CA Magazine Spring 2019

CA

SPRING 2019

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE

THE MODERN P I LG R I M’S → WAY

CA alumnae/i journeys

Dancers in the winter CA Dance Project performance, Uprise. See pages 4 and 5 for more about dance on campus.

F E AT U R E S

SPRING 2019

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The Modern Pilgrim’s Way

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CA alumnae/i help explain the growing appeal of pilgrimage.

Editor

Heidi Koelz Associate Director of Communications

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Design

America’s Neutral Ground?

Aldeia www.aldeia.design Editorial Board

Pilgrim figures along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. See page 20.

In a polarized country, museums may be more important than ever.

Ben Carmichael ’01 Director of Marketing and Communications

DEPARTMENTS

John Drew P’15 ’19 Assistant Head and Academic Dean

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Opening Remarks

Alumnae/i

Message from the Head of School

Alumnae/i news, profiles of Chloe Temtchine ’01 and Shami Andalcio Bery ’07

Alice Roebuck Director of Advancement and Engagement

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Hilary Rouse Director of Engagement

Contact us:

Concord Academy Magazine 166 Main Street Concord, MA 01742 (978) 402-2249 magazine@concordacademy.org

© 2019 Concord Academy

The new book from Michelin-starred chef Anita Lo ’84 is an ultimate guide to cooking for one. See page 38 for more CA alumnae/i creative endeavors.

News about students, faculty, arts, and athletics

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Centennial Campaign

Class Notes

What does experiential equity look like?

Creative Types

82 Then & Now

84 End Space

MISSION

Concord Academy engages its students in a community animated by a love of learning, enriched by a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, and guided by a covenant of common trust.

Director of Health and Student Support Services Jeff Desjarlais O N T H E C OV E R Laura Foley ’75 crossing the French Pyrenees, outside of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, during her pilgrimage along the Camino Francés.

C OV E R P H OTO BY C L A R A G I M É N E Z • I FC A N D BAC K C OV E R P H OTO BY C O L E + K I E R A • TO C A N I TA LO I L LU ST R AT I O N BY J U L I A ROT H M A N

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Students Take the Lead “Our students, as they so often do, are showing us a way forward.”

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What does the future hold? Over the past year, CA students have been showing what kind of leaders they will be. They are inspiring to watch, and they give me hope.

Late in February, a group of CA students appeared before the Town of Concord Select Board seeking an endorsement of the Green New Deal, a sweeping national proposal that aims to effect legislation to combat climate change. The students are part of Sunrise, a youthled movement that has gained powerful support across the United States. One of them, Audrey Lin ’19, was recently profiled in the British newspaper The Guardian for her work in this movement.

On that evening, our students made a compelling presentation. The board’s response? Unanimous support.

We are seeing the same kind of student leadership here on our campus.

This spring, our community reviewed a proposed sustainability plan for Concord Academy. A local artist designed a large declaration (imagine something out of early American history), to which students

C O N C O R D ACA D E M Y M AGA Z I N E

and adults added their signatures. During one lunch period, over 150 people signaled their support for a more sustainable future by adding their names, each signature a commitment to a better future.

As one of the students put it, “I believe that small individual efforts make a big impact.” The sight of this page — filled as it is with evidence of many individuals coming together in support of a larger commitment — makes me optimistic. So does the work of our Sunrise students.

From leading a discussion about climate change to engaging in discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement, CA students are taking active roles and thereby making a positive difference in their communities.

Sometimes it is easy to scan the day’s headlines and to feel powerless to change them. Yet our students, as they so often do, are showing us a way forward. I am moved by their commitment and their idealism.

The future — our future — looks brighter. For that, I am grateful.

I L LU ST R AT I O N BY A DA M C RU F T. P H OTO ( R I G H T ) BY B E N CA R M I C H A E L ’0 1

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H A L L F E L LOW

What the Spotlight Shows Josh Duboff ’04 speaks about celebrity journalism

“I’ve always been greatly interested in the trappings of celebrity,” says Josh Duboff ’04, a senior writer for Vanity Fair, whose pop-culture podcast In the Limelight he also co-hosts. Duboff spoke with students and adults as Concord Academy’s 2018–19 Hall Fellow in March, sharing his career journey, what he has learned from playwriting and web series direction, and insights into reporting on entertainment and popular culture.

“As a culture, we like to build up celebrities and then watch them fall,” he told CA students in a creative nonfiction writing course he attended during his campus visit. “I’ve seen them at all stages of that trajectory.” In writing about celebrities, Duboff teases out details that show them at their most unguarded and relatable, their most human. In addition to writing about actors, musicians, and influencers, he has a keen interest in the people who surround and support them.

Though ways for writers to reach audiences are constantly and quickly evolving, Duboff excitedly anticipates new formats for telling stories. “There will, I believe, always be storytellers and stories to be told,” he said in his Hall Fellow Lecture, “even if the way that looks does shift.”

The Hall Fellowship is an annual endowed lecture named for former Headmistress Elizabeth B. Hall and established in 1963 to honor her tenure. Over the years, this lectureship has brought a wide array of accomplished individuals to CA. W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/duboff

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ARTIST, ACTIVIST, WILCOX FELLOW Using the body to tell a story or express emotion is at the heart of Destiny Polk’s work as a dancer, teacher, and activist. A Boston native, she began dancing at the age of 4 and remembers the inspiration she felt when her grandmother took her to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, showing her the first of her role models. “I could always see myself being a performer,” Polk says.

With a belief in the power of art to create political and personal transformation, Polk created the digital platform Radical Black Girl, hoping to build more community among artists of color and more paid opportunities for their work.

As a Wilcox Fellow at CA, Polk has been giving students unusual assignments, such as embodying a superpower. Her approach to blending story and dance has generated great enthusiasm on campus. “Students are really excited,” says Amy Spencer, head of the Performing Arts Department and Polk’s co-teacher. “Everyone wants to work with Destiny.”

W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/polk Concord Academy established the Wilcox Fellows program in 2000 to honor former Head of School Thomas E. Wilcox’s commitment to nurturing talent and increasing diversity. Learn more: www.concordacademy.org/ wilcox-fellows

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DA N C E- M A K E R Boundary-pushing artist Lily Kind ’04 returns to CA’s dance studio On a January afternoon, Dance 3 students, confined to just half of Concord Academy’s dance studio, coordinated a demanding improvisation. They looped in different directions and glided onto the floor, one leaping over another.

Guest teaching artist Lily Kind ’04 watched, then hurled herself into the mix.

Kind’s love for vernacular and vaudevillian dance traditions and her interest in artistic risks show in her teaching.

“Guys, you’re all strong enough to do it,” she cheered. “It’s there! It’s all there in your body.”

Her visit to the class was one in a series from professional dancers, including Alexander Brady and Rika Okamoto from Twyla Tharp Dance. With the advanced students in Dance Project, Kind played with Ravel’s famously repetitive Bolero. “It’s a way to force yourself into a different kind of formalization,” she says. “It’s kind of what it feels like to be a student at CA: There’s structure but also an increasing ramp-up.”

Her membership in Dance Company (now Dance Project) under Richard Colton all four of her years at CA was formative. “That’s where I learned how to be an artist — not a professional dancer, but an artist, which I was more interested in,” she says.

As a CA student, Kind also took part in Summer Stages Dance at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston — a workshop and performance series with leading contemporary dance artists, founded and directed by Colton and his wife, CA’s longtime Performing Arts Department head Amy Spencer.

After graduating, Kind returned year after year on staff. “I can’t explain enough how much those experiences shaped my life, both creatively and professionally,” she says.

While attending Goucher College in Baltimore, Kind started the Effervescent Collective, which embraced a broad definition of dance in eclectic spaces — boxing gyms, churches, riverbanks, warehouses. She studied dance for camera, ballet, and clowning, among other modalities, as a postgraduate at the California Institute for the Arts and at Headlong Dance Theater in Philadelphia, where she now lives and runs residencies and performs at Urban Movement Arts. Kind has traveled to study the Flying Low and Passing Through floorwork methods widely employed in European and South American dance institutions. She is also an accomplished Lindy Hopper and vernacular jazz dancer. Now she’s completing an MFA in interdisciplinary art studies with a concentration in performance creation from Goddard College. Her current dance theater project, very much informed by her work with young adults, is called W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/kind

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Celebrating 30 Years of the GSA CA marks the milestone with thought-provoking programming

Concord Academy celebrated the 30th anniversary of the GSA (founded in 1988 as the Gay-Straight Alliance, now the Gender Sexuality Alliance) with moving and thought-provoking programming throughout the academic year. CA was among the first independent schools to openly provide a safe and supportive space for LGBTQ+ youth and their allies. The CA community marked the occasion by looking back at the progress of the past three decades and ahead to the work to be taken up by a new generation.

COMMUNITY AND EQUITY EVENTS

CA’s commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January brought diversity, equity, and social justice educator and activist Rodney Glasgow to campus.

The full day of student- and faculty-led workshops also featured a screening of Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a documentary about the gay civil rights hero by filmmaker Nancy Kates ’80.

“Law one of gay history: The more visible you are, the more you will be attacked. Law two: The more you are attacked, the more you will fight back.”

K E V I N J E N N I N G S , former faculty Read more: www.concordacademy.org/jennings

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“We were trying to figure out how to be a person. It’s hard to describe the degree to which that was impossible at the time.”

