trace and get people into quarantine at a quick pace. BU also has a vast population — undergraduates, graduate students in different programs across different campuses, faculty and staff — and each population

has its own nuances. We’ve been able to adapt the contact tracing program to match these nuances to get more information and reduce outbreaks as soon as possible. For example, if someone’s working in a lab, or if they’re a clinical student, they’re more likely to be in close contact with somebody else. On the employee side, we have professors, and we also have dining and facilities and healthcare workers. Learning about those different situations and being able to prompt the positive case with detailed questions helps us identify those close contacts and inform further prevention methods across campus. How did you arrive at this point in your career? I went to BU for undergrad, and I also got my Master of Public Health here. I worked in education and public health, and then went back to school to earn my nursing degrees. I returned to BU as a nurse practitioner within student health services. In March, when the pandemic began, my background in public health led me to focus on the student health response, and then to this university-wide position. I became interested in public health because of my time in the Brooks Exchange Program. I did an exchange to Botswana, and I spent my afternoons volunteering at a government hospital with patients with HIV/AIDS. That’s when I saw, for the first time, how incredibly important public health is, and the effect that community and government resources have on individual and population health.

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HELPING COVID-19 RECOVERY ABROAD Jason Fraser ’90 is two years into a four-year assignment in Kingston, Jamaica, as the country’s Director for USAID, the U.S. government agency working to improve lives in more than 100 countries through development assistance. During his nearly 20 years with USAID, the development professional has served in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Washington, D.C. USAID’s purview is wide, with goals from improving global health and advancing food security to protecting human rights and furthering education. How would you describe what you do? With USAID, every time you go to a new country, you have to address a new set of issues. It’s your job to help figure out what the solutions might be and bring in the right expertise, working with governments and the private sector. We are the U.S. agency that carries out development projects in countries or responds to natural disasters. We are the agency on the ground administering foreign aid to those who need it. We engage with governments and work with the private sector to provide aid as countries develop and grow. The hope is that as countries develop they will be able to utilize their own resources and not rely on external aid. How has COVID-19 affected Jamaica? In Jamaica, COVID-19 is very real. The effect it’s had is exponential because it’s a tourist-dependent country. It’s really impacted the economy. The work I’m doing here has been primarily focused on the emergency role. We work with the Ministry of Health to get people personal protective equipment and access to testing, and to educate people on proper sanitation and hygiene. On a secondary level, USAID is engaging with the government of Jamaica on the economic effects of COVID-19. We focus on how to support people to sustain their businesses, reduce their costs and provide resources in order to keep their businesses afloat. As people

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lose jobs, we focus on making sure that crime rates don’t also go up, or that instances of domestic violence don’t rise as people become frustrated. USAID can’t do it all, but I think we can make an impact. We also provide care packages and food aid to some who may have lost their jobs and those who are more vulnerable. You were working in the Dominican Republic during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. What do you recall about the challenges to recovery from that crisis? The Dominican Republic and Haiti are part of the same island, Hispaniola. I had to travel back and forth because our offices in Haiti were not functional at that time. We worked through our NGO partners in Washington and in-country to coordinate a humanitarian response. It was difficult. There were bodies in the streets and people without shelter and food, which also exacerbated the rate of crime. It was a very dangerous, volatile situation. It was depressing on one level, but I was also inspired by the Haitian people and how much was being done by so many indigenous and international organizations. There was a lot of energy from the highest levels of U.S. government, the Haitian government, and other donors and foundations like the Gates Foundation. I was a legal advisor charged with bringing an agreement together so all the different organizations involved could work together effectively. It wasn’t easy, but it’s one of the accomplishments I’m most proud of. Haiti ended up in a much better place because we identified the ways in which all of the organizations

could support Haiti through what they do best. What are other ways you’ve made an impact through USAID? I’ve worked on the HIV/AIDS program in many countries, mostly in Africa. When I started working on the AIDS epidemic, many people were not disclosing their status. They were also not getting tested, and the drugs weren’t easily distributed and were often very difficult to take. It kind of feels like we’re going through that now with COVID-19, but there was a lot more stigma and discrimination against people with HIV. The work that I did with others made it easier for people to get treatment, access care and deal with discrimination issues. We worked on public education campaigns and in areas of high prevalence, with key populations like sex workers and the LGBT community. We also worked with governments on their responsibility to educate people and provided funding for them to do that. A lot of the work I do now is working with the private sector, particularly in the renewable energy space. My focus in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean is in moving away from fossil fuels and toward a more renewable future. We’re looking at how the private sector can help countries leapfrog development by bypassing fossil fuel-based investments and focusing on renewables that can help spur new industries and investment. More developing countries are moving in that direction, and it’s clear they do not have to

pollute their way into development like we did in the United States for years, or like China is doing now. The work that USAID is doing now is making a real impact on countries and on livelihoods. Beyond rebounding from the pandemic, what are your goals for Jamaica? My number one goal is to reduce the number of people who contract HIV/AIDS and who die; to see Jamaica reach its targets in controlling the HIV epidemic. Number two would be to help Jamaica become more diversified in energy resources; helping them move to a more renewable future through investment in renewable energy and public/private partnerships. Then, finally and probably the hardest thing, would be to reduce the number of incidences of crime and violence among Jamaica’s youth. We want to train the police and the community on alternative dispute resolution, criminal justice reform and child diversion. I would like to see more community policing efforts and more psycho-social support for Jamaica’s youth as well as alternative incarceration programs.

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON EDUCATION Folwell Dunbar ’84 is an esteemed author and educator in his hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana. He currently serves as the executive director of Chartwell Center, a small non-profit that educates students with autism, typically on the more profound end of the spectrum, between the ages of 3 and 30 years old. An agent of educational reform, Dunbar has helped launch more than a dozen schools in Louisiana and around the country, and he remains an educational consultant for schools around the globe.

Right: Folwell Dunbar ’84 is the executive director of Chartwell Center, a small nonprofit that educates autistic students in New Orleans, Louisiana. The school teaches many life skills within its curriculum. Illustrated through the school garden, students learn how plants grow while harvesting the fruits of their own labor.

