HB magazine: Summer/Fall 2015

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Young alumnae return to Cleveland to find a revitalized city eager to welcome them back HOME pg. 14

Annual Report on Philanthropy Inside


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Turf Field, IDEA Lab, and Learning Commons construction projects improve and enhance HB’s campus

very school year at Hathaway Brown is meaningful, but this one will be even more so for me personally, as it marks my return to the classroom as a teacher of Shakespeare, and it marks the close of my tenure as Head of School—a tenure that has been such a deeply rewarding privilege. Our 2015-2016 school theme is Lighting The Way, Leaving Your Legacy. I can’t think of a better way to describe the HB experience. Since its founding, our school has endeavored to set a standard for excellence and make a difference in girls’ education, in society, and in people’s lives. Through the years, we’ve done this through innovative and outstanding programming, with world-class academics delivered by the best faculty and staff anywhere. It is our mission to help all of our girls and our Early Childhood boys to make use of every growth opportunity so that they may maximize their own potential and make the world a better place. We are committed to providing the best possible learning environment. To that end, I’m pleased to tell you about some exciting new construction initiatives that are now in process at the corner of Courtland and North Park: a new Turf Field, an IDEA Lab, and a Learning Commons. Thanks to the generosity of numerous donors, these efforts will improve and enhance our campus for students across divisions. All are expected to be completed during the first part of the 2015-2016 school year. To give you a sense of the full scope of these projects, we’ve created a web presence that describes each one in detail and answers a number of Frequently Asked Questions. You can find all of that information at www.hb.edu/ construction. Check back often, as we’ll be sharing photos and videos of the progress we’re making in each of these areas.

While we’re in the construction phase on these three projects, we continue to explore ways to enhance and beautify other areas of our physical plant as well. For example, over the last two years, we’ve been working closely with architects and engineers to draft and implement improvement plans for our Primary School building, and funds have been placed in a reserve for Prime heating, ventilation, and air conditioning upgrades.

PHOTO BY JAMES DOUGLAS

breaking new ground

HB’s new Strategic Plan, which was ratified by the school’s Board of Trustees and went into effect in January, calls upon us to optimize our campus for 21st-century learning (Strategy #4). Our new construction projects put us well on our way toward achieving that goal. The Learning Commons will most directly impact the daily lives of our Upper Schoolers, but both the Turf Field and the IDEA Lab will be used by students in every HB division. I’m thrilled that the IDEA Lab (Innovation, Design, Engineering, Art) will be operated under the direction of HB alumna Leah Ridgeway Jackson ’99, who has returned to her alma mater as Director of the Center for Technology & Invention. Please visit the school website to get a glimpse into these exciting initiatives, or come see them for yourself. I’d love to show you around.

William Christ, Head of School

on the cover: #SUNANDSAND Just off the SR 2 Memorial Shoreway west of downtown Cleveland, Edgewater Beach beckons swimmers, boaters, and even surfers to Lake Erie. Operated by the Cleveland Metroparks system since 2013, the urban park has undergone a massive cleanup and image change. Regularly teeming with people, the beach is the site of a weekly summertime concert series and it’s the perfect place to fly a kite, host a family reunion, or take in a majestic watery sunset. HB alumnae caught a few rays and a breathtaking view of downtown Cleveland on a recent trip to the beach. Read more about Cleveland’s evolving landscape in #ThisisCLE on page 14. COVER PHOTO BY KEITH BERR


PHOTO BY REENA GOODWIN


PHOTO BY KEITH BERR

... from the editor I love Cleveland. I love it for the traits the convention and visitors bureau picks to pack the pages of its city guides: the neighborhoods, the food, the music, the sports teams, the culture, the lakeshore.

But that’s not all. I love Cleveland because Clevelanders have each other’s backs. Just about every time I meet new people, they go out of their way to give me tips on how to make my west-side-to-east-side commute a little bit faster, or to tell me that they know a guy or a girl who can help me in some way and that I should look them up—or better yet, they’ll even make the introduction. The people who live here are amazingly gracious and committed to the betterment of their friends and neighbors. They may not consider themselves civic champions, but through their everyday interactions, they make the entire region an immensely more likeable and appealing place to live. This is not a “me” town; it’s a “we” town. That’s not to say that you can’t make a nice living here or launch a passion project or become influential in your chosen profession. Clevelanders— including plenty of Hathaway Brown alumnae who have returned to Northeast Ohio after college to live, work, and raise families—are doing all of those things and much more. On a gorgeous day in July, my colleagues and I had the chance to connect with several of those HB alumnae and take a trip around the city aboard the iconic Lolly the Trolley (my first time!), experiencing our hometown as tourists. If you haven’t been to Cleveland in decades or if you’ve always lived here, I highly recommend the experience. See photos from our recent HB trip in #ThisisCLE on page 14.

All Aboard The city is experiencing a palpable and undeniable renaissance. You can see it in the urban development initiatives cropping up in newly revitalized neighborhoods in the city’s core and in the faces of people of all ages who shout their community pride through colorful t-shirts emblazoned with feel-good slogans. And I’m talking every single day of the year—not only when the Cavs are in the NBA Finals. The excitement is contagious. But don’t just take my word for it. Check out the wide range of publications that have been singing Cleveland’s praises these last few years, everything from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to Travel + Leisure and Bon Appétit. Better yet, experience the city anew for yourself. I’ll meet you at the trolley.

