17 minute read
Leading Brooks Forward
Leading
Brooks Forward
This year’s class of school prefects reflects on the importance of their role as leaders for the student body and on their role in reaffirming the strength of the Brooks community.
BY REBECCA A. BINDER
EVERY YEAR, a group of sixth-formers leads the student body as school prefects. These students, who are selected in the spring of their fifth-form year, shoulder the large responsibility of being leaders and role models for the student body in every area of school life; for serving as liaison between the student body and Head of School John Packard; and of using their voice, authority and influence to better the school.
This year, the job of school prefect is even more heightened. The last school year that was not affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and its necessary physical distancing, isolation and activity restrictions, was the 2018–2019 school year: This year’s sixth-formers were third-formers then, and they alone carry the student body’s institutional memory of a full and unrestricted academic year at Brooks. Now that the school is able to physically gather again; to reach across course, dorm and team rosters; and to spend informal, unscheduled time together, this year’s school prefect class has embraced the additional responsibility of teaching their younger peers why that’s important, and why it’s such an important and meaningful aspect of life at Brooks. The Bulletin sat down with each of the 11 school prefects to hear their thoughts on leadership, their role at Brooks and the ways in which they hope to leave the school a better place.
Lucy Adams Christian Bejar
“I think it’s really important that we’re those people, those upperclassmen, who are approachable,” Lucy Adams says of her role as school prefect. “It’s important that, as we walk down Main Street, we say hi to literally every single person.” Adams firmly believes that, along with the reintroduction of allschool gatherings like Chapel and School Meeting to the Brooks schedule, smaller, unscripted efforts at connection will help restore the sense of community that she says has suffered during the pandemic.
“Reaching out all the time is slowly building this sense of community,” Adams continues. “I think it’s really important for the prefects to establish genuine connections with other people at the school. I think it’s really cool, really tangible, and I can already feel the effects of it and our community building back.” She explains that the pandemic, and its attendant restrictions on student contact and indoor capacity limits, divided Brooksians into classes, forms, dorms and afternoon activity groups. Friend groups, she notes, became smaller and more divided as students had less opportunity to meet and mingle with others. “I think the majority of the sixth-formers this year couldn’t tell you the names of the majority of the thirdand fourth-formers,” she says. “This is one of the most tangible things that we can change, if we just make an effort to get to know everyone. That’s what I really hope I can accomplish as a prefect.”
LUCY ADAMS
Christian Bejar feels strongly that the best way to ensure that the Brooks community is vibrant is to make sure that it’s having fun. “Our role as prefects is to see what the vibe on campus is, to talk about it with Mr. Packard and [Associate Head for Student Affairs Andrea] Heinze, to see what’s working and what’s not, and to just keep doing more of that,” he says. “It’s trying to bring excitement to campus: good, fun things to do with each other.” Bejar notes that he and the other school prefects are also students; “we know what everybody else is going through, and we know how it is.”
Bejar focuses on the steps he can take as an individual to promote a larger sense of community. “When I put a smile on, when I bring my energy up, it brings my friends and then the community up,” he shares as an example. He points to some obstacles the students face, among them continued COVID19 policies that, at press time, affected the ability of students to engage in inter-dorm visitation. “Right now, it’s having a group of people committed to bringing the energy and the community back,” Bejar says. “If it’s only one person or a few people, it’s not going to be that effective. You have to be fully bought in to bringing the community back together again.”
CHRISTIAN BEJAR
Hongru Chen Amy Del Cid
“The most important job of the school prefects is to represent the school community in the best way possible,” says Hongru Chen. “I think each of us brings a different perspective to our team; we all offer our own insights and reflect the voice of the student body as a whole.”
Chen values the discourse that emerges between the 11 school prefects and Mr. Packard at their weekly meetings, and he hopes to make the school “a better environment” for people who share his identity. “We each have different identities,” he continues. “I’m an international student and a student of color. I’m part of the LGBTQ+ community. All of these things are very important parts of my identity, and it’s important that I represent those who share parts of my identity and reflect what they’re thinking.”
Over the course of his career at Brooks, Chen has come to appreciate the kindness individual members of the community have shown him, and he hopes to bring that instinct to the fore as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. “I think our kindness toward each other is often increased when we’re together as a community, so I’m really just looking forward to bringing back the closeness that was hindered by the pandemic,” he says. “When I was a third-former, a lot of the sixth-formers gave me encouragement and support, and I can really feel how that inspired me. I look forward to returning that kindness to the younger students here now. All-school events like the GSA’s Paint Dance or our Chapel services are an integral part of supporting each other as a community.”