F I N D O UT MO RE Education reformer Folwell Dunbar is the executive director of Chartwell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. Please visit www.chartwellcenter.org to learn more about his and the center’s work.

What are Chartwell Center’s challenges to educate its students during the pandemic? We’re facing the same struggles that everyone around the country is facing with COVID-19: the ineffectiveness of online learning. We actually were one of the first schools to reopen. We opened this summer. As soon as they lifted the stay-at-home order, we opened our doors. I made the decision based on the reality of what I know of online learning and what you can do with children on the spectrum. We did try during the lockdown to do Zoom sessions and it was a tremendous strain on our families, and just ineffective with our kids, who have tremendous needs. We knew we had to be back in person with our kids. We made that determination early on and we took a risk in opening. At first, we kind of limped through the summer. We had one teacher out after another. Everyone was scared to death. Many of our teachers decided not to come back. Some of our kids decided not to come back as well. We were sort of running on fumes, but we made all of the necessary adjustments and got to a better place. Fortunately for us, we have a board member who’s not only a parent, but also a doctor in town. She came and advised us, and we set up new systems and protocols for the school. Right from the start, we were at the door, we were taking kids’ temperatures, we were washing hands throughout the day. We’ve sanitized the entire building; we’ve changed the curriculum up a great deal just to

accommodate some of the things that we used to do. I’ll give an example: One of the things we do that most schools don’t do is take our kids out in the community on a daily basis. Part of the reason is to acclimate our students to regular life, and to have them interact in ways that they’ll have to in the real world. It also exposes the community to the needs of children and adults with autism. But we just can’t do that the way we used to. We’re still doing what we call Community-Based Instruction, but we’re very limited in terms of where we can go and who we can interact with, and we’ve had to split up classes for social distancing. What’s been the hardest thing for your students to adjust to? One of the beautiful things about our kids is they’re not completely aware of the magnitude of this. It’s been a challenge for them to wear masks. Some of our kids are vocal and many of our kids aren’t. Their ability to express themselves and their fears and their anxiety and things like that — it’s been challenging for us to really interpret how they’re taking this. But we have been working; we changed the curriculum around so that we’re spending a lot more time on hygiene, wearing a mask and communicating with a mask. For us, using your face, your facial expressions, your mouth when you’re behind a mask makes it more challenging as a teacher. We’ve had some challenges that we didn’t necessarily anticipate, but the kids, they love to come to school. They love to see their

friends; they love to go out into the community. We’re not doing some of the things we used to do, and we’re doing a number of things differently, which in some ways is kind of fun. What worries you the most about the pandemic’s effect on education and what remedies do you foresee? I worry about the overall loss of learning time, which has been tremendous. As a country, we need to think more seriously about year-round learning. Our school is year-round. That was one of the things that gave us a leg up. I’m sure other school systems are going to look at that. I think schools are going to seek out supplementary online learning that’s effective. I think online learning is going to get better because of this. It’s sort of forcing the issue. The developers of online learning platforms are going to learn a number of lessons and it’s going to get better. I also think parents are going to be looking for supplementary educational resources. It’s been a little boom for the private schools here in New Orleans. A lot of folks thought enrollment would drop, but instead it did just the opposite. I think private schools were a little bit quicker to adjust and they’ve done a really tremendous job. In the long run, I think this pandemic is going to change the landscape for the better — kind of like Hurricane Katrina did here in New Orleans. In many ways, it’s shaking things up, causing people to rethink how they do things and how they might do them better. I’m hoping that’s the case.

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THE SCIENCE BEHIND VACCINES Dr. Charles “Chuck” Walworth ’78 dedicated the early part of his career in medicine to the care of HIV-infected individuals and the development of antivirals for the treatment of HIV. During this time he witnessed systemic discrimination against AIDS patients. Now, he’s in medical affairs at LabCorp, the world’s leading healthcare diagnostics company, which is advancing the science behind the testing and treatment of COVID-19. You pursued a career in science and medicine because of your relationship with Brooks faculty emeritus Nick Evangelos. What about your time at Brooks inspired you? Mr. Evangelos was so enthusiastic about science and the potential for us to do whatever we wanted, whether that was to be a researcher or physician. He had set up a program with Dr. Rudolph Muto P’74, P’79, GP’08, GP’11, GP’14, GP’16, who was a thoracic surgeon at the time, and each of us had the opportunity to witness surgery firsthand as a high school student. You can never underestimate the value that something like that affords a young mind. You redirected your career after working in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, when the first five cases of AIDS were reported at Bangkok General Hospital. You left urology for infectious diseases and eventually built a large private HIV practice. Why did you pursue this specialty? I’ve always seen medicine as an opportunity to take on one of the more challenging fields, and I thought it took a certain type of person to be able to not just master it intellectually, but also master the humanity and the compassion that is needed to be a good physician. When I finished college, the AIDS epidemic started. When I saw what was happening in that field — that doctors weren’t going into that field because they feared it — I felt it was the best field for me to challenge my compassion as a human

being, and to explore my interest in a fascinating area of virology, as it related to something the world had never seen before. The management of HIV-infected individuals was very rough in the early years. The diagnosis itself was equated with a death sentence. Our job was made more difficult due to the discrimination we saw on multiple levels — whether from other physicians, from hospital staff, from people who wouldn’t rent houses or apartments to our patients. We fought on multiple levels to not only care for our patients, but to get them what they needed just to survive. Although we still do not have a cure, the evolution in the field has been tremendous.

over 20 years has been adapted into what’s called a neutralizing antibody assay. It can determine whether the virus can be prevented from replicating in the laboratory. This assay can be used for the characterization of convalescent plasma, and for the development of monoclonal antibodies, such as the type given to the president. Both of these have been featured prominently in the news. Most importantly, however, the assay is being used to help determine the effectiveness of vaccine candidates in clinical trials. That’s really, really exciting. The bottom line is that vaccine development is key to being able to control this virus and being able to return to our lives as we once knew them. Dr. Charles Walworth ’78 gives Infectious Diseases Grand Rounds at Tufts University.

