Letter from the Head Master

a message from the head master ANDREW HOLMGREN

In the very early days of Calvert, legend has it that the combination of the Great Baltimore Fire and a subsequent bout of typhoid fever resulted in a number of Calvert students and teachers being confined to their homes. Unwilling to compromise their education, Head Master Hillyer began boxing up teacher-created content to send home to the boys and girls. Thus, Calvert Home Instruction was born.

Well over 100 years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation, only this time it wasn’t a handful of students or a short period of time, it was all 600 children and almost three months away from campus. We were going to need a lot of boxes!

Fortunately for all of us, today’s boxes are made of circuitry, glass, and plastic, and they hold a great deal more information than traditional cardboard. In the blink of an eye, Calvert went from learning together to learning apart. The creativity, resolve, and resourcefulness of our teachers, students, and parents were on full display as we built an entirely new and digital school. Everything from math class to physical education suddenly found its way onto the World Wide Web. We learned how to Google and to Zoom, how to Seesaw and Flipgrid, how to record, delete, and record again! We learned how to adapt, be patient, and support one another. In essence, we all learned how to learn all over again.

But perhaps most of all, we discovered something that has been found and forgotten too many times before in human history – we need one another. We need our community, our friends, and our family. These are the things that make up our common humanity. It wasn’t the videos, the texts, or the Google Docs that kept us going, it was our sense of belonging, it was the knowledge that someone out there, even if on the other side of a glass screen, missed us, worried about us, and cared about us. Our Calvert community was our foundation and our strength, on which these last three months rested.

Over the next three months, we will improve our remote program with hopeful hearts that we never, ever have to use it again. Our teachers have learned so much from this experience, and with the help of several outside consultants and organizations, that learning will continue over the summer. We will plan for our full reopening of campus in September with social distancing, barriers, masks, and all the other recommendations coming from our medical professionals – how lucky we are to have them at our side through all of this. We will do all of these things, and we will do them well, because of all of you, our Calvert community. The men, women, girls, and boys who have, since the days of typhoid fever and cardboard boxes, called our little School home.

Calvert has never been stronger, its future never brighter, and its students never more able and willing to face the challenges of tomorrow.

Thank you for your kindness and support during this past year. I will see all of you again soon.

Sincerely,

Andrew Holmgren Head Master