S. B E A R B E RG M A N ’9 2 Read more: www.concordacademy.org/bergman

“The world gave me the gift of seeing the humanity in the person on the other side of the fence — the person who was my main tormentor was also a human being with his own story and his own struggles.”

RO D N E Y G L AS G OW , Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speaker Read more: www.concordacademy.org/mlk-2019

“We need to take big risks, ask uncomfortable questions, be fearless in our pursuit of truth. We must examine our ugly parts.

We must find a way to understand them. We must fight against the hate with love, and we must start yesterday.”

M A R K B E RG E R ’0 6 Watch a video of his talk: www.concordacademy.org/berger

FIGHTING HATE WITH LOVE: THE LARAMIE PROJECT

CA was the first high school to stage The Laramie Project, just after its premiere in 2000. This iconic dramatic work grew from the Tectonic Theater Project’s interviews with residents of Laramie, Wyo., following the murder there of gay college student Matthew Shepard. Giving gravity to the opening night of Concord Academy’s 2019 reprisal of the play, film, theater, and TV producer Mark Berger ’06 spoke to the entire school about his experience as a former member of Tectonic’s touring cast of The Laramie Project and the world premiere of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, and the urgent lessons these plays continue to offer today.

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BIG DATA CLUB TAKES AIM AT GUN VIOLENCE Concord Academy’s Big Data Club participated in the 2018 Teradata University Network Analytics Challenge in Las Vegas this fall. Not only was it the first high school team to compete in this global, university-level competition, but co-heads Lucas Ewing ’19 and Haley Wixom ’20 also took home the People’s Choice Award for best presentation.

In their statistical analysis, they recommended improving mental health support to reduce gun violence in schools.

W Read more and watch a video from the Teradata Analytics Universe Conference: www.concordacademy.org/big-data

Audrey Lin ’19 leads a workshop at The Umbrella Community Arts Center.

A Crafty Calling Audrey Lin ’19 launches Matting Change To transform a heap of waste into a sleeping mat for a young person experiencing homelessness takes between 600 and 700 plastic shopping bags and 15 to 20 hours of work. “It’s a labor of love,” says Audrey Lin ’19, who convinced others to take it up as part of her senior project, an effort she calls Matting Change. Throughout the year, she taught workshops in greater Boston on making plastic yarn (or “plarn”) from single-use plastic bags and using it to crochet lightweight, portable, bugfree, waterproof sleeping mats that a local overnight shelter distributes.

The project united her love of crafting with her passion for environmental advocacy. Lin is concerned about the increase in plastic packaging and plastic’s devastating effects on the oceans, where the toxins it absorbs spread up the food chain. “We have this belief that plastic can just be recycled and it’s fine, but that’s not really true,” she says. “It’s a really dirty business.” Lin is quick to detail problems with recycling, from the dangerous particles workers inhale to the contamination of batches, which end up in landfills. “It’s really important to take these plastic bags out of the trash and put them to a better purpose,” she says.

W LEARN MORE Visit www.concordacademy.org/lin to watch videos of Lin demonstrating her techniques and connect with Matting Change.

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Lucas Ewing ’19 and Haley Wixom ’20 in Las Vegas.

CA Wi T: Take CT R L In April, CA hosted its first Women in Tech conference for female and nonbinary high school and middle school students interested in computer science and technology. The full day included panels and workshops by professionals from MathWorks, Raytheon, and MIT as well as programs led by CA students.

W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/wit-2019

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CA M P U S VO I C E S

“Stand-up is anything you want it to be.

You’re reflecting society, but you’re also hopefully shaping society.”

CA students readying for a rally in support of the Green New Deal.

CA = CLIMATE ACTIVISTS

Comedian H A R I KO N DA B O LU (pictured left) gave CA students insight into his unique blend of personal storytelling and political humor.

W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/kondabolu

In February, CA students successfully lobbied the Concord, Mass., Select Board to adopt a symbolic resolution calling on the federal government to support the Green New Deal environmental legislation. Their success in Concord, which has made sustainability a priority, was a high point of a year of action and advocacy coordinated with young people around the country through Sunrise, a national youth movement to stop the climate crisis.

W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/green-new-deal

W I N T E R F E ST 2 0 1 9 This annual event gathers CA students during the dreariest days of winter for food and fun, from a clubs showcase to a talent show. Generous raffle prize donations from the CA and local Concord communities helped Winterfest raise more than $10,000 for financial aid this year.

“I really don’t think we can allow people to lie about what’s happening in the world.

It’s hard to do it, but I think we have to stand up for the truth.”

Founder of Groundwood Books PATSY A L DA N A ’6 4 (pictured right) spoke about migrant children at risk in her 2018–19 Davidson Lecture at CA.

W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/aldana

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HAIR! In celebrating ’60s counterculture, the rock musical Hair ushered in a new era of theater. CA’s winter mainstage production of the show, directed by Shelley Bolman, with music direction by Tai Oney and choreography by Amy Spencer, examined identity, community, global responsibility, resistance, and what it means to be a young person in a changing world.

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STUDENT ART SHOW The hallways of the Math and Arts Center showed off student art this winter. Photographs, top to bottom, by Ryan Mach ’20, Oliver Longo ’21, and Patricia Plunkett ’22.

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How do you serve a school community with distinction — even with honor and grace? You need look no further than Assistant Head and Academic Dean John Drew P’15 ’19, who will become the next head of the White Mountain School in fall 2019.

John has served Concord Academy for 21 years. Over his two decades, he has contributed greatly to CA as a teacher in the Science Department, a house faculty member, a coach, a department head, and, perhaps most importantly,

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A WORLD-CLASS MUSICIAN WHO’S SERIOUS ABOUT TEACHING as the parent of two wonderful children, Sophie ’15 and Nate ’19, with his wife, Gianna. Over these past two decades, he has enriched our community with his dedicated work ethic, his wise insight, his steadfast integrity, and his wry good humor.

John is a talented leader, and we are confident that he will serve the White Mountain community with the same commitment and character that he brought to CA. Set in the bucolic town of Bethlehem, N.H., bordering the White Mountain National Park, the White Mountain School is a wonderful independent school with a strong Episcopal heritage. I have no doubt that the school’s mission and community resonate profoundly with John, and I think he is going to be a terrific leader of this fine school. John has made CA and all he knew better. His contributions to us, and our gratitude in return, are immense. — Rick Hardy, head of school

ME E T C A’ S N E W C H O R A L D I R E C T O R An award-winning countertenor and Boston University graduate student, Tai Oney became CA’s choral director in September 2018. It’s a change for the charismatic opera singer, who has performed around the world and spent much of the last decade based in London. But the role allows him to combine his own artistic pursuits with his desire to give to others what a dynamic teacher once provided him.

Oney grew up singing gospel music in a band with his siblings and parents. He had a recording contract by age 12 but was dropped from the label after a management change at 16. His high school’s choral director helped him recover.

“She is the one that nurtured my musical talent and helped me learn to read music,” he says. “I get teary-eyed just thinking about how much she cared about me and saw the potential.”

That memory is partly what brought him to CA. “When I visited, I felt like the school put the mission into action,” says Oney, who also teaches music theory and serves as an academic and affinity group advisor. He relishes when students make connections between an academic concept and the music they enjoy.

In addition to his work at CA and his own career as a soloist, Oney is a second-year doctoral student in historical performance at BU. A typical weekday has the Maynard, Mass., resident dashing from a class to a performance to a rehearsal, and then heading into Boston for a private lesson of his own.

His enthusiasm for all these endeavors is apparent to his students. Samantha Morrison ’19, a co-head of Chorus, describes Oney as a serious musician who is also down-toearth, able to laugh at himself and with the students. As she puts it, “He knows how to rehearse the music in a way that everyone can learn from.”— Alison Lobron W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/oney

COMPOSER-IN-RESIDENCE The members of the Chameleon Chamber Players usually listen to unfamiliar pieces before playing them. But this year the new advanced ensemble had a chance to approach music differently, thanks to a gift of funding for a composer-in-residence.

That composer, Stefanie Lubkowski, included the students in creating a three-movement piece. She also taught individual lessons in composition, with a goal of helping young people see composition as a dynamic process. “Contemporary classical music by living composers is some of the most exciting material out there,” Lubkowski says.

W Read more: www.concordacademy.org/composer

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R E T I R E M E N TS

RICHARD COLTON Performing Arts Department In his 30th and final year as co-director of the Concord Academy dance program, Richard Colton is preparing for retirement in part by reading Japanese Zen poetry. One piece, in particular, a 13th-century work

by Muso Soseki called “Old Man in Retirement,” captured his imagination with the closing line, “I’m letting my white hair fall free.”

Colton’s hair is not yet white, but he hopes retirement gives him the sort of freedom it gave Soseki: the freedom to let creativity happen. The poet “permitted his imagination to blossom in his late years,” says Colton. “It is our imagination that asks us to break through the inertia of habit, and that is where creativity begins.”

An accomplished dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Colton will spend the beginning of his retirement on campus while his wife and fellow co-director, Amy Spencer, continues to teach. In two years, the couple plans to move to Hudson, N.Y., to be

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closer to New York City and their son, Jack Colton ’13.

As Colton reflects on three decades at Concord, he is proud of the program he and Spencer built, one grounded in the idea that even novice artists have something to contribute to the collaborative process of dance. But rather than thinking too much about the past or the future, he is caught up in this semester’s work. Colton says his favorite piece is always “the one we’re working on now.” Similarly, while he has helped launch the careers of a number of celebrated dance professionals, the students most on his mind are the ones he sees each day in the studio.