In 2008, you joined Monogram Biosciences in South San Francisco as the director of global medical affairs. Monogram was acquired by LabCorp, and you are currently associate vice president of medical affairs and education at Monogram/LabCorp. How is your company contributing to the search for effective COVID-19 vaccines? We are currently running a phenomenal number of tests on a daily basis. This includes PCR testing for diagnosis, antibody tests and neutralization assays. One thing that I’ve worked on is a test that can be used to detect and quantify the amount of COVID-19 antibodies in a blood sample. One of the cellbased assays that we’ve used in HIV for

A Note: The views expressed by Dr. Walworth are based on his own comments and opinions, and do not represent the view and opinions of his employer.

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BROOKS CONNECTIONS IN THIS SECTION 44 Alumni News 50 Class Notes 91 In Memoriam

Science faculty Laura Hajdukiewicz was awarded the Hope H. van Beuren Endowed Chair in Chapel on November 16, 2020. In her 10th year at Brooks, Hajdukiewicz joins five faculty colleagues who also hold endowed chairs following a nomination and comment process from the full faculty. “It is perhaps the highest honor a teacher can have at Brooks or any school: the thoughtful and informed respect and admiration of fellow teachers who know what it takes to do this work well,” Head of School John Packard said when announcing Hajdukiewicz’s accomplishment. “The simple truth is that schools and organizations of any kind don’t get better without people like her thinking all the time about what they can do to make tomorrow a bit more fulfilling than yesterday,” Mr. Packard said. “She has not and does not settle for anything that feels or is less than it might or should be. I believe this to be true in her thinking about all aspects of school life, but it is critically important to underline that she thinks first, foremost and always about students before thinking of any other constituency.” Current physical distancing protocols call for advisories to gather in separate classrooms and other spaces to watch Chapel through a livestream. Fourthformer Vivienne Foley, Hajdukiewicz’s advisee, reports on her advisory’s reaction: “We were all listening to Mr. Packard list these amazing qualities of an unknown teacher. As soon as he mentioned something about scuba diving, we knew he was talking about Mrs. H.,” she says. “I don’t think she thought it would be her, and she was truly ecstatic when he announced her name. All in all, it was a great and happy time, and it made everyone there proud.”

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Answering the Call When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the Kapadia Education Foundation organized a fundraising campaign to enable its students to help and protect their communities, with tangible and meaningful results. Pradeep Kapadia ’74, P’04, P’09

is in his 20th year as founder and president of his non-profit organization, Kapadia Education Foundation (KEF). The foundation, which also includes Brooksians Jess Kapadia ’04, Elan Kapadia ’09 and Ross Povenmire ’74 in its ranks, provides full-tuition scholarships for higher learning in developing nations in 21 countries across 44 areas of study, and has sponsored 400 students — or as Pradeep Kapadia likes to say, “676 years of college.” “I believe we live in the best of times, despite recent news to the contrary,” Kapadia says. “The risks we face today in the United States and Europe are what ‘normal’ feels like in many developing countries. We do need to provide short-term relief, of course, but nothing replaces advanced education as a sustainable solution to the cycle of poverty and ignorance. I am a product of that education. The foundation was built to ‘pay it forward.’ We do this every time we sponsor a new student.” During the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic, Kapadia rapidly organized a fundraising campaign to safely bring students home from school and provide financial assistance to help protect their communities. In just over two weeks, KEF’s coronavirus emergency relief fund supported nearly 60 scholars and alumni in 10 countries. The mobilization transformed how these students and alumni coped with the effects of lockdown, and stories began pouring in.

KEF Executive Director Yazan Fattaleh has readily shifted operations to continue serving the needs of their students. “Luckily we were already a virtual organization before COVID lockdowns happened, but we did have to pivot our programming,” he says. “We were not able to assure any scholarships were being received with schools’ financial aid offices closed. Students were soon in touch with the very effective relief efforts they were taking on themselves, and we wanted to support their community work through a COVID-19 emergency relief fund we were able to raise quickly thanks to our generous donors.”

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Kapadia Education Foundation sponsors students who pursue higher education in developing nations. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, KEF’s students have been “paying it forward” and assisting their local communities, with financial help from an effective KEF fundraising campaign.

Thokozani Sagawa, a KEF alumna in Malawi who graduated in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in natural resource management from Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, took the initiative to set up hygiene stations throughout her village and, using proper social distancing protocols, taught her neighbors proper hand-sanitizing technique. Thokozani used her KEF emergency

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relief fund to support at-risk elders who were disabled or caring for orphaned children with cooking oil, sugar, salt, matches, soap and washing buckets. Rosemary Kako, another KEF alumna in Uganda who studied business administration at Kampala University, was suffering from food insecurity before the pandemic hit. With her emergency grant, she has been able to feed her family during these uncertain times and sews masks to help keep her community healthy. Hasifa Nabalimira, a KEF alumna working in healthcare, used her relief fund to purchase additional PPE for her medical center in Uganda, and donated food, masks and soap to those in need. And, like his fellow KEF students and alumni, Alberto Rogerio Nhalungo’s drive for education inspired his desire to pay it forward. Nhalungo set up a small space in his village in Mozambique for children whose lessons had stopped due to the pandemic. “For grades 1 through 4, I provide exercise sheets, notebooks, pencils and pens, and I hope to start having school lunches for the children as well,” he says. They’re being taught about the importance of hygiene every day during this pandemic. With an education, you can see things clearly. Education is key.” Kapadia notes the broad, immediate impact of the foundation’s donors. “A $100 stipend transferred directly to each student or alumnus via a phone app has done more to save lives and to ease the burden of COVID-19 among the most vulnerable people than anyone can imagine,” he says. “These brave students and alumni will be remembered and celebrated by their communities long after the virus disappears. And our students will have experienced first-hand what it feels like to pay it