Amy Del Cid is focusing on re-forming the communities that have meant much to her during her time at Brooks. She also hopes to increase student voice in the school’s administrative decisions.
“I think the beauty of having such a small school is the fact that everyone can get to know everyone if they just make the effort to,” Del Cid says. She points to Alianza Latina, the affinity group on campus for Brooksians of Hispanic/Latinx descent. “I’m a co-head of Alianza Latina this year,” she continues. “Alianza Latina has always been that place where I can go and I can be me, and I hope that’s the case for other students also. Especially now, when there are underclassmen who are in Alianza Latina but didn’t get to know everyone because we were virtual, it’s nice to finally have everyone in the same room — and it’s a lot of people!”
Del Cid sees the excitement students returning to the in-person Brooks experience are bringing to campus. The students are invested in what their day-to-day experience looks like, she notes. “Brooks prides itself on the fact that there’s communication between students and faculty and the administration,” she says, adding that she hopes the administration is receptive to student opinion. She sees opportunity to work in partnership with the school administration to refine how the school evolves.
HONGRU CHEN HONGRU CHEN
AMY DEL CID AMY DEL
Luke Desmaison Christian Duran
Luke Desmaison hopes to spend his prefecture building on the excitement he and his peers feel about being able to engage fully in a year at Brooks. “When I was a third-former,” he remembers, “it was allschool event after all-school event. When that went away during the pandemic, I felt a huge void. It was really difficult to come back to Brooks and not be able to sit with my friends in Chapel, or laugh at a silly video in School Meeting. Even going to class: Physically being here and being able to sit in a chair in front of my teacher is super important to me now.”
Helping younger students understand the importance of “what they’re supposed to be doing,” Desmaison says, is paramount. “It was difficult for students to engage with things happening on campus last year,” Desmaison says. “And now that we’re back, it still feels a bit awkward for some kids. We’re trying to get back to having kids feel excited to be at School Meeting, for example. We’re trying to make sure everybody really feels the energy of what we remember Brooks being. This class of prefects is engaged. We’re enthusiastic. And, we’re excited. The year’s just beginning, and we’re already building that foundation.” “I want people to feel comfortable interacting with each other, and comfortable going out and trying new things,” Christian Duran says. “When I was a third-former, I was always kind of scared to go to the dances or sign up for certain activities. Something that I really want to help these third-formers do is realize that everywhere you go at Brooks is going to be a comfortable space in which you can try things and hang out with people.”
Duran practices what he preaches by, he says, making a point of starting conversations and greeting people wherever he goes. “I’ve really been trying to say hi to everyone I see,” he says. “In the lunch line, or if I’m walking awkwardly a few steps ahead of someone, I’ll slow down and say hi instead. I start little conversations here and there, and I make an effort to say hi to that same person the next day. I think it’s really important that the upperclassmen take the initiative to say hi to the underclassmen and get to know them. Just yesterday, I said hi to someone outside the athletic center. They weren’t expecting it, but it’s good because then you start saying hello in the halls, and then you start a friendship. I hope this rubs off on someone, and I hope that as these kids get older, they’ll want to do the same thing.”
LUKE DESMAISON CHRISTIAN DURAN
Malachi Johns Eleonore Kiriza
“Our job as school prefects is to challenge what’s been traditional and what’s happened in the past,” says Malachi Johns. “I feel like that’s kind of my thing, personally. Our job isn’t to just agree with the administration. [The prefects] should be kids who aren’t necessarily just going to go along with the school, but who will ask questions when they need to be asked.”
Johns focuses his efforts on rebuilding the Brooks community on the school’s disciplinary system. He says that he feels the current disciplinary system needs to be restructured so that it provides a learning experience and a path back into the community, instead of a traditional suspension from school. “I want to make sure everyone feels like they have a space at Brooks,” he says. “There’s something important about making sure that students understand the social ramifications of their actions rather than just the length of their suspensions.”
Johns also holds tenure as a dorm prefect in Blake House, and he calls on dorm prefects to create a strong dorm culture that’s based on community and interdependency. “Dorm prefects facilitate dorm culture through their actions as much as through their words,” he says. “We lead by example, but I think the biggest thing has been creating a culture within our friend group in Blake that kids can model their behavior after.”
“The prefects are here as a support system,” Eleonore Kiriza says. “We know what Brooks was like before the pandemic; we experienced the pandemic with everyone else; and now we’re experiencing this year with everybody else. So, we’re really good points of reference and resource for younger students.”