Colton cites another poet, W. S. Merwin, in describing his approach to teaching: “Merwin wrote, ‘The practice of the arts depends on a balance between convention and control, on the one hand, and spontaneity on the other. There is an inevitable tension between the two elements, and yet ideally the two seem to give life to each other and become one.’”

“I hope, above all, that the dance students at CA experienced this oneness in my classroom process of dance-making,” Colton says.

— Alison Lobron

LESLIE DAY Finance Office In Leslie Day’s 24 years at Concord Academy, the first three in development research and the majority in the Finance Office, she worked under four heads of school and three chief financial officers. She saw the campus improve and expand. And she fondly remembers the student trips to New Orleans,

London, and the nation’s capital that she chaperoned over the years. “The culture here has always been heartwarming to me,” she says.

In retirement, she and her husband are looking forward to spending time with their three grandchildren and in the house they’ve built in Hudson, N.H. It’s around the corner from an elementary school, where she hopes to volunteer. “Now that I’ll have the time,” she says, “I want to give back.”

ROSS ADAMS Performing Arts Department To warm up a room, CA’s music program administrator and jazz ensemble director Ross Adams is liberal with jokes. “What is Beethoven doing now?” he might ask, perfectly timing the beat before answering: “Decomposing.” He extends this approach to matters more profound.

“Life is the only school that gives you the test before the lesson,” he says of a concept central to his teaching philosophy.

“You learn by making mistakes,” Adams explains. It’s important to him to give students opportunities to take risks through real musical experiences, which is why he spends considerable time writing scores and arranging parts as he would for professional musicians.

When Adams came to Concord Academy in 1982, the Advanced Jazz Ensemble consisted of a clarinet, flute, and upright bass. Now with several trumpets, trombones, and saxophones, it’s a traditional stage band. For 10 years, Adams has codirected the highly regarded annual Music Café with his wife, CA vocal coach Diana Thompson.

Adams invests first in discovering who his students are as individuals.

“If we help them grow into who they

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Else, a duo with Jonathan Fagan ’11.

“Now I’ll get to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up,” he quips. — Heidi Koelz

are, they can ride the wild waves of life,” he says. Acknowledging that love of learning is an acquired taste, he creates an environment where learning happens effortlessly.

That involves caring, listening, and refraining from giving too much advice. It also involves being present. “That can be the hardest thing,” Adams says, though he has spent early mornings in the music rooms meditating with mathematics teacher George Larivee for more than 20 years.

Adams says he learned to teach from his colleagues, among them longtime English faculty member Janet Eisendrath. “I learned from her the ability to project love as an agent of change,” he says.

Retiring after 37 years at CA, Adams will continue as a private music instructor here, though he looks forward to focusing more on his own music. A versatile string player, he plays in local bands such as the Tom Nutile Big Band and Stoney’s Wicked Din, and Something

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MORGAN MEAD English Department Morgan Mead joined the CA English Department in 2006.

Previously he had taught English at independent schools in New York, California, and Cambridge, Mass., where he also served as the dean of faculty at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School.

“My CA students surprise me every day,” he says. “They delve deep into close reading and analyzing of everything from Anna Karenina to a graphic novel. They come to individual conferences excited to improve their writing. Given the opportunity, they will joyfully devote hours to completing an ungraded project.

They routinely call out a ‘thank you’ as they leave the room.”

Looking forward to less schedule and more spontaneity in his post-teaching life, Mead says he will most miss the kindness, humor, and daily inspiration provided by his colleagues, advisees, and students.

D E PA RT U R E

BRIAN P OT T E R- R AC I N E Science Department, Academic Office “CA is not the easiest place to leave,” says Brian Potter-Racine P’12, who taught physics for 22 years at Concord Academy. “It’s a place that teaches students how to think instead of what to think, and where a growth mindset is incredibly important to faculty as well.” Potter-Racine headed the Science Department for many years and most recently served as the assistant academic dean, overseeing the Academic Support Center.

This year, he and his husband made a long-considered move to a more tropical climate. In St. Petersburg, Fla., Potter-Racine is now teaching at physics and heading the mathematics department at Admiral Farragut Academy. “At CA, we encourage students to take risks,” PotterRacine says of the relocation.

“This was an opportunity for me to take my own advice.”

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AT H L E T I C S

Go Green!

Pursuing excellence in their sports, CA’s student-athletes cultivate life skills and values that they carry with them off the field and court. With several teams competing in the Eastern Independent League (EIL) and New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) championships, the CA athletics program carried on strong in the fall and winter seasons.

BY THE NUMBERS

1st

NEPSAC championship for the boys varsity cross-country team

5th

NEPSAC championship for CA

6th

NEPSAC tournament bid for boys varsity soccer in the last seven years

Running as One What a season boys varsity cross-country had! The undefeated team defended its home course at Great Brook State Park to capture the EIL trophy, then finished first in a field of 24 of the region’s strongest teams at the NEPSAC championship meet, earning a perfect record.

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S K I P H OTOS : A N N A D O R M I TZ E R ’20 ; VO L L E Y BA L L P H OTOS : C O L E + K I E R A; C ROSS - C O U N T RY P H OTOS : K R I ST I E G I L LO O LY

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Back on the Mat

Well Matched

After not having enough wrestlers to field a team last year, coed varsity wrestling rebounded under the leadership of new head coach Zach Bloom ’14. The team of 12 finished fourth in the EIL this winter, earned a point in the Battle of Lexington and Concord (see page 19), and sent two qualifying wrestlers to the NEPSAC tournament.

The girls and boys varsity squash teams represented CA

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well at the NEPSAC championships. On the strength of their regular-season record, the girls competed in the Class B tournament for the second consecutive year against much larger schools with strong programs. The boys competed well at the Class C tournament, narrowly missing the podium.

Playing with Pride Following a second-place finish in the EIL, the boys

varsity soccer team secured its sixth NEPSAC tournament bid in the last seven years, advancing to the semifinals after a 4–0 quarterfinal win.

Downhill Edge

X Visit CA’s website for spring athletics highlights: www.concordacademy.org/athletics

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Though the winter was low on snow, the varsity Alpine ski teams had another successful season. The girls and boys respectively brought home second- and third-place EIL trophies. Both teams represented CA with pride in the NEPSAC championships, the girls earning fourth- and fifth-place finishes and the boys two fifthplace finishes, at Connecticut’s Sundown Mountain.

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ST U D E N T-AT H L E T E S

Going the Distance These NEPSAC champions are in it for the long run In fall 2018, the undefeated CA boys cross-country team won its first-ever New England Prep School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) championship, along with the title for the Eastern Independent League. The victories were the result of talent and hard work, but also what the three senior co-captains — Andreas Byamana ’19, Jason He ’19, and Karl Hick ’19 — describe as a remarkable team spirit. They recently gathered for lunch to reflect on the season and their hopes for the program’s future.

What do you think made the 2018 season so successful?

Andreas: Team dedication was a huge

part of our success. Athletically, we also had a really strong team. Normally, we have a strong top two or three runners, but this year we had a great top seven.

Your coach credits you and the other runners with creating a really positive atmosphere in which hard work and dedication could flourish. How did the leadership of the team work?

The boys varsity cross-country team

Karl: Somewhat unconsciously, we

split into different roles. I’d be the cheerful one! [He laughs.]

Jason: The freshmen and sophomores

did really well.

Andreas: Jason and I were a lot

Karl: We had a great group of

freshmen!

more focused on getting things done athletically. We were probably more focused on winning.

Andreas: Tyler McGarry ’22 was a big

Jason: We would talk to the new

stand-out. He’s such a good athlete...

runners a lot to make sure they were doing well and help them with their running.

Karl: ...and he really improved over the

amazing. I think a legacy will definitely be built. Or a dynasty — that’s what we like to call it.

Jason: I feel like more students who

like running are choosing CA. A lot of the freshmen are coming in with running experience. I think it would be good if we got known as a school that’s good for running.

season, too.

Andreas: Also, Jonathan Waldron is

the best coach I’ve had in any sport.

The reason CA’s had so much success is J-Wal, 1,000 percent. We’re lucky to have him.

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What do you predict for the team next year?

Karl: I’m going to miss the team for sure, but I know we are leaving it in good hands.

Andreas: It’s going to be even better.

We have such a good varsity team.

Our No. 1 runner, Reza Eshghi ’20, is fantastic. Our coaching staff is

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CA fall team captains with the Chandler Bowl.

C H A N D L E R B OW L In October, CA narrowly prevailed against Pingree School on home turf, retaining the Chandler Bowl for the third year in a row. Five hours of competition over nine different games yielded wins from four teams from each school. As determined by the Chandler Bowl rules, a tie in the girls JV soccer game tipped the overall contest in favor of CA, the school defending the bowl. This campuswide event fired up CA fans with community spirit, and the Chandler Bowl for Changing Lives raised over $2,000 for Samaritans, a suicide-prevention hotline.

FIELD NOTE

“This year’s team was committed to constant improvement and demonstrated uncommon focus and resolve. At NEPSACs, the team wasn’t thinking about a championship, only about running their best on that day, and they did.”

J O N AT H A N WA L D RO N , cross-country coach

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Exuberant fans celebrate CA’s first Battle win in six years.

B ATT L E O F L E X I N G TO N A N D C O N C ORD In January’s Battle of Lexington and Concord at Lexington Christian Academy, CA’s varsity wrestling, girls JV basketball, and boys varsity basketball teams earned the three victories needed to bring home the Red Drum for the first time since 2013. After the boys varsity basketball team clinched the contest in a nail-biter of a game, an exuberant CA fan section poured onto the court to celebrate.