forward. In their sponsorship application, they made this pledge to pay it forward upon graduation, but COVID-19 was their call to action and they were true to their pledge.” KEF students and alumni have stepped up to help provide resources and manpower in ways that have made a profound difference on the people around them. Uganda, where KEF sponsors the majority of its African students, has been hit especially hard by lockdown measures. Despite these challenges, KEF students continue to tirelessly support their communities, like Charles Waiswa, who continues to work as a nurse in Mukono, near Kampala. Using emergency funds, he purchased bars of soap to cut into pieces and hand out to each patient. Olivia Abenakyo, who recently graduated from Makerere University in Uganda with a degree in economics, donated a portion of her salary to the emergency fund. Another Ugandan student, Bwema Matata, has concentrated his volunteer efforts at a food distribution point in a refugee settlement, where there are many suspected cases of COVID-19. He spends his days testing the refugees’ temperatures before they enter, and enforcing hygiene and social distancing practices to reduce the infection rate. “Now schools are starting to slowly re-open in limited capacities, and we are eager to admit more students and support our existing scholars as they return to school,” says Fattaleh. “Seeing how quickly our students were able to help their communities during lockdown gives me confidence for whatever the future may hold, and we look forward to the continuous positive impacts that will come from change-makers like them.” —Jess Kapadia ’04

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Homecoming @ Home Brooks found ways to connect across the digital divide for Homecoming festivities this fall. The school’s first virtual homecoming, held over a series of 13 events in November 2020, was a success. Nearly 150 students, employees, alumni and friends of the school, for example, set out — on campus, at home and across the world — to complete a 5k on November 7. Along the way, they posted photos on social media, cheered each other on and connected through distance. Homecoming@Home’s virtual offerings included a movie screening, a recorded walk down the fire trail, class agent training and a conversation with Head of School John Packard. Individual alumni also showcased their passions: Evan Merriam ’11 hosted a wine tasting; Cat Lau ’12 guided a yoga session; Kat Barker Bacon ’10 led a HIIT workout; and English faculty Leigh Perkins ’81, P’14, P’18 offered a peek into her fourthHOMECOMING form world literature course. The @ series wrapped up with an alumni HOME career panel on COVID-19 resiliency moderated by broadcaster and former professional soccer player Charlie Davies ’04. “We wanted to create different types of offerings that struck a balance between providing updates from campus and connecting fellow alumni,” says Associate Director of Alumni Relations Carly Churchill ’10. “Thankfully, we have so many talented and generous alums, a bunch of whom agreed to help Homecoming @Home become a reality.”

CONNECT WITH BROOKS Please visit www.brooksschool.org/ alumni/events for updated information on events for Brooks alumni and other community members.

ALUMNI BRIEFS The South Carolina Stingrays, ECHL affiliate of the National Hockey League’s Washington Capitals and American Hockey League’s Hershey Bears, agreed to terms with defenseman Connor Moore ’16 for the 2020–21 season. Moore begins his pro career after a fouryear run at Boston College. As a senior for the Eagles, Moore appeared in all but one game: He posted nine points (two goals – seven assists) and a +9 rating while leading the club in blocked shots for the third time in four years with 44. During his career at Boston College, Moore was part of two teams that won Hockey East regular-season championships and had a career-high 17 points in 37 games as a sophomore. Joe Giallanella ’99 works for Seventh Generation, the cleaning product company known for natural products. He leads the company’s growth incubator, the team tasked with eliminating plastic from packaging. For years, Seventh Generation has moved toward sustainable packaging, and its new line, Zero Plastic Homecare, eliminates plastic packaging entirely. In order to eliminate plastic, the company is moving toward non-liquid products that don’t require the “moisture barrier” plastic provides. For example, the line’s hand soap is a powder; the dishwasher detergent is a tablet; and the kitchen cleaner is a powder. These new products will be packaged in steel containers, which tend to be recycled at a high rate.

BROOKS WORKS Have you recently published a book? Has your album just dropped? Tell us about it. We want to hear about your creative successes, and we want to highlight your work in an upcoming issue of the Bulletin. To have your work considered for inclusion in a future installment of Brooks Works, please send a review copy to:

Editor, Brooks Bulletin 1160 Great Pond Road North Andover, MA 01845

The magazine does not purchase the materials listed in Brooks Works. The materials we receive will be donated to the Luce Library or another appropriate outlet. The Bulletin reserves the right to reject works that, in the judgment of the editorial staff, do not promote the mission or values of Brooks School or the Bulletin.

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Head coach Stuffy McInnis (top row, right) with the 1945 Brooks baseball team.

Headed to the Hall? A local man’s quest may land former Brooks baseball coach Stuffy McInnis in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The Boston Globe reported in May that a Rockport, Massachusetts, man named Mel George had submitted a 31-page report to Cooperstown advocating for local hero McInnis to be inducted. McInnis coached baseball at Brooks from 1942 to 1945, between coaching stints at Norwich University, Amherst College and Harvard University, and following a professional career that, George argues, deserves Hall of Fame accolades. McInnis debuted as a first baseman with the Philadelphia Athletics straight out of nearby Gloucester High School. Under Connie Mack’s management, McInnis became a member of the “$100,000 Infield” (a measure of their value to the team, not of their salaries) that won the World Series in 1910, 1911 and 1913. McInnis stayed with the Athletics through 1917 until he was traded to the Boston Red Sox, where he collected 56 RBIs en route to

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the 1918 championship — second only to Babe Ruth’s 61. McInnis also played for the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Braves before landing with the Pittsburgh Pirates to win another World Series title in 1925. His professional career ended in 1927. McInnis hit .307 over his career and carried a .343 on-base percentage. He logged 2,405 hits and was known for his consistency: He hit over .300 for 12 years out of his 18-year career. George, the Rockport man advocating for McInnis’s inclusion in the Hall of Fame, points out in his report that of the 17 players from that era who had 2,400 career hits and a career batting average over .300, McInnis is the only one not in the Hall of Fame. McInnis’s chances at the Hall of Fame are dulled, though, by the fact that he only hit 20 home runs over the course of his career as a first baseman. He was previously included on the Hall of Fame ballot seven times between 1937 and 1951, and never received more than 5.2% of the vote. His name will come up again

when the Hall of Fame’s Early Baseball Era Committee meets next fall (this fall’s meeting was postponed due to concerns over coronavirus transmission). In his book “Thirty Years at Brooks,” faculty emeritus J. Tower Thompson describes McInnis as “a soft-spoken, modest, gentle person, the antithesis of the popular notion of a brash, selfcomplacent professional ball-player.” Thompson explains that, because McInnis coached during World War II, a time when many Brooks students were accelerating their educations and when limited transportation for teams was available, the potential of his teams was never realized. However, Thompson concludes, “The sport took a new lease on life with the coming of the much beloved Stuffy McInnis as coach. It must have been a painful experience for such a great player to make teams out of the materials he was offered, but he did more than this, instilling in all the boys who played under him a real love for the game.”