SEE AND SHARE, SHOW AND TELL Now you can connect with HB on Pinterest and the new HBlog along with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more! Visit HB.edu for details. #LearnforLife

Letters to the editor may be sent to publications@hb.edu or to the school’s mailing address.


PHOTOS BY KEVIN REEVES

Eschew timidity. Act. Until you act, you will never know what you can achieve.

Kathleen Osborne Editor

Benita Y. Pearson ’81, U.S. federal judge for the

Vanessa Butler Art Director

Northern District of Ohio, and keynote speaker for HB’s 139th Commencement Exercises, June 5, 2015

QUOTABLE

Reena S. Goodwin Digital Editor Amanda Seifert Associate Editor

administrative team: William Christ Head of School

Sue Sadler Assoc. Head of School & Director of Upper School

Sarah Johnston Assoc. Head for Enrollment Management

Sharon Baker Director of Middle School Director of Early Childhood

Mary Rainsberger Director of Advancement

Katherine Zopatti Director of Primary School

alumnae relations team: Dana Lovelace Capers ’86 Director of Alumnae Relations

Erin Reid Advancement Coordinator

19600 North Park Boulevard Shaker Heights, Ohio 44122 216.320.8785 If you’d like to cancel delivery of HB magazine, please email publications@hb.edu. Parents: If your daughter is not receiving this magazine at her permanent address, please notify publications@hb.edu so that it may be mailed directly to her.

HB

Jane Brown

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index

alumnae featured in this issue Emily Amjad ’15 – Uncommon Credentials, pg. 34 Angela Amos ’01 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 15, 21, 23 Morgan Austin ’15 – Great Debaters, pg. 8 Bethany Costilow Baldwin ’01 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 14, 22, 23 Kristen Bowman ’03 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 14, 17, 18, 23 Lauren Battle ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Emma Bryan ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Alice Catanzaro ’13 – Teacher Traveler Trendsetter, pg. 26 Lizzie Coquillette ’09 – Uncommon Credentials, pg. 34 Lily Datta ’90 – Report on Philanthropy Jordan Doak ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Molly Bruce Downing ’60 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 15 Iman Eulinberg ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Elizabeth Falco ’01 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 14, 16, 21 Lisa Battaglia Fedorovich ’83 – Report on Philanthropy Elizabeth Stewart Fox ’60 – Admirable Alumnae, pg. 30, 31 Arielle Goldberg ’13 – Teacher Traveler Trendsetter, pg. 26 Julie Golinski ’09 – #ThisisCLE, pg. 18 Martha Shierson Harding ’61 – Report on Philanthropy Lauren Harris ’06 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 14, 21, 23 Reem Rahim Hassani ’84 – PSPP in CLE, pg. 10 Tierney Healey ’06 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 15, 19, 20 Dora Huang ’09 - #ThisisCLE, pg. 18, 19 Emily Imka ’15 – Keys to Creativity, pg. 7 Ariana Iranpour ’14 – Perfect Match, pg. 12, 13 Leah Ridgeway Jackson ’99 –Breaking New Ground, inside front cover Lauren Kahn ’15 – Keys to Creativity, pg. 7 Ann Lai ’01 – Uncommon Credentials, pg. 34 Becca Lambright ’15 – Keys to Creativity, pg. 7 Danielle Bradshaw Lane ’90 – Admirable Alumnae, pg. 30, 32 Lauren Leizman ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Rachel Leizman ’12 – Where Are They Now?, pg. 13 Becca Levinsky ’10 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 15, 18 Jean Mackenzie ’65 – Admirable Alumnae, pg. 30, 31 Caitlin Mann ’09 – Uncommon Credentials, pg. 34 Nia Marshall ’13 – Where Are They Now?, pg. 13 Elizabeth Mortimer ’88 – Report on Philanthropy Gabe Moss ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Catherine Mullen ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Lisa Kroeger Murtha ’88 – Admirable Alumnae, pg. 31 Sheena Dee Pauley ’84 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 15 Benita Y. Pearson ’81 – Quotable, pg. 3 Cassi Pittman ’01 – cover; #ThisisCLE, pg. 14, 21, 22 Erin Schikowski ’07 – Uncommon Credentials, pg. 34 Elana Scott ’14 – Teacher Traveler Trendsetter, pg. 26 Camille Lipford Seals ’02 – Milestones, pg. 8 Vanessa Smith ’13 – Where Are They Now?, pg. 13 Emily Spencer ’15 – Uncommon Credentials, pg. 34 Rebecca Weinberger ’15 – Scholarly Commendations, pg. 9 Riley Whitmyer ’15 – Sport Report, pg. 11 Susan Kettering Williamson ’55 – Well-Earned Recognition, pg. 10 Julie Lozon Wojtkowski ’07 – Sport Report, pg. 11 2015-2016 Alumnae Council – pg. 35

contributors If you’d like to become a contributor to HB magazine, please email kosborne@hb.edu or call 216.320.8785.