P H OTOS : K R I ST I E G I L LO O LY, C O L E + K I E R A

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In this secular age, pilgrimage is on the rise.

CA alumnae/i pilgrims share the views that open up along the way.

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A trail along the Camino de Santiago beckons on a misty spring morning.

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THE MODERN P I LG R I M’S → WAY T E N YE A R S A GO , when Lindsay Soutter Boyer ’76 visited Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, with her family, her niece didn’t believe it was a pilgrimage site — it seemed an anachronism — until they saw the throngs at the cathedral. “She saw how alive it was,” Boyer says.

Over the last decade, the number of pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago has more than doubled; since the mid-1980s, it’s risen over a hundredfold.

Last year alone, more than 327,000 traveled this route. When Boyer’s family visited, Americans made up less than 2 percent of Camino pilgrims; now they account for nearly 6 percent.

Why might pilgrimage be gaining in popularity among Americans? Boyer, a spiritual director who works with individuals who are uncomfortable with organized religion, has some theories.

“People have a deep need for ritual that is not always met in our culture,” she says. “There’s a hunger to connect with a sense of aliveness and be around others who are searching for meaning.”

Not all pilgrims traverse established routes.

Some blaze new trails. Some walk; others drive.

Many are not religious. Boyer counts as pilgrimages trips she and her husband, Markley Boyer ’78, take to see the artworks they fell in love with as CA students in Janet Eisendrath’s art history class.

While her definition is welcomingly broad, she offers insight into some of the essential elements of pilgrimage. With her as a guide, we’ll consider them in turn.

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SU R P R I S E

Boyer: What sets pilgrimage apart is that it’s something people are longing for, yearning toward, preparing themselves for.

Boyer: You surrender your usual controlling attitude and expectations, the routine that locks you into certain ways of being.

By going, you’re saying you’re ready to be changed.

Laura Foley ’75 calls her 500-mile pilgrimage last spring on the Camino de Santiago “inevitable.” Her wife, a marathoner, comes from Madrid and had wanted to do it all her life. Foley, a decade older, worried about keeping up with her.

Though they planned extensively — the right clothing kept her from getting even one blister — as she had feared, knee pain plagued her from the outset. Halfway through, after contracting a stomach bug, she began sending her overnight pack ahead.

“In everything, you have to negotiate with the body,” Foley says. “That started to help.” So too, perhaps, did the women in a small chapel who prayed for her recovery. “I have no Catholic beliefs,” she says, “but I did feel something.” After 250 miles, her knee stopped hurting.

Foley is a Buddhist practitioner of over 15 years. In walking, she found a state of flow. Still, she was surprised by how the pilgrimage affected her.

“There were so many awful days that consisted of one ordeal after another that I didn’t expect to feel so completely fulfilled by it,” she says. “As soon as we were done, I missed it.

Ending it was really hard. It took a month for me to be all right not being on pilgrimage.”

A poet, Foley is writing a collection about her experience. She and her wife are planning a walk in Portugal in June and a return to the Camino in the fall.

Foley says, “It makes me feel less restless in the rest of my life, knowing it’s coming up.”

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Visit www.concordacademy.org/ pilgrimage to learn about CA faculty and student pilgrimage experiences.

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Unlike Foley, Sophronia Camp ’67 didn’t have long to prepare for her first pilgrimage. Burned out from working with a volunteer ministry for the homeless, she wanted to clear her head. Romanesque art and architecture drew her — like the Boyers, she had developed that love at CA. Within two months of attending an art historian’s talk on the Camino 18 years ago, she set out on her sixweek journey.

“You’re not doing anything but walking, just following the arrows,” Camp says. “You’re not thinking about the destination. You’re in the present.” Her spiritual pilgrimage became a way of life. She has now walked the Camino seven times, both alone and with friends and family, and has self-published two books on different routes. She and her husband will return this fall.

An Episcopalian, Camp wears around her neck a little wooden box filled with written prayer requests from friends. She prays for them in clusters, by topic. “People feel alone and isolated when they’re in trouble,” she says. “Realizing others share their struggles is so comforting. I like the collective aspect of prayer that links people.”

Singing on the trail lifts her spirits, as do fellow pilgrims. “The way you get to know people is different,” she says. “No one cares about your job.

You don’t have to identify yourself as a wife or a mother. Everyone is out there for their own growth.”

On her third pilgrimage, she offered a foot rub to a disagreeable Brazilian man and learned his son had died in a motorcycle accident. He was struggling to walk in his memory. Along the

way, “he got more open and relaxed,” she says. He was one of the last people she saw as she was heading to the airport. He laughed and gave her a thumbs-up.

“People take care of each other in lovely ways, but there’s no obligation,” she says. “You’re given license to have your own experience, and there aren’t expectations. It’s full of surprises.”

planned to require no single-use plastics. “We were all looking for a really hard expedition,” he says, but he and expedition-mates communicated so poorly with each other that they only narrowly avoided a fatal accident.

Walker says the experience taught him a lot. “I thrive in challenging conditions, but it needs to be in the context of a healthy respect for nature,” he says. On his next personal journey, he hopes to join up with his mother in the Arctic.

ORDEAL

Clockwise from top: Fannie Watkinson ’08 overlooking Thousand Island Lake along California’s John Muir Trail. Watkinson on her final day on the trail. Laura Foley ’75 (right) and her wife, Clara Giménez, during their 500-mile walk along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Eli Walker ’09 (in red) and his husband, Sage Walker, lining their fully loaded expedition canoe upriver while traversing the Ungava Peninsula in the Canadian wilderness.

Walker at age 19, thru-hiking the Appalachian trail alone during a gap year before college.

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FO C U S

Boyer: Even people without an understanding of themselves as spiritual might still need a transformational ordeal to shake them out of their usual life.

Boyer: On a pilgrimage, you’ve readied yourself to be opened in some way. You’re gestating something new in yourself.

Challenge is what appeals to Eli Walker ’09. Though he’s not religious, “there

If environmental scientist Frances Bothfeld ’08 has sought anything

is something very spiritual about being outside,” he says. “There are a lot of things outside of my control.”

An Outward Bound instructor, Walker has made a career of long wilderness excursions. “It’s a hard job, and I’ve always said that I’ll only continue with it as long as I’m enjoying it and willing to take on the role of student in challenging situations,” he says.

In a senior chapel at CA, Walker came out as trans, but didn’t make plans to change his name until years later. Growing up in Maine, Walker dreamt of thru-hiking the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail, though his mother persuaded him to wait for a gap year before college. In the mountains, in the absence of any gendered spaces, he had a realization that was a first step to transitioning. “It wasn’t a shock to me that I wanted to work outdoors,” Walker says, “but I realized while I was walking that I needed to work outdoors.”

A whitewater canoer, Walker recently returned from the most difficult excursion of his life: a 46-day, mostly upriver journey in an uninhabited part of Quebec, exhaustively

on her journeys, it’s simplicity. She vividly recalls reading Walden for CA English teacher Sandy Stott’s Thoreau class, so near Walden Pond.

As often as she can, she has found her own way to live with only the essentials, in the backcountry.

During a year off from college, she worked as a ranger on the Pacific Crest Trail, studied in Tahiti, traveled in Patagonia and Peru, and conducted glaciology research in Alaska. She spent the year before graduate school hiking trails across New Zealand and Europe. All her gear fit into a 40-liter pack.

“Once you’re out on a trail, there’s no choice about entertainment,” she says. “You’ve got three things on your mind: staying alive, being comfortable, and being happy. And you know exactly what order those come in.”

Bothfeld calls these treks “typetwo fun” — fun, that is, in hindsight.

Hiking through a snowstorm or going days without food, she says, “shifts your concept of adversity and lets you know what you’re capable of.”

It shifts her relationship to technology, too. She says, “When I get back

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You think it begins and ends at certain

from a trip, it’s so easy to get sucked into my phone.”

Bothfeld’s classmate Fannie Watkinson ’08 considers herself spiritual but not religious. “Exercise and nature are my release points,” she says.

In April 2017, she quit her management position at Coursera, an educational software company in Silicon Valley, to travel and get her bearings.

She says, “I needed to be away from other voices telling me how I could and should be.”

The capstone to a summer of adventuring was hiking the John Muir Trail in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, which winds 210 miles through national parks from Yosemite to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States. She joined a friend who, unlike her, had minimal wilderness experience, and they ambitiously set out to finish the trail within two weeks.

In lightning and hail storms on 12,000-foot passes, Watkinson needed strength and clarity. When severe stomach pain hobbled her friend for days, she assumed the physical burden of his gear and the emotional burden of making decisions. “It was very scary to carry that weight for both of us, but I did and we got through it,” she says.

“Over and over on that trail and on this life journey, I’ve learned I’m a lot more resilient than I give myself credit for.”

COMMUNITY

Boyer: When you’re ready to listen to people in a different way, the things they say can feel very significant.

Kristine Ball ’75 has hiked around the

world, but it was the pull of a particular country that made her a pilgrim. For a year and a half after graduating from Williams College, she taught English in Japan, but afterward let her passion for the culture languish. Three years ago, to rekindle that spark, she traveled to Japan for a two-week language

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dates, but half of the point is to discover that what you were looking for wasn’t really what you wanted, or that you found it but not completely.

The search has to continue beyond the space and time that limit the journey.