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Welcome to the Alumni Board Brooks welcomes seven new members to the Brooks School Alumni Board. James Begen ’05 earned his

undergraduate degree from the Wallace Carroll School of Management at Boston College and a master’s degree in finance from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. Begen has worked in the investment management industry for the last 10 years and currently is a senior client portfolio analyst at Income Research + Management. Begen lives in Charlestown, Massachusetts, with his wife, Emily ’05, their rescue dog, Callie, and their newest addition, 2-month old Hadley. In his spare time, Begen still enjoys playing soccer in local men’s leagues and also serves on the Leadership Council for Boston Scores, a soccer and educational Boston-based non-profit and affiliate of America SCORES.

Alex Haughton ’95 is originally

from Boston. After Brooks, he attended Denison University. Haughton currently lives in Fresno, California, with his wife, Berlyn, and two boys, Louin and Liam. Haughton says he is still a “diehard” Boston sports fan who loves to be outdoors with his family. They also love to travel, and hope at some point to be able to do so again. “I believe Brooks was of singular importance in my life, and I’m looking to pay that forward to other members of the Brooks community,” Haughton says. “I see inclusion on this board as a big part of that and look forward to helping in any way I can.” Haughton has worked in sales and account management for the past 10 years and has been involved with global

procurement, spending time on the ground in China. He currently works as a senior key account executive for North Lane, in which he manages a portfolio of Fortune 100 companies and advises them on new opportunities to digitize their payments to consumers and employees in a fast-moving and innovative landscape. Brittanye Mackey ’07 graduated from Spelman College in 2011 and taught English in Vietnam and France. In 2016, she graduated with her master’s degree in higher education from the University of Michigan and returned home to Massachusetts to work advising international university students. Mackey loves to travel: She participated in the Brooks Exchange Program to Hungary, spent her junior year of college studying in France and Senegal, and aims to travel to the African Continent annually. She speaks French fluently and owes her strong foundation in the language to her studies at Brooks. A proud Brooks day student, Mackey was involved with theatre and Students Embracing Culture (she notes that there was not yet a Black Student Union). Mackey still loves the arts (and thanks former Brooks faculty Michael McCahill!), and she looks forward to reconnecting herself and other alums to the Brooks community. Her brother, David, is a member of the Brooks class of 2001. Jackie Murphy ’14 played on the field hockey, ice hockey and lacrosse teams at Brooks. Murphy then

moved on to Connecticut College, from which she graduated in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a double minor in computer science and government. In college, Murphy was also a four-year member and two-year captain of the field hockey team. After graduation, Murphy began her career in banking in New York as an analyst at Credit Suisse, working on commercial real estate loan origination and underwriting. In her free time, Murphy enjoys spending time with family and friends, and participating in any activities that involve being outdoors. Her older brother, Eric, graduated from Brooks in 2013. Lowey Bundy Sichol ’92 is an award-

winning author, speaker and leading expert in teaching business and entrepreneurship to kids. She received an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a bachelor’s degree from Hamilton College, where she played softball and women’s rugby. At Brooks, Sichol was a three-sport athlete (softball, basketball and cross-country). She lives in the Chicagoland area with her husband, Adam, and her three children Peyton, Carter and Tucker.

Abby Skinner ’14 hails from

Georgetown, Massachusetts. She was a day student at Brooks and counts among her favorite memories playing on the girls tennis team, becoming a mentor at the Lawrence Boys and Girls Club, and teaching Zumba at the Relay for Life. After Brooks,

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ALUMNI WEEKEND PLANS AND AWARD NOMINATIONS

Skinner attended the University of Connecticut, where she pIayed club tennis and club racquetball. She graduated in 2018 as an English major with a concentration in creative writing (inspired, she says, by English department chair Dean Charpentier’s creative writing class). Skinner went on to attend law school at Boston University School of Law, where she is now a third-year student. Following graduation, she will work at a labor and employment litigation firm in Boston. In her free time, Skinner enjoys reading, staying active and trying new restaurants in Boston. Katie Rogers Taylor ’92 spent

“three fabulous years at Brooks playing field hockey, squash and rowing crew” before earning her undergraduate degree from Davidson College. After graduation, she worked in advertising in California and New York. In 2001, Taylor helped start a hedge fund in New York and raised more than a billion dollars as the director of investor relations. She lives in Charlotte, Vermont, with her two children, Charlie and George, and her two dogs, Ruby Ninja and Hippo. Taylor currently raises money for a handful of non-profit charities, including the American Cancer Society, Meals on Wheels, Hope Lodge, the Lund Family Center and the Charlotte Central School.

We’re already looking toward May, during which Brooks typically holds Alumni Weekend. Due to the current state of the coronavirus pandemic, we cannot yet predict whether and where we will be able to celebrate with Brooks graduates from class years ending in 0, 1, 5 and 6. Please visit www.brooksschool.org/alumni/ reunion for updated news and information on this year’s Alumni Weekend. A highlight of the weekend is the awarding of three alumni awards: the Distinguished Brooksian award, the Alumni Shield award and the Alumni Bowl award. Descriptions of each award follow. The winners from class years ending in 0 and 5 have already been decided. If you’d like to nominate a member of a Brooks alumni class year ending in 1 or 6 for either the Alumni Shield or the Distinguished Brooksian award, please visit www.brooksschool.org/alumni/ awards by February 1, 2021. DISTINGUISHED BROOKSIAN The Distinguished Brooksian award honors a member of the Brooks community whose life and contributions to society exemplify the nobility of character and usefulness to humanity embodied in the spirit of the school. ALUMNI SHIELD The Alumni Shield award recognizes an alumna or alumnus who graduated from Brooks 25 or fewer years ago who has made significant contributions in the field of his or her endeavor. ALUMNI BOWL The Alumni Bowl is awarded to that member of the alumni community who has tirelessly and loyally supported the school through their thoughtful and exemplary service and dedication as a volunteer. The Alumni Office determines the recipient(s) of this award each year.