Keith Berr

Cover; #ThisisCLE – page 14

Keith Berr is a commercial and fine art photographer with studio locations in Cleveland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. His assignments and personal projects allow him to capture vistas, people, food, and native flair around the world. He has been inducted into the Cleveland Advertising Association’s Hall of Fame and recently was named one of the top 10 photographers in the United States by the American Society of Media Photographers.

Thrity Umrigar

Teacher, Traveler, Trendsetter – page 24

Thrity Umrigar is the bestselling author of a memoir and six novels, including The Space Between Us, The World We Found, and The Story Hour. She is a recipient of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard, a winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize, and a finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins award. She is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University.

HB.edu/magazine

The contents of this publication—with the exception of Class News for privacy reasons—are posted online. To maximize your experience, we’ve made a wide array of additional content related to the featured stories available as well, including videos, photo galleries, and Internet resources.


contents Cover Story

14 #ThisisCLE Young alumnae return to Cleveland to find a revitalized

city eager to welcome them back home

Features

24 Teacher, Traveler, Trendsetter Joe Vogel’s passion for global education is contagious,

and he shares it in his classroom and beyond

30 Admirable Alumnae Presenting the 2015 Hathaway Brown Distinguished Alumnae

and Alumnae Achievement Award winners

34 Uncommon Credentials Emily Spencer ’15 named a finalist in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search

News from North Park

6 HB Happenings

Studet and Faculty News

Locker Room

11 Sport Report News and highlights from Blazer Athletics 12 Perfect Match

Ariana Iranpour ’14, who earned a state title in singles tennis, emphasizes teamwork in the classroom

13 Where Are They Now? Catching up with college athletes 2014-2015 Report on Philanthropy Class Notes

35 36 67 81

A Note from the Alumnae Office Alumnae News and Giving Brides, Babies, Memorials Head of School Search Update

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Powerhouse Programmers PHOTO BY JOHN FORCINA

The HB Robotics Team 2399, aka the Fighting Unicorns, competed in the FIRST Robotics Competition World Championship in St. Louis this spring. This was the first year the team qualified for this international contest. Earlier in the season, the Fighting Unicorns won the prestigious Engineering Inspiration Award at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional Tournament. The award “celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school and community.” Judges took notice of Team 2399’s outreach efforts. As the only all-girls FIRST Robotics team in Northeast Ohio, the Fighting Unicorns make it their responsibility to spread the word about engineering, computer science, and robotics throughout the school and the wider community. In addition to helping mentor two FIRST Lego League Teams and refereeing and judging at FIRST Lego League Tournaments, team members demonstrated their robot at the Ohio STEM Meeting at the Ohio Aerospace Institute in October and ran a workshop for Boys Hope Girls Hope of Northeast Ohio in November. They also mentored a new FRC team at Parma Constellation Schools Community High and offered them open access to HB’s equipment. In the spring, the girls assisted with an after-school robotics club for grades 4-9 and ran an afternoon workshop for the entire eighth grade.

In July and August, the Hathaway Brown Theatre Institute staged three outstanding productions: Rent, Little Women, and Oklahoma! Just wrapping its third season, HBTI was created by the Hathaway Brown Performing Arts department for students in first grade through college. The program offers three summer sessions with coursework in drama, dance, and music, with high-level training from working artists for young people interested in the performing arts, as well as professional-level production experiences. Students of HBTI’s staff of professional artists have gone on to perform on Broadway, in regional theatre, and in film and television. Visit www.hb.edu/hbti to learn more.

PHOTOS BY SCOT T CHAPMAN

Summer Stock


Keys to Creativity Feminist Narratives

Author and activist Yvonne Pointer; graphic artist Gwen Garth, project coordinator for the City of Cleveland; community activist Barbara Anderson; SPR Therapeutics president and founder Maria Bennett; eco-friendly dry cleaning company owner Vicky Trotter; OB/GYN Dr. Karen Jaffe; Apollo’s Fire Baroque Orchestra artistic director Jeannette Sorrell; Center for Families and Children external affairs director Elizabeth Hijar; Social Advocates for Youth counselor Laurel Greene; and business owner and teacher of entrepreneurship Sharie Renee each shared their perspectives, and the information gathered in these discussions was used to create short videos with the MAKERS.com “MAKERS Stories” mobile app. Making HERStory was presented in partnership with the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women at Case Western Reserve University, MAKERS. com, Inner Visions, and the Center for Leadership & Well-Being at HB. Program facilitator Amy Richards is the founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a national feminist, activist foundation. She is also a consulting producer on the HBO documentary Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words, and an adviser to Makers, a PBS documentary on the women’s movement in America. Prior to the event, she spoke with parents and took part in the annual fourth-grade Notable Women presentation and celebration.