SU SA N K E M B L E W E ST ’ 6 2

immersion class. After she made a brief pilgrimage with her daughter along the Kumano Kodo, she vowed she’d return to Japan every year.

The pilgrimage she made in spring 2017, the Shikoku, is traditionally done on foot, though most pilgrims now travel by car or bus. Ball walked the 750-mile circle that links 88 Buddhist temples in one seven-week journey. Unlike Spain’s Camino, most of the Shikoku is paved. “Some of the walk is not idyllic,” Ball says. “But for all of the sections of the pilgrimage you spend walking along highways, breathing in exhaust, there are many others where you’re in the mountains by yourself with beautiful views of cherry blossoms and the sea.”

Ball had quit her job to train, and the Shikoku gave her a physical challenge as well as time to herself, to live minute-to-minute. “When you have worked all your life, when you have a family, a house, community responsibilities, it is such freedom,” she said.

“The only decision to make every morning is to walk or not.”

Defying her expectations, her pilgrimage wasn’t meditative; the people she met along the way made the deepest impression. Ball is not a Buddhist, but she observed the Buddhist value of compassion in locals who ran out to give her beautifully wrapped tomatoes, candies, or statues of saints. “Their warmth and friendliness really struck

me,” she says. “They’d walk for miles just to show me to the next place. It really makes you believe in the goodness of humanity.”

Now when she travels or meets people from other cultures, it’s easier for her to imagine how to be helpful with whatever she has. “I know how enriching that is for someone else,” she says.

I N T EG R AT I O N

Boyer: After a pilgrimage, it takes a while to digest and integrate it, and you might never finish doing that.

Facing page: Kristine Ball ’75 outside of the Okuboji Temple, the final of 88 temples along a circular, 750-mile pilgrimage on the island of Shikoku, Japan. Getting ready to walk to the first temple to complete the circle, she was exhausted but shared the accomplishment with fellow pilgrims. Left: Lindsay Soutter Boyer ’76 meditating at one of the temples she visited as part of a 2004 pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu, India.

suffering opened further during her pilgrimage. She’s still on it, in a sense.

“There are no real boundaries, except in the intensity of being apart from distraction and everyday life,” West says. “You think it begins and ends at certain dates, but half of the point is to discover that what you were looking for wasn’t really what you wanted, or that you found it but not completely.

The search has to continue beyond the space and time that limit the journey.”

After her husband died a few years ago, Susan Kemble West ’62 reluctantly joined members of her Episcopalian Bible study group on a trip to Jerusalem. “I’m not a good traveler at all,” she says. “My solution was taking my daughter with me.” Though her daughter went as a tourist, West traveled as a pilgrim.

“I thought it would make a huge difference to be in the physical presence of where the events in the Bible took place,” she says, to walk the Stations of the Cross before dawn and feel the ruts in the stones from Roman chariot

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wheels. Despite the political turmoil in the city and the presence of armed Israeli soldiers, West reacted strongly at certain Holy Land sites, even the nativity scene. “You can say in your thinking brain, ‘This is silly. No one knows exactly where this was,’ but it didn’t make a difference,” she says. “You see the tears of pilgrims from all over the world, and you’re affected as much by the beauty and emotions of other people as by the place itself.”

Involved in supporting refugees, immigrants, and prisoners, the former nurse says her desire to alleviate

LO N G I N G FO R P I LG R I M AG E Boyer advises anyone interested in making a pilgrimage to find one right for them — whether it’s from a familiar or unfamiliar faith tradition or none at all. Her most overt pilgrimages have been in India. “In the West, we keep sacredness in boxes, but all of India is alive with devotion,” she says. She describes strong physical experiences of being in “profoundly sacred” Hindu temples. “They’ve created environments where you can allow yourself to be different than you are in any other place in your life,” she says.

In those temples, she made offerings to a deity. “It’s not because the deity needs it but to create an opening in yourself so that you can receive something,” she says. “It opens you to transformation.”

For people who aren’t able to commit to a long journey but who nevertheless long to go on a pilgrimage, Boyer has advice: “Make a special time in your life — daily, weekly — to be with that longing in a way that is right for you. Make space for fantasy, to imagine what the possibilities could be.

Often people need to do what doesn’t seem to make sense. Once you start following your intuition, the next step will appear.”

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America’s Neutral Ground?

Unlike other educational institutions, museums inspire public trust across the political spectrum. What responsibilities do they have in return?

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useums may be more important than ever. Not only has their number doubled in the United States over the past few decades, but at a time when bias so often overpowers facts, an overwhelming majority of Americans trust museums as sources of credible information. That’s in striking contrast to the nearly two-thirds of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, who think the country’s higher education system is headed in the wrong direction. Americans see so much value in museums that almost all — from 93 to 97 percent across political affiliations, according to the American Alliance of Museums — want their tax dollars to support them. Why are these institutions so widely endorsed, and what are their obligations, given that trust?

Betty Mugar Eveillard ’65, chair of the board of trustees of the Frick Collection in New York, sees many reasons museums continue to inspire confidence. Foremost is authenticity.

Eveillard loved museums even as a child and recalls the powerful experience of seeing in person the master works she’d known from books. “I see that awe in visitors to the Frick,” she says. “They’re looking at the history of human effort and the human search for beauty.”

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE This spring, CA students in a U.S. history course learned about preparing museum exhibitions and gave gallery talks at the Concord Museum.

W Read more about their partnership with the museum: www.concordacademy.org/museum

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Visitors enjoy the Frick Collection.

Weber has been closely following the Museums Are Not Neutral movement, which is sparking debate at museum conferences. “While we want to preserve public trust, museums have never been and can’t be neutral,” she says.

She recently challenged audiences with an exhibition about guns. “We’re able to do things that you can’t see at a major art museum,” she says. The show was well-received, and around 350 visitors attended a panel discussion about gun violence.

“It was an amazing turnout,” Weber says. “To have that many be part of the conversation — we made a difference.”

Weber sees many ways for museums to engage with topical art being made today. “We create a space where people can have important conversations,” she says. “Museums have the potential to be places where positive change can happen.”

Eveillard is also a trustee of the Kress Foundation, which carries out the vision of Samuel Kress, one of the founding benefactors of the National Gallery of Art. A collector of drawings who worked as an investment banker on Wall Street, hile some museum leaders espouse instituEveillard sees collector museums as unique institutions cretional objectivity, others question whether ated from individual wealth and individual taste — private neutrality is even possible. As to whether it’s desirable, public opinion offers some treasures transformed into public gifts.

Elizabeth Smith ’75, who spent her curatorial career in guidance. A 2017 National Awareness, contemporary art museums and now leads the Helen Attitudes, and Usage study conducted by IMPACTS Research Frankenthaler Foundation, says objectivity is critical to muse& Development showed that approximately 78 percent of ums’ credibility. “People go expecting they will have experiAmericans consider museums highly credible sources of inforences that have been shaped by expert, informed decisions in mation, 11 percentage points higher than newspapers and contexts free from conflicts of interest,” she adds.

27 percentage points higher than federal agencies. Nearly as many — roughly 74 percent — believe That’s not to say museums are free from controversy. “We’re seeing a lot of instimuseums should recommend action. That’s tutional critique these days throughout not necessarily a call to politicization, but as our culture, and arts organizations are not museums are both believed and looked to Top: Mastodon skeleton immune,” Smith says. She cites protest for direction, what are their responsibilities? sculpture, created by Ben Neiditz in conjunction with the over cultural appropriation at the Whitney For anthropology museums, presenting exhibition Jefferson, Science, Biennial in 2017 in response to the artist diverse perspectives is a guiding rationale. and Exploration. American Philosophical Society Museum, Polly Hubbard ’83, the director of K–12 Dana Schutz’s paintings of Emmett Till’s 2015. Bottom right: Listening open coffin. “But museums have unique education with the Peabody Museum of to the Native American Poets’ Playlist at Harvard’s Peabody opportunities to engage all the thorny Archeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Museum. issues,” Smith says. “It’s what they’re set Semitic Museum, both part of the Harvard up to do.”

Museums of Science and Culture, develops Contemporary art museums fill that school programs, curricula, and visitor experiences. She is working, for example, with role particularly well in partnership with artists. When Smith was chief curator at the Museum of African and Caribbean teens from a Somerville, Mass., phoContemporary Art Chicago, the British artist Jeremy Deller tography club to gauge their responses to a planned exhibit of the first photographic images of enslaved people in America. brought in the bombed shell of a car from Iraq to start conversations about the Iraq War between audiences and experts Most of the learners Hubbard engages are young. “Valuing of many kinds. “It was a brilliant use of an object as a basis curiosity and continual questioning — that’s what we try to for discourse and a great example of how museums perform model for kids,” she says.

To enhance the Peabody’s Native American exhibits, a public service,” Smith says. she recently partnered with the Harvard University Native “Peace, and a little social awareness” are what Carey Mack American Program and invited a predominantly native review Weber ’79, director of the Fairfield University Art Museum committee to curate an audio playlist of poems read by their in Connecticut, says people seek at museums. Their integindigenous authors. “I wanted poetry by contemporary writrity, in her view, rests heavily on museum educators. “Their ers to help people experience something more emotional, programs are carefully crafted and engaging,” she says. “In the relationship between the public and the art, they’re interto have a different kind of conversation with the history in mediaries with an amazing personal touch.” this space,” Hubbard says. She was heartened by visitors’

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responses. “People stayed longer, they looked more carefully,” she said. “It brought people to a much more complex and complicated understanding about contemporary Native American experiences.”