THANK YOU The school would like to thank the following alumni who have concluded their dedicated and valuable time on the alumni board: Karl Arakelian ’83, P’18, P’20 Lexi Caffrey ’06 Jeff Longnecker ’93 Morgan Manoff ’04 Peter Rathbone ’64, P’04, P’15 Stephen Taber ’72 Eric Ziady ’83

The newest members of the alumni board. From top to bottom: James Begen ’05, Alex Haughton ’95, Brittanye Mackey ’07, Jackie Murphy ’14, Lowey Bundy Sichol ’92, Abby Skinner ’14, Katie Rogers Taylor ’92.

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JULIA MORAN M O RTO N ’8 3

Building Homes and Hope How a chance temp job sparked an executive’s lifelong passion, and permanent career, in affordable housing development.

Julia Moran Morton ’83 planned to be a doctor. Her mother, Gail — a volunteer at the Lawrence, Massachusetts, non-profit Neighbors in Need near their home in Andover — “instilled in me a strong sense of giving back to the community,” says Julia, who was 12 when her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I don’t know if the career choice came from her being sick and me wanting to find the cure … but I wanted to help people through medicine.” At Brooks, Julia’s favorite class was AP Biology with Nick Evangelos, where she did EMT training, and Polly Vanasse’s chemistry class, where she did a project on chemotherapy, shadowing her mom in treatment, before entering Connecticut College with plans to go pre-med. And today she is actually helping people rebound in their lives and heal — only in a very different way: as chief housing development officer at the Washington, D.C., non-profit SOME (So Others Might Eat). Julia’s career has been dedicated to helping low-income individuals and families by developing affordable housing, including multifamily apartments, SROs (single room occupancy) and special needs housing, including for people living with HIV, and even founding a Habitat for Humanity chapter in the Caribbean. It’s a list of accomplishments that would have made Julia’s mother proud. Sadly, she died when Julia was 19.

Julia Moran Morton ’83 (left) with her daughter, Lily Grace, at the Turkey Trot 5k fundraiser organized by So Others Might Eat.

“After caring for her when she was sick … I wondered if I could watch others go through that and feel that pain over and over,” Julia says. So she abandoned her plan to go into medicine, majored in psychology, interned with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America counseling kids in low-income housing projects and considered a career in social work. “It was

through that experience that I first saw firsthand how people struggled just to have a decent roof over their head,” Julia says. Determined to experience “a more diverse world” after graduation, Julia moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her great aunt for a few months and took a temp job with a luxury real estate developer. The city and gig were “just going

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to be for the summer,” Julia recalls. Thirty years later, she jokes, “It’s been a very long summer.” Julia fell in love with the work and spent three years embracing “the eclectic mix” of real estate development: identifying sites for acquisition, researching the zoning, working with an architect on the design, crunching the numbers to determine if a project was economically feasible and procuring financing. “I was enjoying it all,” she says, “but something was missing.” After attending a fundraiser for the nonprofit Jubilee Housing, she found it. Hearing Jubilee’s director tell the story of their organization, Julia says it clicked for her. “That was everything I was doing and loved and also combined the ‘heart and soul’ part of it, too.” She felt she had found her calling. She quit her for-profit job, took the summer off to travel cross-country, then approached Jubilee about a position — only to find one had just opened up. “It felt so serendipitous!” Julia says. The work was all she had hoped for. “Housing development can be very fast-paced and stressful,” she says. “But knowing that the end result is someone able to step out of being under-housed or homeless and into a unit they can call home makes it worthwhile.” She enrolled in a master of science program in urban planning with a concentration in housing and real estate development at the

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Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Real Estate Development to take her career a step further. Classes in real estate development, housing policy and social work tied together Julia’s passions. “I really like the social work aspect, but found I could make a bigger impact actually building the housing,” she says. And she’s done just that throughout her career, directing housing development at organizations including Building Futures and Transitional Housing Corp., before joining SOME in early 2019. “SOME has had an extraordinary evolution that started 50 years ago with folks handing out sandwiches on the street and grew to fill an entire spectrum of needs for those in poverty,” Julia says of the nonprofit that provides comprehensive meals and services for the homeless and housing for D.C.’s extremely low-income residents, including transitional and permanent supportive housing, medical services and employment training. “Nearly 10 years ago, SOME declared a goal to develop a thousand units of housing, and we’re just about there.” The organization has more than 800 units and two projects under construction now: Anna Cooper House with 47 units for single adults and Karin House, at the historic Walter Reed campus, with 41 efficiency units for seniors. Impressive stats, to be sure, but it’s still the personal impact that equals success for Julia.

“It is possible to do this work and not interact with residents,” says Julia, who makes a point of entering her office through a housing area so she can say hello to clients and connect with the community, not through the front door. “The most rewarding part, though, is getting to know the people. The people are what it’s all about, and the payoff is moving day, seeing them move into a place for the first time and the elation of the kids and adults. I feel a real joy seeing that impact.” There will be more to come, as well, since SOME was just awarded funding from the Department of Housing and Community Development for its next project: the demolition of four townhouses, which currently house short-term transitional housing for people experiencing a mental health emergency, and building a 136-unit high-rise in its place for formerly homeless single adults. There is a lot on her plate, but, Julia says, “As much as I wish we could put ourselves out of business, there is always a need for those who are falling through the cracks, and I hope to keep making an impact.” How can others find work as satisfying? “Listen to where life is taking you, widen that view and be open to possibilities,” she advises. “My career path took me in a completely different direction than the medical path I was on, and it’s been fulfilling in ways I never could have planned.”