Several of HB’s regional winners went on to earn national recognition in the 2015 program, and they were honored for their work at Carnegie Hall. HB’s national Scholastic honorees are: Emily Imka ’15 (Silver Medal for Painting; Silver Medal and American Voices Medal for Poetry), Lauren Kahn ’15 (Gold Medal for Jewelry), Becca Lambright ’15 (Gold Medal for Poetry; Silver Medal for Personal Essay/Memoir); Isabella Nilsson ’16 (Gold Medal for Short Story), and Nitya Thakore ’16 (Silver Medal for Personal Essay/Memoir). These students were identified by panels of creative professionals as the most talented young artists and writers in the nation. This year, 300,000 works of art and writing were submitted by students in grades 7-12, and only the top 1 percent received national ranking. Since 1923, The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards have recognized teenagers from across the country. By winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, these HB students join a legacy of celebrated authors and artists including Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Robert Redford, John Currin, and Lena Dunham. A great deal of Scholastic award-winning work was compiled in HB’s new literary journal, Retrospect. That publication, produced by the school’s Osborne Writing Center, was lauded by the National Council of Teachers of English Program to Recognize Excellence in Student Literary Magazines. Retrospect won the top prize in Ohio. This superior designation was awarded to only 30 U.S. schools. Read Retrospect online at www.hb.edu/write.

HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT For the second consecutive year, Hathaway Brown has been named a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio by The Plain Dealer and Workplace Dynamics. Ask the faculty and staff what they like best about HB, and they might tell you about the on-site child care, yoga and fitness classes for employees, monthly chair massages offered by an HB alumna, the fabulous lunches served every day in the beautiful dining hall, or about the many professional development opportunities the school provides. You may discover how

employees are encouraged to dream big, to try new things, and to make the most of themselves as educators and as human beings. But what you’re sure to hear again and again is how much the adults in this community appreciate the intelligence, passion, and perseverance of our students and how much they enjoy being surrounded by some of the brightest, friendliest, hardest working people anywhere.

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Girls from six Cleveland-area high schools joined together at Hathaway Brown School’s Worldwide Communications Center to document the stories of some of the city’s most interesting women. “Making HERStory,” a workshop conducted at HB in March by Amy Richards from the website MAKERS.com —a digital and video storytelling platform that aims to be the largest and most dynamic collection of women’s stories—showcased 10 prominent Cleveland women who spoke with students about the experiences and qualities that made them who they are.

After racking up an impressive 82 writing awards and 24 visual arts awards in the 35th annual regional Scholastic Art & Writing competition, HB girls brought home 10 additional high honors from the Cleveland Institute of Art’s special Scholastic exhibition ceremony in January.

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HB IN DC

At the close of the school year, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) met with a group of Hathaway Brown seniors enrolled in Molly Krist’s American Government and Constitutional Law class who attended his weekly Constituent Coffee during an annual trip to Washington, D.C. “It was an honor to meet with these bright young women,” said Brown. “It is great to see students take interest in our government and the work being done in Washington to help Ohioans.”

Great Debaters Morgan Austin ’15 (left) and Isha Lele ’18 both admirably represented Hathaway Brown and the North Coast District in June at the 2015 National Speech and Debate Tournament in Dallas, Texas. These two HB debaters were among a handful of students from the Cleveland area to qualify for Nationals from the more than 100 who participate in Congressional-style debate. Competing against more than 250 of the best Congressional debaters from around the United States, both Morgan and Isha made it to the semifinals. Morgan was named Best Presiding Officer in the semis and she advanced to the final day of the competition, placing in the top 24 Congressional debaters nationwide. This is the best finish by any debater in HB’s history.

OPEN DIALOGUE

Hathaway Brown’s Black Cultural Awareness student group, in partnership with the school’s Center for Multicultural Affairs, hosted an important Upper School forum in May. “A Real Conversation on Race” included an outstanding group of faculty representing different disciplines, experiences, and perspectives who shared stories and engaged students in conversation around the topic of race in America. The program focused on the historical construction of race, and panelists talked about how our diverse experiences influence the lenses through which we see race and the stories of others, and discussed how everyone at HB can be advocates, allies, upstanders, and activists for all of the members of our cosmopolitan community.

MILESTONES After 27 years as our beloved Early Childhood and Primary School Librarian, Kathy Englehart left HB this June to embark on her well-earned retirement. We also bid a fond farewell to our school nurse, Judy Wilson, who has been providing our students with excellent care and nurturing for five years. A special reception was held to honor these two outstanding women and commemorate their influential service. The 2014-2015 school year also brought with it the employment anniversaries of several other HB faculty, staff, and administrators. We paid special tribute to three colleagues who have spent three decades of their lives with us: Director of Plant Operations Terry Churchill, Associate Director of Athletics Julie Kerrigan-Ettorre, and Upper School Administrative Assistant Karen Oberholtz. 5 Years of Service – Bonita Bertrand, Anthony Cirincione, Leslie Coleman, Olivia Morales Geaghan, Sari Gonick, Marlo Henderson, Molly Krist, Sandrine Lhomet-Schmitz, Camille Lipford Seals ’02, Morgan Locsei, Diana McBeath, Eva Rosbach, Louise Scott, Matt Skitzki, Colleen Sommerfeld, Jennifer Stevenson, Marie Walsh, Victoria Weisberg-Smith; 10 Years of Service – Rebecca Anders, Sharon Baker, Caroline Borrow, Tina Reifsnyder, Regina Gray, Jason Habig, Marissa Haverlock, Elizabeth Patterson, Joanna Smith, Eric Wonderly; 15 Years of Service – Tara Anderson, Alison Day, Shelby Dietzel, Julie Grazia, Lisa Lurie, Dawn Keske, Carol Neff, Mary Rainsberger; 20 Years of Service – Carole Lechleitner, Alice Stubbs; 25 Years of Service – Susan Gallagher; 30 Years of Service – Terry Churchill, Julie Kerrigan-Ettorre, Karen Oberholtz