Kiriza, who also serves the school as a diversity, equity and inclusion prefect, also sees herself as a support for students who, she says, feel alienated and as if they cannot be themselves. “I’ve experienced that also,” she says, “and I can be a really good person for people who are feeling that now.” She says that the pandemic and its attendant isolation have prompted her to become more outgoing. “I make sure that, on Main Street, I scream the names of the thirdformers who were part of my orientation groups, that I say hi to them,” she says.
The typical high school hierarchy, Kiriza says, won’t work this year. “I think that, especially right now, we have a great chance to become more unified as a community,” she says. “Before, there was an element of sixth-formers feeling as if they were above talking to third- and fourth-formers. As prefects, we’re already crossing that and trying to make everybody feel more comfortable with each other.”
MALACHI JOHNS
ELEONORE KIRIZA
Laura Smith
Student Government President
As president of the student government, Laura Smith sees her role in this year’s school prefect class as unique: She brings ideas and initiatives from student government to the prefects and Mr. Packard, and serves as a vital connection between the two leadership groups on campus. “I think student government has so much potential,” she says, “and I want to leave it in a place where it can continue to make change. There’s only so much you can do in one year.”
Smith says that this year’s crop of school prefects is committed to old traditions while also taking an opportunity for change. “We’ve lost sense of some traditions we used to have, like seated dinner and dish crew,” she says. “We’re trying to bring those back to give Brooks a sense of that tradition. But with COVID-19 changing everything, we’re also definitely bringing ideas from our friends and younger grades about what they want the dorms to look like and how they feel things are going in the classroom. I think it’s going to be a good year!”
Smith notes the lingering pandemic restrictions on campus and their outsize effect on day students: “It’s really important to bring everyone together and encourage them to step out of their usual friend groups,” she says. “Seated dinner, for example, was really intimidating when I was a third-former, but it’s actually how I made a lot of good sixth-former friends. I realized that they were interested in sitting and talking with me.”
LAURA SMITH
Saisha Prabhakar and Naomi Wellso
Senior Prefects
When asked to describe this year’s class of school prefects, Senior Prefect Saisha Prabhakar, who shares duties with Senior Prefect Naomi Wellso, immediately lauds the group’s diversity. “We have a lot of people from a lot of different areas of the school,” Prabhakar explains. “So as a group, we have a lot of insight that someone who is only focused on academics, or only focused on athletics or the arts, doesn’t have. We’re very collaborative, so we can make decisions together and get stuff done.”
Prabhakar also feels grateful for her relationship with Wellso. “Naomi and I have very similar morals and values in what we care about and in leadership,” she says. “We really do want to make sure that underrepresented voices, particularly, have more of a voice this year. It’s a huge ambition, but we want to make this school more inclusive, especially for students who haven’t been on campus until this year. We want to get students used to the feeling of Brooks.”
Senior Prefect SAISHA PRABHAKAR
Wellso notes the ways in which she’s been meeting younger students and bringing them into Brooks on a smaller scale. “On my teams and activities, during my classes, and even at seated lunch, I try to listen to other students and form connections with them,” Wellso says. “I’ve met some new faces, new third-formers; I’ve also had the opportunity to sit and talk to people in my own grade that I don’t know well.”
Prabhakar remembers her own time as a virtual student last year, and says that her readjustment to being on campus last spring was a “culture shock.” “There was so much disconnect from the school when I was virtual,” she remembers. “That made me a lot more aware, and it made me care a lot more about the interactions between faculty and students. So I take that into consideration when I think of the kids who were virtual even longer than I was, or the new Brooksians who were virtual last year, and how that must feel for them.”
Wellso draws her inspiration as a prefect from the prefects that she encountered when she was a new Brooks student. She recalls her own dorm prefects from her third-form year, and says that she’s always wanted “to be the person who underclassmen would feel comfortable talking to; someone who isn’t intimidating.”
Now, as senior prefect, Prabhakar strives to be intentional in her drive to move the school forward. “If I have something, a change I want to see happen, I’m trying to be more intentional in going to faculty and asking about it, or talking to students about it, rather than just having a thought and not doing anything about it,” she says. Wellso echoes Prabhakar’s desire to form stronger lines of communication between students and adults at Brooks; she hopes, she says, to leave Brooks “a place where people care about the community and each other.”
Senior Prefect NAOMI WELLSO FAMILIAR FACES
Saisha Prabhakar ’22 and Naomi Wellso ’22, who serve the school as this year’s senior prefects, were featured in the spring 2021 Bulletin when, as virtual students, they each took readers through a day in their lives at school. The piece, “A Day in the Life,” begins on page 28 of that issue.