Hubbard points out that since 1990, museums have been subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and are thus not neutral places but rather sites of negotiation with native communities. By watching the Peabody’s repatriation department, which works directly with native nations to return or arrange continued care for culturally important objects, Hubbard has learned a great deal about indigenous people’s feelings for museums. “They range from anger and grief to respect and gratefulness that the objects have been conserved and cared for,” she says.

Archeology and history museums have been engaging in this politicized conversation for 30 years, adding to their knowledge about their collections and also adjusting their storage practices. At the Peabody, special handling instructions now indicate who may touch certain items, for example, or what direction objects must face, to honor native understandings of artifacts as living things.

Hubbard thinks it’s precisely by presenting multiple voices — by being places, she says, “where you don’t get assaulted with an opinion” — that museums earn their authority.

Merrill Mason ’67, who directs the American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum in Philadelphia, says the meaning of public trust is changing. “In the hallowed halls built at the turn of the century, you knew you were supposed to go in without talking or touching,” she says. “Now people are challenging that expectation. But our Top to bottom: responsibility remains the same: telling the Betty Eveillard ’65, Carey Mack truth as shown in historical documents.”

Weber ’79, A cultural shift reshaped the APS, once an Merrill Mason ’67 exclusive society, leading to the creation of the museum in 2001 and a curatorial training program in 2013. “There’s been more interest in opening up the APS’s treasures to the public,” Mason says of the collection, which includes Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence and a moon-landing transcript annotated by Neil Armstrong.

Mason hasn’t shied away from contentious topics. Prior to a 2010 exhibition on Charles Darwin, she learned from a Pew Research Center poll that around 40 percent of Americans don’t believe in evolution. Visitors were invited to comment on the exhibition, which presented other theories of life from Darwin’s time and his correspondence following his Beagle voyage. “It was pretty amazing some of the things people wrote,” Mason says. “One child posted, ‘If my parents knew I was here, they’d kill me.’”

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While such reactions testify to how polarized America is, Mason grounds her approach in founder Benjamin Franklin’s desire for the APS to promote useful knowledge. “And useful knowledge,” she says, “is fact-based.”

In Massachusetts, the Concord Museum’s commitment to primary materials and living history inspired Anna Winter Rasmussen and Neil Rasmussen P’10 ’15 to make a leadership gift in support of education. “Especially today, when no one seems to be able to argue based on facts, it’s very important to have a common understanding of our past that will allow us to agree on the future,” Neil says.

“It’s critical now to do what we can to augment our academic institutions,” adds Anna, who has been involved with the Concord Museum since 1992 and has served on its board of governors since 2000. “People don’t perceive bias as readily in museums as they do in classrooms, too often attributing subjectivity to a teacher’s personality or motivation. Museums are positioned to place true and tangible materials before your eyes — and often in your hands.”

In the Concord Museum’s new Anna and Neil Rasmussen Education Center, school groups from Lawrence and Lowell, Mass., grind herbs with a mortar and pestle in the historical kitchen; they pretend to be British soldiers, colonists, or enslaved people, then reverse their roles.

While the Rasmussens are concerned with preserving the rare and profound level of public agreement on the value of museums, they acknowledge times have changed these institutions of knowledge for the better. “They’re actually more factual and neutral than ever,” Neil says, recalling exhibits from his childhood that glorified Christopher Columbus.

“Now we put a spotlight on the mistakes that were in our textbooks.”

They celebrate the Concord Museum’s commitment to challenging simplistic narratives, which is also a promise not to vilify any perspective. “What museums teach is knowledge, insight, tolerance, and understanding,” Anna says. “This is us — all our beautiful and not-so-beautiful sides.”

P H OTO C O U RT E SY O F P E A B O DY M U S E U M O F A RC H A EO LO GY & E T H N O LO GY, P R E S I D E N T A N D F E L LOWS O F H A RVA R D C O L L EG E

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What Does Experiential Equity Look Like?

Concord Academy invests in students who go on to make meaningful contributions not only on this campus but out in the world.

For students receiving financial aid, having the same opportunities as the rest of their classmates to learn, travel, experiment, and collaborate outside of the classroom makes a real difference. That’s why experiential equity is a hallmark of the school’s financial aid approach. Part of creating an inclusive community is ensuring that everyone has access to the same experiences — that as promising young people mature into leaders, their paths are determined by passion, not financial obligation.

CA’s comprehensive approach to financial aid is rare. This commitment to ensuring that all students get to make the most of their CA education is expensive, but it is guided by the school’s values and aspirations.

“Thanks to CA’s incredibly generous financial aid, I’ve been able to take voice lessons, join a film class, study in Beijing, travel to Hong Kong, participate in cultural excursions to Boston, and so much more. Experiential equity means that no one should ever feel forced out of an opportunity because they can’t afford it, and I truly value that about CA.” VA N C E WHIT E ’19 , B OARD I N G STU D EN T, DA N CER, MA N DAR I N S P EA KER

“CA focuses on giving all students access to a similar experience. Being able to buy food or coffee with friends lets me participate in social life, and financial aid has helped me pay for violin strings, running shoes, a class ring, even Ubers back from rehearsals and concerts in Boston so I can make curfew.”

S O P H I A CANNIZ Z AR O ’19, BOA RD I N G STU D EN T, PERFO RM ER , P O ET

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ROAD B A Y STUD I didn’t know before what a difference good running shoes make.

The right Shoes

Equipment for team sports

IN 2018–19, 100 FAMILIES,

1 in 4, received financial assistance, and the average aid package was

Life-changing experiences

Boo ks for cla sse s

Individual music lessons

$46,125

Showing school pride Violin strings

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Left to right: Daniel Kramarsky ’79, Stephen Kramarsky ’85, and Lucy Davison ’52

ALUMNAE/I GENEROSITY Daniel Kramarsky ’79 and Stephen Kramarsky ’85 Brothers Daniel Kramarsky ’79 and Stephen Kramarsky ’85 attribute their lifelong love of learning to Concord Academy. Dan and Steve conduct their philanthropy independently, yet both have the same priority: CA’s people.

Dan values CA’s pillar of common trust.

“Real learning can only happen when you trust, and I was trusted by all members of the CA community,” he says. Dan has made philanthropic investments to support both the Jacob A. Dresden Head of School Endowed Chair and the Centennial Campaign.

Steve says he gives to help “preserve the character and enhance the diversity” of the school. He has supported the Wilcox Leadership Fund, the Campaign for CA in the early 2000s, and the Financial Aid Endowment.

Dan and Steve grew up in New York City, two of four children in the Kramarsky family. In contrast to their middle school experiences, Steve says CA “was supportive of every single different kind of kid — it was always possible to find a place where you fit.”

Dan says, “The faculty and staff cared about me as a human being, offering trust and providing an environment where I had room to learn and grow.” Dan recalls that he, in particular, had a lot of growing to do.

At CA, “they began teaching me how to be a human being,” he says.

Dan earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in early childhood and elementary education from Bank Street College of Education. Having spent his professional life in education, he proudly says, “CA is one of the best institutions of learning that I’ve been associated with in any form.”

He is president of the House of Study, which he describes as a “foundation and think tank exploring new horizons in professional development for schools and senior educators.”

Steve earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Cornell University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Along with two other attorneys, Steve established Dewey Pegno & Kramarsky LLP, a litigation firm in New York City. He traces his love of language and literature to CA. “My CA teachers were humans — they taught up to me and were perhaps the most important part of my experience.”

Today, Dan and Steve both work and live in New York City with their families. They have built distinctly different lives and careers, yet they use almost the exact same words to describe why they support and believe in CA to this day: “There is no place with better people — faculty, staff, administrators, and students — than CA.”— Abigail Jenney

Lucy Davison ’52 To this day, Lucy Faulkner Davison ’52 lives by the knowledge, life lessons, and values she learned as a student at Concord Academy. One example: “Do what is right and be true to ourselves at all times.”

Davison says this is why she gives loyally to the CA Annual Fund, and why she has included the school in her estate plans: “Because it is right.”

When she was 4 years old, Davison’s family moved to Lexington, Mass. Her father, George Faulkner, was a musician and educator who spent most of his career as the head of the South End Music School. Davison’s mother taught at both the Fenn School and Nashoba Brooks. Throughout her childhood, knowledge — both scholarly and cultural — was a priority in Davison’s family, and at CA she found a school with values that mirrored her own.

Davison began attending CA in eighth grade and immediately took to the community under the leadership of J. Josephine

Tucker and Elizabeth Hall. Mrs. Hall, in particular, had a significant influence on Davison, who describes her as a “down-to-earth” leader who used all kinds of opportunities — discipline included — to teach the girls lessons about life. In fact, in 11th grade, Davison was asked to leave CA for the remainder of the year for disciplinary reasons, which greatly upset her parents. Remarkably, Mrs. Hall, understanding how much the school meant to Davison, saved a place for her in the senior class, even paying for her tuition!

Davison readily admits, “Being a teenager was difficult and my path wasn’t smooth, but CA was always there for me.”

After graduating in 1952, Davison attended Wheelock College in Boston and regularly sent Mrs. Hall money to repay her kindness, and her CA tuition. After college, Davison took a first-grade teaching position in Bradford, N.H., and while living there, met and eventually married her husband, Shelly Davison. Together they owned and operated a dairy farm, and Davison reflects fondly on tending the livestock in the early mornings and teaching during the day.