Scholarly Commendations

Kate Aris ’18 took second place at the beginner level in the 10th Chinese Bridge Speech Contest for American High School Students at The Confucius Institute at University of Massachusetts Boston. Before competing in the finals, each student must submit a three-minute speech with a script in Chinese and English. The finalists then perform their speech for a panel of judges and take questions. Kavya Ravichandran ’16 and Rebecca Weinberger ’15 (pictured l-r below) were honored at the Cleveland Technical Societies Council’s 69th Annual Scholarship and Achievement Awards. Each year this ceremony grants scholarships to the best math and science students in the Cleveland area and selects an Honor Junior for each school. Rebecca earned a scholarship sponsored by Lubrizol and Kavya was designated HB’s Honor Junior.

The Princeton Prize in Race Relations was established to “recognize, support, and encourage young people in our country who have demonstrated a commitment to advancing the cause of race relations.” Kacey Gill ’16 has been honored with a Certificate of Achievement from Princeton University in this annual awards program for high school students. She and Cleveland’s Princeton Prize winner Anthony Price, a student at Shaw High School, were celebrated for their work at a special ceremony in May. During the program, Kacey delivered a very moving acceptance speech, and she and Anthony led attendees in a discussion about race relations.

Superlative Science Madeleine Ference ’16 (right), Nitya Thakore ’16 (left), and Aarathi Sahadevan ’16, students in Hathaway Brown’s signature Science Research & Engineering Program, traveled to Houston, Texas, in May to compete in I-SWEEEP, The International Sustainable World (Energy, Engineering, and Environment) Project. This groundbreaking competition is open to high school students from around the world. It is one of the largest events of its kind, bringing together young scientists from more than 60 countries to present more than 500 projects.

The HB students received all-expensespaid trips to compete at I-SWEEEP as finalists, having advanced through HB’s 17th Annual Poster Session judging. HB is awarded spots to I-SWEEEP each year based on the quantity and excellence of the science and engineering research that comes out of the school year after year through the SREP. At I-SWEEEP, students are exposed to a five-day whirlwind of scientific, cultural, educational, and social events. The centerpiece of the competition is a full day at which each student’s research project poster is judged in person by several professional judges. At the end of this year’s competition, the HB students

each won bronze medals for their research representing the United States. The students were at I-SWEEEP to present two separate projects: Madeleine and Nitya conducted medical research in a team project through a lab at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and Aarathi conducted an individual research project also at the CWRU School of Medicine.

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BRIDGE BUILDER

Kavya also represented HB in the regional finals of the 2015 Veale Youth Entrepreneurship Forum business plan competition. Hers was one of only 10 student-run startups in the contest that took place at LaunchHouse in Shaker Heights in the spring. Working solo or as a team, the competition requires students to create a comprehensive plan and presentation for an enterprise that could be started for less than $2,500. Startups ranged from consumer product companies, mobile applications and service businesses, to handmade jewelry and food businesses. Kavya’s business, Pro Plan, involves an organizational planning app that she developed. “Kavya did an excellent job with her business plan and presentation, and she also blended in her computer science expertise nicely,” said Kevin Purpura, Director of HB’s Center for Business & Finance.

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Well-Earned Recognition

2015 Endowed Faculty Chairs named Near the end of the school year, colleagues, family, and friends convened to pay tribute to the school’s three new Endowed Faculty Chair Holders: Julie Kerrigan-Ettorre (Anne Cutter Coburn Chair for Excellence in Teaching), Toni Cross (Hathaway Brown School Award Fund for Promise in Education), and Dr. Crystal Miller (Kettering Fund Chair for Student Research Program).

The Anne Cutter Coburn Chair for Excellence in Teaching was awarded to Julie Kerrigan-Ettorre (left), pictured with her mother.

The Anne Cutter Coburn Chair for Excellence in Teaching was established in 1984 to recognize teaching excellence at Hathaway Brown School. The endowment income is used to defray the cost of the chair holder’s salary and provide the chair holder with an annual stipend. The chair is held for a one-year term. The 2015 award was given to Associate Athletic Director Julie KerriganEttorre in recognition of her 30 years of service as a Physical Education teacher, coach, and school administrator. The Hathaway Brown School Award Fund for Promise in Education was created to honor Associate Head of School Sue Sadler for her many contributions to the Hathaway Brown community, including classroom teaching and school administration spanning nearly three decades. This award is given annually to an early career educator who demonstrates a deep commitment to excellence in education, possesses a sincere desire to reach every student, and through his or her work, has a powerfully positive impact on the HB community. Sixth-Grade History teacher and Middle School Diversity Liaison Toni Cross is this year’s recipient. The Kettering Fund for Student Research endowment was established in 2004 with generous grants from The Kettering Fund of Dayton, Ohio, with the support of Susan Kettering Williamson ’55. Income from this endowment supports the salary of the Director of the Science Research & Engineering Program at HB. Dr. Crystal Miller is the new full-time director of the SREP, working alongside Founding Director Patricia Hunt. For descriptions and a complete list of HB Endowed Faculty Chairs, please visit www.hb.edu/endowedchairs.