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CH ANTELLE M E N DO N SA ’ 11

Connecting the Dots Between Climate Change, Health and Racial Equity An environmental change-maker shares how she got her start and why she’s nowhere near finished trying to help the planet and everyone on it. It’s almost like she has x-ray vision. When Chantelle Mendonsa ’11 looks at a problem, she can see, down to the bones, so to speak, how the pieces come together. It’s an essential skill in her position as the Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC) Community Lead at the National Resources Defense Council, where she focuses on identifying connections between the environment, racial equity and health equity, then helping make structural changes to improve all three. “The lens that helped me begin to understand climate change and the environment was public health,” says the Santa Ana, California, native, who now resides in Washington, D.C. “There were days growing up in Southern California when the air quality was so poor you couldn’t go out and play, and I noticed in my neighborhood, a lot of kids had asthma.” Her understanding of the links between health and the environment deepened during college at Syracuse University. Mendonsa began to “really connect to the fact that the way in which most Americans actually engage with climate change and our environment is through their health,” she says. “It’s through clean air, water.”

At the same time, she learned not all health impact is experienced equally. “The ways in which an income can be a determinant for air quality is frightening,” Mendonsa says. “And in order to figure out how we got to the place where your race or your income can determine the quality of air you breathe, you have to understand the way that our history and our communities — particularly surrounding racial and environmental justice and policies like redlining and sundown towns — purposefully pushed polluting industries out of white and affluent neighborhoods and into communities of color and low-income communities.” A fellow environmentalist at Syracuse inspired her to turn concerns into action. “He got me to really think about the ways in which [these] systems are connected,” she says. “He pushed me to be like, ‘Okay, if you care about the environment, then why are we learning about climate change while our school endowment is funded from big oil and polluters?’” (Sadly, the inspiration her former classmate continues to give Mendonsa to fight climate change is due to the fact that he was overcome by wildfire smoke while working in agriculture in California and has been in a coma for the past three years.)

Collaborating with a group of students and local partners, Mendonsa and her classmates staged a sit-in, met with Syracuse University’s administration and campaigned to force the school to address their concerns. It worked. In 2015, the university publicly committed to divest its $1.8 billion endowment from oil, coal and gas companies and make investments in clean-energy technologies. Divestment of the entire SUNY school system followed. Mendonsa kept that positive momentum going after college, working at the Council on Environmental Quality in the administration of President Barack Obama. “It helped me recognize that we need to talk about climate through health, through how people are experiencing it, connecting health and climate to where we live,” she says. “I reflect on that as probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life, working with a team of people fully dedicated to public health and to having a livable planet.” At the NRDC, an organization that Mendonsa says shares her goal of figuring out how to build a safer world, and one in which all can thrive, Mendonsa works on the “Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge.” She

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partners with organizations and individuals in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Memphis and San Francisco on community practice work around climate resiliency, health equity, racial equity, and the intersection of health and climate. “I’m really lucky to work with partners who are all really passionate,” she says. “They’re determined to improve their own communities and make sure that where they live is not a place that negatively impacts their health but, instead, is someplace where they can really thrive and want to build a family. You can really feel the urgency when you’re working directly with people who are impacted.” The job could sound complicated on paper, but to Mendonsa it’s all really quite simple: “I don’t think any of us should have to expect that we will live a shorter life or have more health impacts because of where we live, because of our race or income.” She readily admits that she doesn’t have all the answers, though. “Honestly, what I’m most proud of is the fact that we’ve gone through an incredible learning journey in recognizing that we, as environmentalists and as experts in climate change or health, are not experts in lived experience,” she says. “The people who know best what’s happened to a community aren’t scientists who don’t live in that community. It’s actually people who live there and who understand what those daily impacts are. [Then for others like me to] help co-create projects to help the community, that I think has been the biggest learning.” Mendonsa’s learning continues every day now, since she became a Bloomberg American Health Initiative

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Fellow. “It’s a partnership between Johns Hopkins and the NRDC, so it’s been really great because it’s allowed me to continue trying to build the connection between public health inequities and climate change,” she explains. Of course, tackling such weighty, all-encompassing issues can feel heavy at times. “It is really easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom of ‘Everything is terrible,’ with climate change exacerbating the impacts on those who are most impacted: on low-income communities, on communities of color, on all of us,” she admits. Looking to her NRDC partners and fellow environmentalists makes all the difference. “I’ve been really blown away by the number of people, and the number of young people specifically as well, who recognize that this is the time to stand up and do something,” she says. “That gives me a lot of hope.” Plus, Mendonsa adds, “Working with people who know what they want to do in their community, and who are really eager and working tirelessly to push forward, it’s hard to say, ‘Oh, but everything is bad!’ It’s a lot easier to say, ‘Let me help, let’s do this together.’”

“ In order to figure out how we got to the place where your race or your income can determine the quality of air you breathe, you have to understand the way that our history and our communities — particularly surrounding racial and environmental justice and policies like redlining and sundown towns — purposefully pushed polluting industries out of white and affluent neighborhoods and into communities of color and low-income communities.”

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IKENNA ND U G BA ’ 16

The Power of Poetry A Brooksian uses poetry as a medium to help underserved youth in Boston.

Ikenna Ndugba ’16 (right) founded the Boston non-profit 617Peak.

Ikenna Ndugba ’16 is a Division I collegiate basketball player with aspirations of playing professional basketball next year. He managed to earn both a bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing and a master’s degree in business administration and general management during his four years at Bryant University, and is currently pursuing a second bachelor’s degree in human services studies at Elon University. Yet he’s most proud of his budding non-profit, 617Peak, which provides platforms for youth in Boston to find their voices by sharing

their stories through written and spoken forms. “Everyone has a story to tell. The youth need safe spaces to participate and express themselves artistically, and our open mics allow that. The stories that they’re sharing are all important because they are their own,” Ndugba says. “And the amount of talent they have — these students who are 13, 15, 17 — is amazing.” Ndugba attended Mission Grammar School and Boston Latin Academy, both academically strong but located in more dangerous pockets of Boston. The schools also