Davison currently resides in Concord, N.H., where she sings in her church choir and spends time with neighbors, friends, and family. She lights up when talking about her years at Concord Academy, and says that in the end, “I always felt loved, and that is what matters the most.” — Abigail Jenney

U P DAT E

CA HOUSES CENTER STUDENT LIFE The recently expanded common rooms in Bradford, Wheeler, Admadjaja, and Phelps houses have also been enlivened.

With kitchens tailored to student needs and enough space for all house residents to comfortably gather at once, and even invite neighbors for evening cookie-baking sessions, they’re getting a lot of use. From sushi making to game nights to French club dinners, they’re bringing boarding and day students together as well.

The final phase of the CA Houses campaign initiative is nearing completion. The finishing touches will be put on the new Haines-Hobson shared common room this summer, in time to welcome students for the 2019–20 school year. See more photos from the common rooms: www.concordacademy.org/common-rooms

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Singing Her Story A singer-songwriter finds inspiration in a life-threatening condition

Chloe Temtchine ’01 works the oxygen tank she depends on into her public image, and she has fun doing it.

g WATCH See Temtchine performing: www. concordacademy.org/ temtchine

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After her guitarist once called Chloe Temtchine ’01 20 minutes before a show to say he wasn’t feeling well enough to perform, the singer-songwriter made a personal pledge. “From that day on, I vowed to myself, I’d know how to play every instrument so I’d never have to be reliant on another musician,” Temtchine says.

And she did. Still, there is one constant companion Temtchine cannot perform without: her oxygen tank. Diagnosed in 2013 with a lifethreatening form of pulmonary hypertension, Temtchine is dependent on supplementary oxygen 24 hours a day.

The sight of a young woman singing on stage with a breathing tube in her nose is a shock to some audiences at first, and Temtchine understands this.

There was a time when she herself couldn’t imagine performing while attached to her life-sustaining oxygen tank. But these days she incorporates

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the tank — which she has named Steve Martin — into her act, dressing it in a tie and using its metal sides as a percussion instrument. She even created a YouTube parody of a Taylor Swift love song in praise of it.

CA classmates might remember Temtchine for her role as Dorothy in The Wiz or for the song she wrote and performed in her chapel talk, paying tribute to her CA teachers and peers. After graduation, she spent two years at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. In 2009, she released her first album, Between Day & Dream. But then health problems began to overtake her life. She suffered from coughing fits, which hampered her performances, and shortness of breath that made her nearly immobile.

Several years of bewildering misdiagnoses followed.

After a severe medical emergency in 2013, she was diagnosed with pulmonary veno-occlusive disease and told she might have only days to live.

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“The diagnosis was as shocking as it could possibly be,” Temtchine recalls. “I finally went home from the hospital because the doctors said there was nothing they could do for me. Their future for me was no future. So I had to create my own future and believe it in even though they said it didn’t exist.”

Determined to set her own path to wellness, Temtchine developed for herself five principles of health: exercise, mindset, nutritional lifestyle, family and friends, and creative expression.

That last principle was the genesis of her next album, Be Brave, released in 2015. “I really believe that album saved me,” Temtchine says.

“I had so much to say, and the easiest way for me to say it was through music. I was so lost.

I wrote those songs for myself as a message of hope. And it turns out if you write for yourself, what you write has a chance of resonating with other people.”

The stylish, talented, fit young singer attached to an oxygen tank has had a ripple effect. “I learned that there are a lot of kids who should be on oxygen but resist it because of the way it looks,” Temtchine says. “So I made it my goal to make oxygen cool. And soon I was getting emails saying that because I’m on stage with an oxygen tank, a kid who gave up hope has found hope again, is wearing her oxygen to school, wants to be a singer.”

Now living with her partner in Los Angeles, Temtchine is preparing to release her fourth album later this year and is working on a documentary about pulmonary hypertension. She has recently embarked on a project called the Smile Tour, visiting and performing for chronically ill patients at children’s hospitals all over the country, and she has started a foundation to generate funding for these endeavors. She also spreads the message of her five principles through her lifestyle website, lifebychloe.com.

“Everyone is going through something challenging,” she says. “For me, this diagnosis is simultaneously a blessing and curse. There are days I wake up not feeling well and think, ‘I would do anything not to have this condition.’

But other times I realize how strangely fulfilling it has been for me. I have found a way through my music to actually help people — to create strength for myself and for others as well.”

— Nancy Shohet West ’84

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A LU M N A E / I AS S O C I AT I O N L AU R A M C C O N AG H Y ’0 1, Alumnae/i Association President

LIVING CA’S MISSION FOR A LIFETIME For almost a century, Concord Academy alumnae/i have been bound together by a love of learning, a desire to serve others, and a proud legacy of advocacy. With more than 4,800 CA graduates around the globe, we are a small yet powerful community, and our connections to CA and each other span both distance and time.

As someone who attended CA, you are automatically a member of the Concord Academy Alumnae/i Association, a group that serves as a primary link to fellow alumnae/i as well as to current students and the school. We strive to ensure that CA remains present and relevant in all stages of your life.

On Friday, June 7, all alumnae/i are invited to attend Concord Academy’s Alumnae/i Association Assembly. An evolution of the annual meeting, this year’s assembly is a chance to bring all alumnae/i together to hear important updates from school leadership and to be part of the conversation as we approach CA’s centennial in 2022. During our time together, the Joan Shaw Herman Award will be presented to the 2019 recipient, and the alumnae/i community will vote on the Alumnae/i Association officers for terms commencing in fall 2019. Following the assembly, alumnae/i will join reunion classes for dinner and drinks to kick off reunion 2019. We hope you’ll enjoy visiting with classmates, current and former faculty, and friends from across the decades; together, we will toast our shared CA experiences.

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that while campus may look a bit different than when you were a student, our school’s spirit and ethos are alive and well. The core values of Concord Academy remain the one true constant — come and see for yourself!

To register and view the full schedule, visit www.concordacademy. org/annualassembly. The event is free. For alumnae/i who cannot make it to campus, the assembly will be live-streamed and available at the link above.

I hope you will join me on June 7!

Sincerely, Laura McConaghy ’01 President, Concord Academy Alumnae/i Association

MISSION The Alumnae/i Association fosters lifelong connections between Concord Academy and its alumnae/i community. The association facilitates meaningful opportunities to preserve and promote a love of learning, service to others, and a commitment to diverse perspectives and backgrounds. Through involvement in the life of the school, within the community, and through service to the greater world, the association strives to renew and affirm the core values instilled while at CA.

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I AM CA

Committee chair leads charge to honor fellow alumnae/i Jamie Wade Comstock ’82, P’17 recalls being aware of the Joan Shaw Herman award as a CA student. “I knew it was the only award the school gives out and that it was very special, not just because it was singular but because of what it stood for,” she says. “It wasn’t about what you were doing right in this minute but what you’d do later out in the world, with the gift of your education.”

Since becoming chair of the Joan Shaw Herman Award Committee in September 2018 (she previously volunteered on the CA Parents Council and as a class secretary), Comstock has enjoyed reading about fellow alumnae/i and their service to others. She hopes to expand the role of award recipients to include a campus visit with students. “CA is in the business of creating strong individuals who are poised to go on and become stronger,” she says. “There’s much inspiration to be drawn from our alumnae/i.”

W Learn more about the Joan Shaw Herman award: www.concordacademy.org/jsh

ENVIRONMENTAL CRUSADER The Sierra Club honors a CA alumna

In September, Caroline Grote Snyder ’50 accepted the Sierra Club’s 2018 Distinguished Service Award. She shared the honor with former EPA microbiologist David Lewis, now the Focus for Health Foundation’s research director, for their joint longtime commitment through the Sierra Club Grassroots Network Sewage Sludge Team to raising awareness of the harm caused by using biosolids as fertilizer. “Receiving this award reaffirms the Sierra Club’s policy of protecting soil, on which all life depends, from irreversible damage,” says Snyder, professor emerita at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “It also means protecting the right of citizens and scientists to freely question a harmful government policy.”

W Learn more about Snyder’s work: sludgefacts.org

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Aligning Art and Activism A documentary filmmaker testifies to the power of the artist to change the world Catherine Saalfield Gund ’83 makes films about strong women and col-

laborates with activists to create films that support social justice movements. The powerful independent documentaries she has created over her more than 20 years as a director and producer have earned her critical acclaim and Emmy nominations. In June 2018, they also earned a distinction unique to Concord Academy graduates: the Joan Shaw Herman Award for Distinguished Service. Gund accepted the award in a recorded speech shown to her classmates during their 30th reunion in June 2018, and she came to campus in October to speak about her films, her personal journey, her focus on media literacy and narrative change, the founding of her nonprofit production company, Aubin Pictures, and the movements that are immensely important to her today. In her inspiring talk, she urged students to live purposeful lives, instigate change, and make cultural contributions that matter.

The Joan Shaw Herman Distinguished Service Award is the sole award bestowed at Concord Academy, presented annually by the Alumnae/i Association in recognition of service to others. Established in 1976, it honors Joan Shaw Herman ’46, who, after contracting polio and becoming paralyzed, worked tirelessly to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

W Read more about Gund’s talk: www.concordacademy.org/gund

“That everyone can make videos now is nothing short of a revolution.

I encourage you to use that power intentionally and abundantly.”

CAT H E R I N E SA A L F I E L D G U N D ’8 3

P H OTO: B E N CA R M I C H A E L ’0 1

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HOW TO THINK LIKE AN ENTREPRENEUR A mentor helps teens open up a world of possibilities

As entrepreneurship education coordinator at the Possible Project, a Cambridge-based after-school program focused on developing student ventures, Shami Andalcio Bery ’07 teaches and mentors high schoolers to help them cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset and apply their passions and principles to creating new businesses.