March 10–12, 2016

C ONNECT * LEARN * E NGAGE All are invited to Hathaway Brown School in Cleveland, Ohio, for the 9th annual Private Schools with Public Purpose conference this coming March. Nearly 200 teachers, administrators, nonprofit managers, civic representatives, community partners and others with a shared vision of leveraging resources, networks, and knowledge for the benefit of their larger communities will convene at HB for three days of workshops and outreach activities. Visit www.privateschoolspublicpurpose.org to learn more and to register.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Reem Rahim Hassani, HB ’84 Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Numi Tea, an organic tea company rooted in the principle of creating a healthful product that nurtures people and honors the planet Eric Gordon CEO of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which serves more than 50,000 students in 90 locations, including several new and innovative schools

#PSPPinCLE


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Sport Report

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BASKETBALL

The Blazers finished their final season under Coach Paul Barlow with a record of 11-14. • The team made it to the OHSAA Division II District Championship game and finished as District Runner-Up. • The JV basketball team enjoyed a season of growth.

SWIMMING

COLLEGE BLAZERS

LACROSSE In Kevin Purpura’s inaugural season as the Varsity Lacrosse Head Coach, the team advanced to the second round of the OSLA Division II State Tournament. • JV Lacrosse had a tremendous season, earning a record of 8-5.

DEPARTMENT NEWS

HB Swimming proved to be strong in Roderick Speed’s first season as Head Coach. • The Varsity team finished as OHSAA Division II District Runner-Up and took fourth place in the OHSAA Division II State Finals.

SOFTBALL

With no senior athletes and only one junior on the team, the Varsity Softball team had a lot of young talent who fought hard throughout the season and showed continuous improvement under Coach Angela Long. • The Blazers ended the year with a close game in the OHSAA Division II Sectional Semifinals.

TRACK & FIELD

Co-Head Coaches Meredith Shaul and Ericka Davis led Varsity Track & Field to an extremely successful season. • The team advanced several athletes to the OHSAA Division Regional Finals. • Sophie Richards ’16 received Academic All-Ohio honors and competed in the OHSAA Division II State Finals, placing fifth in the 300M hurdles and eighth in the 100M hurdles. She was the first Blazer Track athlete to compete in the State Tournament since 2007.

Eight of the scholar-athletes in the HB Class of 2015 (pictured above) will continue their sports careers in college: (front row, l-r): Catherine Mullen - Bates, swimming; Riley Whitmyer - Colby, field hockey; Lauren Leizman - Cornell, squash; Emma Bryan - Cornell, diving. (back row, l-r): Gabe Moss - Hamilton, field hockey; Iman Eulinberg - Wagner, swimming; Jordan Doak Emory, soccer; Lauren Battle - George Washington, track.

Julie Kerrigan-Ettorre has been promoted to Associate Director of Athletics. She brings 30 years of teaching experience in Physical Education with students Pre-K through 12. Since joining HB in 1987, she has worked to develop many students and coaches, and has a deep appreciation for and understanding of not only our Blazer programs, but of athletics administration and women in sport. • Julie Lozon Wojtkowski ’07 has been named Assistant Director of Athletics and Dean of Students for Athletics. As a former student-athlete, coach, and school administrator, she brings a wealth of experience and knowledge of the “HB Way” to this new role. • Stacey Aroney has assumed the title of Assistant Director of Athletics for Aquatics. • The Blazers are pleased to welcome five new Varsity Head Coaches for 2015-2016: Ahyodha Kishna (Field Hockey) Greg Aten (Tennis), Bill Scully (Golf ), Meredith Shaul (Cross Country) and Michael Coreno (Basketball).


Perfect Match Ariana Iranpour ’14, who earned a state title in singles tennis, emphasizes teamwork in the classroom. Her students aren’t the only ones reaping the rewards.

PHOTOS BY REENA GOODWIN

All together: “I am smart and tough!” The teacher calls a quick time-out and reminds everyone to speak loudly and enunciate.

O

n the first 90-degree day of the summer, 20 boys and girls in shorts and t-shirts stand in lines four rows deep and face the teacher perched on a table in a tiny classroom with no desks and no windows on the second floor of the Thurgood Marshall Recreation Center. They all look to be about 8 years old. One by one, the kids take turns shouting out emphatic affirmations, volleying powerful phrases around the room. A boy in the first row sings out about his self-worth, and a girl in the back enthusiastically counters with her own declaration of pride. The kids are practicing their original piece for the big Poetry Slam competition slated to take place the next day. From the middle of the room: “I am smarter than Albert Einstein!” Now the front center: “I have the Internet in my head!”