drew students from all over the city, increasing Ndugba’s awareness of the violence he and some of his classmates witnessed routinely. He subsequently decided to enroll at Brooks for a more conducive environment to focus on his academics and athletics. It was at Brooks that Ndugba discovered a passion for the arts through his classwork and culminated with his poetry reading for a senior project, shifting his campus image of being “just an athlete.” “Brooks let me tap into the arts and that side of myself, because up until then, I probably was quieter, or standoffish,” Ndugba notes of his first few months on campus. “It was because Brooks was a new place. But taking some of the theater classes, the art classes, I found that I actually liked it. You were encouraged to actually try to do those things that, I think, back home people would have just laughed at. I would have just laughed — me, writing poetry? But I know that poetry helped me. So, now I’m trying to make the arts cool for others.” As a sixth-former, Ndugba won the Russell Prize, which is awarded by the faculty for an outstanding single contribution to the life of the community. Not long after Prize Day, he “had an itch” to make a positive impact on his native Boston, much like he did at Brooks. Ndugba’s best friend, Timmance McKinney, who runs his own mentoring program, encouraged Ndugba to launch a speaking series

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to spend time with school students across the city. The summer after his freshman year at Bryant University, he started speaking to school-age children around the city. Ndugba and McKinney later implemented a five-week male mentoring program for grades four through six at his alma mater, the Mission Grammar School. Jeffrey Sánchez, former Massachusetts state representative and fellow alumnus of the Roxbury school, met Ndugba during one of his visits to the school and began mentoring Ndugba. Ndugba was invited to the Massachusetts State House and felt particularly inspired by seeing fellow people of color governing for change. Not long after, Ndugba decided to host an open mic at the State House and subsequently file for 501c, nonprofit status. Remembering how nervous he was before his sixth-form poetry reading, Ndugba typically invites a few local artists to share their work before turning the mic over to the students. “It warms the room up. A lot of times the kids are wondering, ‘Is how I feel OK?’ ‘Is this normal?’ It helps the kids — most of whom don’t know each other — to see somebody who looks like them

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perform. Then they’re willing to get up and say something themselves.” The benefits of 617Peak are two-fold: it brings local community programs together, allowing their students to share and participate with other youth in the city; and for two hours, students are inside a safe space and encouraged to share their stories and find their creative voice. “It’s not just me — each person who volunteers — we all want to reduce the amount of violence in the city, but we also want kids to grow during the process. This is one small way,” Ndugba says. “There is a broad range of students who attend the Open Mic events. Whether it’s performing or observing, they’re going to be in that space — indoors — for two hours, during the warmer months when crime tends to rise. If they can be inside for those two hours it might be one less student who ends up in the wrong situation.” Ndugba has placed the public gatherings on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, so he organized a contest through social media where students submitted writings or performative art videos. Six Boston-area students were then selected to win a $100 gift card and

The crowd at 617Peak’s second annual open-mic night in 2019.

other 617Peak gifts. Ndugba has continued to serve as a mentor to individual youths. He’s talked some students through the college and financial aid application process while helping others to connect with local artists in their chosen medium. Noting that several individuals, including Associate Head for Faculty Affairs John McVeigh, have mentored him along the way, he sees his efforts as part of a chain of good deeds. He hopes that one day some of his 617Peak participants will pay it forward themselves. As for basketball, Ndugba was sidelined a season at Bryant due to injury, allowing him to play one final year at Elon University. He’s hoping to sharpen his skills before he tests them out in the professional arena. And majoring at Elon in human services studies directly betters his ability to run 617Peak. “I’m grateful for how far I’ve come since a kid and how close I am to achieving my goals,” Ndugba says. “I’m focused on the growth and improvements I need in order to play professionally.”

PARTING SHOT

Longtime Brooks faculty Doug Burbank H’98, P’11 (pictured in his classroom with students in October 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic began) retired from his long career of teaching, coaching and caring for Brooks students at the conclusion of the 2019–2020 academic year. Burbank’s contributions to the school are peerless, and the Bulletin will publish a longer tribute to Burbank’s career in a future issue. If you would like to contribute thoughts to that piece, please email Bulletin editor Rebecca A. Binder at rbinder@brooksschool.org.

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When Brooks pivoted to hybrid learning in the COVID-19 pandemic, your Brooks Fund support allowed the school to ask what it should do, instead of merely what it could do. Our dedicated faculty was able to design and maintain an intentional and resilient program: Students and their families were able to choose the best academic model for their needs, whether on-campus or virtual; the administration was able to use our spacious campus and its outdoor spaces intentionally and to their full potential; and faculty were able to access technology and training that gave them their best chance to reach all of their students, in-person and virtual, and to teach in ways that maintained and often even enhanced the educational experience at Brooks. This is a difficult time — at Brooks, in the United States and in the world — and we are proud that we are able to continue to work aspirationally, and guided by our mission to provide the most meaningful educational experience our students will have in their lives. We need your Brooks Fund support to conBY THE NUMBERS tinue to find our way as we always To date, Brooks has spent almost have: together, with care for our $1 million in COVID-related costs. students and community, and Below are a few examples of the with determination to emerge investments the school has made from this crisis as a stronger and to keep our community safe and better school. As we strive to our curriculum strong: raise $2.4 million for the Brooks • A robust testing program for Fund this year, we are grateful to all on-campus employees, stuall of our donors who have already dents and resident households donated and those who are plan• Technology to facilitate teachning to give this year. ing and learning for in-person and virtual students in a hybrid classroom • Tents that allow on-campus Brooksians to be outdoors as much as possible: in class, while eating, during free time and during weekend activities • An addition to the Health and Wellness Center that allows us to sequester ill students from well ones • PPE, hand sanitizer and masks for every member of the on-campus community • Air filtration units for the Classroom Building and Wilder Dining Hall • Cleaning supplies to protect against coronavirus transmisBROOKS FUND sion and spread

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Four easy ways to give: Credit Card — Check — Stock—Venmo.* Visit www.brooksschool.org to make your gift. *Venmo: @Brooksschool. For more information, contact Director of Annual Giving and Donor Relations Mary Merrill at mmerrill@brooksschool.org.

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Giving Day is scheduled to take place on February 25, 2021. Please visit www.brooksschool.org/ alumni/events for updated information on Giving Day and other future events.

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