How did your own entrepreneurial mindset develop?

Junior year at CA, a few friends and I started making T-shirts for fans of our sports teams, hoping to build a stronger sports culture at the school. After graduating, I took a semester off and joined some friends in New Orleans who had started a clothing line, then continued the same kind of enterprise as a student at Brandeis. Over time, my focus turned to the ways creative endeavors could spread messages of positivity, equity, and unity. For example, words on a T-shirt can promote a message people may not feel entirely ready to hear. But if they like the shirt, they explore the idea by wearing it, and a dialogue begins. At its best, an entrepreneurial mindset is when your heart, your head, and your hands are working symbiotically to create a material object while also promoting a principle.

When your students’ ideas don’t succeed, how do you help them learn from that experience? A lot of young people construct a plan in their heads and if it doesn’t work the way they envisioned, they become disheartened, believing everything they’ve built for themselves has come crashing down. I try to introduce the idea of flexibility. I tell them if you

mess up, that’s your opportunity to learn something. If you’ve tried something that doesn’t work, you make adjustments or pivot and find a different path. This was something I was lucky to experience at CA. In that very nurturing environment, if you made a mistake there was always a way to make it right. It taught me that what matters is not what goes wrong but what you can do to fix it.

How can adults help in this process? As adults, we need to trust the young people in our lives to figure out what they want and believe in themselves. My students get frustrated when I ask about their plans for the future because they’re used to adults asking them and then giving unsolicited advice: “This is what I think you should do” or “This is why what you want to do isn’t going to work.” I tell them I want to know so we can put a plan together to make it work.

What qualities blossom when students engage in an entrepreneurial mindset? Proactivity and confidence. That’s different from self-assurance. Not just being able to go out and do something, but really engaging in conversations with yourself: “Who am I? What is it that moves me?” Once you figure that out, you can envision your

Shami Andalcio Bery ’07

own path and how you will proceed. It doesn’t have to be just one thing. I’ve been a businessman, a fashion designer, a sports coach, and now a teacher. In all those versions of myself, I had the confidence to work with the resources I had to make my goals possible.

—Nancy Shohet West ’84

“If you’ve tried something that doesn’t work, you make adjustments or pivot and find a different path.”

Shami Andalcio Bery ’07

SAVE THE DATES TO CELEBRATE! Classes ending in 4 and 9, we’ll see you soon!

REUNION 2019: JUNE 7–9 Classes ending in 0 and 5, save the date!

REUNION 2020: JUNE 5–7 Whether it has been five years or 65 since you were last on campus, join alumnae/i across generations for a fun-filled weekend you don’t want to miss!

COMPILED BY LIBRARY DIRECTOR MARTHA KENNEDY

Creative Types Saving Thoreau’s Birthplace: How Citizens Rallied to Bring Henry Out of the Woods Lucille Stott

(former faculty) TMC Books, 2018 Prior to the late 1990s, no single house in Concord, Mass., was dedicated to native son Henry David Thoreau. When Lucille Stott, then editor of the Concord Journal, learned that the farmhouse in which he was born was about to go up for sale, she knew the efforts to save it would make a story worth telling. Her compelling narrative follows a group of concerned citizens who, fearing the loss of this historic homestead, begin a long and arduous dialogue with town officials, private investors, and state agencies. They not only spare the house and surrounding 20 acres from development but also form a nonprofit trust ensuring their preservation.

Positions of the Sun Lyn Hejinian ’59

Belladonna Collaborative, 2018 This genre-defying collection of musings conveys Lyn Hejinian’s perspectives on the period of the Great Recession, our nation’s

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ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and many tangentially related subjects.

Though poetry is the primary prism through which Hejinian sees and interprets the world, Positions of the Sun documents a deft writer struggling to make sense of this time of uncertainty and constant change.

Snow Sanctuary Lee Hall Delfausse ’70

Peppertree Press, 2018 In this novel, a young Vermonter joins elite skiers in a bid for the 1972 U.S. Olympic team. A top prospect, Lia thrives and is welcomed into the nurturing environment of the Sierra Nevada summer training school. As she moves up in the ranks and earns a spot for the upcoming World Cup circuit, Lia quickly learns about the unwanted attentions of male coaches and the cutthroat competition among teammates on the U.S. squad. Nuanced details from a racer’s viewpoint make this page-turner an authentic ski read.

The Clues to Kusachuma Adam B. Ford ’81

H Bar Press, 2018 While her friends are planning end-of-school

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sleepovers, Allison dreads the family vacation she must endure. But the discovery of a curious envelope changes everything.

Soon, Allison and her twin brother, Allan, are deciphering cryptic messages, solving bizarre calculations, and unearthing hidden rooms in their uncle’s sprawling farmhouse. With each clue, they’re drawn further into an elaborate mystery. Eventually they puzzle through to an ultimate solution that reveals a long-buried part of their family’s history. A fastpaced adventure, perfect for middle elementary readers.

Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One Anito Lo ’84

Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 Anita Lo, a worldrenowned, Michelinstarred chef, takes on the delights of cooking for oneself in this easy-tofollow collection of recipes.

The book features Lo’s signature style and passion for fresh seafood and vegetables as well as twists on more traditional French and Chinese fare. Throughout, Lo provides background notes on her culinary influences and reasons for crafting a volume for solo cooks.

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Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry Imani Perry ’90

Beacon Press, 2018 Imani Perry illuminates the complex and tragically short life of writer Lorraine Hansberry using recently released personal papers and previously unpublished works. Immersed in the powerful literary and cultural spheres of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., Hansberry, in turn, became an influencer herself through the insightful commentary on American family life in her play A Raisin in the Sun. That work, however, represents just a fragment of her impassioned life. This book earned Perry the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

(For more on Hansberry, check out the 2018 PBS American Masters documentary Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, which features Perry.) [ CALLING ALL CREATIVE TYPES Have you published a book or released a film or album within the past year? Please email Martha Kennedy at martha_kennedy@ concordacademy.org, and consider donating a copy to the J. Josephine Tucker Library’s alumnae/i collection.

FILM

H I L L B I L LY (Holler Home Productions, 2018) Sally Rubin ’95, co-director with Ashley York

Challenging devastating stereotypes of Appalachia, this documentary explores how Americans think about poverty and rural identity and calls urgently for dialogue during this divisive time in U.S. history.

This sympathetic portrait of oppressed and exploited people won the documentary award at the 2018 LA Film Festival, among other honors. Film Pulse called it a “lovingly crafted and revealing look at one of America’s most stigmatized areas.”

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TOAD HALL Concord Academy recently seized an opportunity to reunite a piece of its history with the western edge of campus.

Last year, the school purchased a private residence that once belonged to former headmistress Elizabeth B. Hall, a property the school owned for a time in the 1970s.

Bordering the Sudbury River and CA’s lower field, the striking midcentury house was affectionately named Toad Hall after The Wind in the Willows. And so it is once again called.

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LEARN MORE

See more online about the history of the home and CA’s reacquisition of it: www.concordacademy.org/toad-hall

THEN: Livingston and Elizabeth Hall at home in Toad Hall, as they appeared in the August 1961 issue of Better Homes & Gardens.

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NOW: Don Kingman, director of campus planning and construction, and his wife, Sue, are living in Toad Hall while the school makes plans for the property.

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Now N OW P H OTO BY B E N CA R M I C H A E L ’0 1

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J E F F D E SJA R L A I S, D I R ECTO R O F H E A LT H A N D ST U D E N T SU P P O RT S E RV I C E S

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01. Atwater Kent radio: My dad collected antique radios. This one’s called a tombstone radio, for obvious reasons.

02. Pottery: Grateful for handmade gifts from students.

03. Emerson quote: The photo reminds me of Vermont.

My sister got this for me.

04. Animal muppet: Because I play drums. I loved playing last year with Ned and the Needlefish!

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05. Frisbee and team photo: I coached Ultimate Frisbee for six years starting in 2000. That’s the 2005 team, and in 2012 I filled in for one season.

06. Stress ball: Always comes in handy.

07. Volleyball team: Love coaching girls JV volleyball now.

08. Cabin photo: Six generations of my family have enjoyed this house on a lake in Vermont. We’ve added a second story now.

09. Sigmund Freud action figure: Students somehow always mistake him for Rick Hardy! Sometimes a bearded man is just a bearded man.

10. Jimmy Fund Walk: I started five years ago, in honor of lots of loved ones who have passed. It’s 8.5 hours to walk the Boston Marathon route.

11. Figurine with lots of children: My wife gave me this to remind me of all the kids I’ve helped. It’s on a red rock from Sedona.

12. The Scream: Self-explanatory.

YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE! Help us reach our 2018–19 Annual Fund goal

12%

$2.9 million

Endowment Draw

11% Annual Fund

Invest in an education that makes a difference with a gift to the CA Annual Fund before June 30.

5% Your generosity is vital to the daily operations of the school and affects every facet of the Concord Academy student experience.

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2018–19 Budget: $28 Million

Where the Dollars Come From

77%

Tuition and Fees

Materials and Tools for Teaching and Learning

7%

General and Administration

16%

Every single gift matters.

Every dollar counts.

Financial Aid

Where the Dollars Go

19%

www.concordacademy.org/give

53%

Salaries and Benefits

Operating CA’s Campus

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