“I am stronger than Thor with his hammer,” proclaims a girl with rainbow-colored beads in her hair. “I am stronger than the people in the slammer,” smiles a boy in a sleeveless undershirt. Nearly five decades ago this very week, just a few blocks from where the kids are standing in the rec center on Hough Avenue on Cleveland’s northeast side, the largest race riot in the city’s history erupted. Today, this spot is home to Inner City Tennis Clinics, a tuition-free summer program that serves more than 200 at-risk area students ages 6-18. The overarching focus of ICTC is tennis instruction offered with donated equipment on the Thurgood Marshall courts, but every Monday through Friday for eight weeks, eager girls and boys also convene in the classrooms and gymnasium of the former school building from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. for activities and coursework centered around four additional major components: wellness, literacy, poetry, and fitness. A nonprofit entity funded by several partner agencies, including Medical Mutual,

Cleveland Clinic, the United States Tennis Association, and the city of Cleveland, ICTC is now in its fifth year. In that time, the program has become a vital community resource. “We’re filling the gaps,” says Executive Director Brian Smallwood. Down the hall from where the students are polishing their performance art, Hathaway Brown graduate Ariana Iranpour ’14 is checking in with a group of teenagers who are writing journal entries about the news stories they read the night before. Iranpour is ICTC’s head literacy instructor. She’s also primarily responsible for designing the component curriculum. “We’ve been working on it since October,” says Smallwood. “But Ariana really took the lead. She made everything much more current and interactive so that the students would be more engaged and they would learn more.” The 2013 OHSAA Girls Singles Tennis State Champion, Iranpour has continued her winning streak at the University of Chicago, where she recently switched majors from pre-med to political science to prepare for a career in military intelligence. On the court during her freshman year for the Maroons, she made it to the quarterfinals and was named NCAA All-American. The Intercollegiate Tennis Association appointed her the Central Region Women’s


“Every time I come here, I learn something new,” she says.

“EVERY SINGLE DAY.” Rookie of the Year as well. But she brings much more to her ICTC position than athletics prowess. “While she is probably the most accomplished tennis player on our staff, her new passion is teaching,” says IMG Tennis Vice President and ICTC Board Chair Kevin Callanan.

The feeling is mutual. “Every time I come here, I learn something new,” she says. “Every single day.” The topics Iranpour and her co-teacher Tia Wright-Bey have chosen to highlight this summer include identity, self-expression, community, adversity, problem-solving, stereotypes, and black history. The class has watched the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma and they’ve written 140-character reviews and posted them to their “Twitter” walls – small yellow square notes attached the actual walls of the classroom. They’ve read articles from The Plain Dealer and from The Guardian. They’ve discussed church burnings, the Confederate flag, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice. They’ve deliberated about whether the best way for people who

In addition to the strides she’s made with the literacy curriculum in her two summers on the job, Iranpour also has brought to ICTC the benefit of her HB experience. Last year, Assistant Head of School and Director of College Counseling Dr. Terry McCue and Associate Director Jennifer Tramer helped her run a weeklong program explaining the college process to the students there. “We wanted to introduce them to the work it takes to apply to college,” Iranpour says. “But mostly we wanted to introduce them to the idea of college and let them know that anyone can go. It is an attainable goal.” Now out on the Thurgood Marshall tennis courts this humid July morning, Iranpour agrees to show off her serve to humor the women who have come to talk with her and take pictures for a story in her alma mater’s magazine. The youngest ICTC students sit together cross-legged alongside the painted white lines on the sporadically chipped green concrete surface. They shield their eyes from the sun, and watch anxiously as she tosses the neon yellow ball high into the air. And then she connects.

-KO

To learn more about Inner City Tennis Clinics, please visit innercitytennis.net.

Where Are They Now?

Catching up with alumnae athletes Nia Marshall ’13 is a standout forward on the Cornell University Big Red Basketball team. During her sophomore year, she was named first-team All-Ivy, becoming the first player at her school to earn that designation in seven years. She racked up even more honors this year as well, having been cited by Business Insider as one of “19 Incredibly Impressive Students at Cornell,” and making College Sports Madness’ first-team selection. Rachel Leizman ’12 and Vanessa Smith ’13 both represent Princeton University as scholar-athletes. Leizman is a talented squash player and Smith is a member of the Tigers basketball team, which was undefeated in the regular season. After a terrific season, Leizman earned secondteam All-America honors. She won the pivotal match to push her team to a third-place finish at Nationals, and at the close of the Individual Collegiate Squash Championship tournament, she was ranked #18 in the country. In 2015, Smith’s 30-0 team had the best regular season record ever for any Ivy League men’s or women’s basketball program. A guard for the Tigers, Smith was a major contributor to the team’s success, and she was one of four players featured in a special segment on ESPN. At the height of the season, she even got to visit the White House and play on the basketball court there. Have news to share about an HB alumna playing sports in college or beyond? Email publications@hb.edu.

#GoBlazers #BlazerNation

HB

You might expect that Iranpour would be assigned to demonstrate her powerful overhead serve for the ICTC students on the Thurgood Marshall courts every sunny day, but where she really shines is in the classroom, according to Program Director Charles Williams. “It’s not often that you find someone so young who is so enthused, so passionate about her work,” he says. “Kids are a good barometer—they can gauge who’s ‘for you’ and who’s not. If you’re boring, they’re not listening. Ariana is helping these kids get ready for college. They want to work with her.”

are feeling helpless to have their voices heard is through peaceful protests or through strategic acts of violence. Standing outside the rec center on Hough, Iranpour reflects on these spirited debates. “Never has it been so apparent to me that history is repeating itself,” she says. “We’re all learning together. We’re all asking ourselves, ‘What are we going to do?’”

13


Young alumnae return to Cleveland to find a revitalized city eager to welcome them back home S T O R Y B Y K AT H L E E N O S B O R N E PHOTOS BY KEITH BERR


n electric guitar lays down a bare rock-and-roll bass line while escalating aerial footage of a black-and-white Cleveland skyline fills the screen. As the drums come in, big block letters appear in a steady succession of phrases punctuated by the beat: “You may have read the stories. Heard the jokes. But this isn’t the place for people who follow the herd. The city where rock was born knows a thing or two about passion, freedom, and doing it your way. No matter what. Because what they never understood, is that while they were talking about us … We. Weren’t. Listening.”

HB 15

Pictured (l-r) at Cleveland Metroparks Edgewater Beach in July: Bethany Costilow Baldwin ’01, Cassi Pittman ’01, Elizabeth Falco ’01, Kristen Bowman ’03, Lauren Harris ’06, Tierney Healey ’06, Sheena Dee Pauley ’84, Molly Bruce Downing ’60, Angela Amos ’01, and Becca Levinsky ’10. Read more about this Cleveland waterfront destination on the inside front cover.


#BEAUTIFULBEACON

Elizabeth

Falco ’01 stands under the GE Chandelier at PlayhouseSquare, the world’s largest permanent crystal chandelier. Studded with a whopping 4,200 crystals, the outdoor lighting installation is suspended over the intersection of East 14th Street and Euclid Avenue. Unveiled in a “Dazzle the District” ceremony in 2014, it’s designed to bring the inside out, as it echoes the motif of the graceful lighting that adorns the theaters at PlayhouseSquare. The chandelier is illuminated every evening, along with the updated signage that welcomes nearly 1 million visitors to more than 1,000 programs throughout the year in the country’s largest performing arts center outside of New York City.


Civic cheerleaders asked everyone who manages a personal or professional social media platform to embrace their self-assured “This is CLE” slogan and use it as a hashtag attached to pictures and casual public observations about how the city has grown and changed and evolved—and become downright cool—in defiance of the naysayers. The approach has worked exceedingly well. Eighteen months after the campaign’s unveiling, there are hundreds of #ThisisCLE posts made to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other channels chronicling everyday citizens partaking in “world-class experiences without the world-class ego”—everything from festivals and concerts to happy hours and trips to the farmers market—every day of the week. Why has this hometown pride movement taken off in such a big way? Well, as it turns out, there’s a whole lot in Cleveland to be proud of. Kristen Bowman ’03 is exactly the kind of community spokesperson the #ThisisCLE folks had in mind when they introduced their own-your-own-narrative crusade. The Hathaway Brown alum and 2007 graduate of South Carolina’s Wofford College traveled and worked overseas as an au pair in France for a time after she received her degree in French,

then she moved back to the Palmetto State for a few years. But her hometown kept calling her. “I realized that every time I came back to Cleveland, it was harder and harder to leave,” she says. “Despite those mild yet beautiful South Carolina winters, there always seemed to be so much happening in Cleveland that felt so alive.” So she packed her bags and returned for good in 2011. She’s now an account manager living in Tremont, a historic neighborhood of Cleveland just west of the Cuyahoga River that’s known for its restaurants, boutiques, art galleries, and stately church buildings. Bowman is just one of the faces of the Millennial Brain Gain that Cleveland has enjoyed over the last decade. Since 2006, the number of college-educated adults under the age of 34 living in the city has skyrocketed by 91 percent, according to a study by the Center for Population Dynamics at Cleveland State University’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs. Chief researcher and Center Director Richey Piiparinen says that he can’t give a one-word answer to the question of what’s luring these young people to Northeast Ohio’s central city, but the job market is most certainly a big part of the draw. Home to the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, and a number of biomedical companies and business incubators, Cleveland is a hotbed for careers in

healthcare, healthcare innovation, manufacturing, engineering, and the maker sciences. Knowledge work is on the rise here, according to Piiparinen, and Cleveland is attractive to entrepreneurs as well. With cheaper storefronts and more space available to conduct business, there are “lower barriers to entry,” he says. Additionally, “real estate development in the urban core is picking up speed, and former manufacturing spaces are being turned into live-work spaces.” Piiparinen, who will share his perspective at the Private Schools with Public Purpose conference to be held at HB in 2016 (see PSPP in CLE on page 10), says that in addition to the reimagined and redesigned existing structures to

HB

Cleveland Anthem, a video produced by Destination Cleveland, the city’s convention and visitors bureau, unapologetically announced the booster organization’s new branding campaign, “This is Cleveland,” in 2014. The extended trailer showcases scenes of the colorful people and locations that make Cleveland what it is. You catch glimpses of some traditional cultural institutions that have fed our interests for decades: the famous armor court at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the iconic I.M. Pei-designed glass pyramid of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the reliable old dinosaur bones at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. You see other, newer developments too. There’s the lively strip along West 25th Street just over the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge in Ohio City, packed with hip restaurants and nightclubs that have risen in the shadow of the century-old West Side Market. There’s also the Horseshoe Casino where Higbee’s used to be, the landmark house with the leg lamp in the front window where Ralphie and his family lived in A Christmas Story (now open for tours), and an urban indoor mountain bike park studded with cascading man-made hills and chasms. And remember the depressingly polluted Cuyahoga River, whose fire launched a thousand late-night talk show jabs and whose cleanup launched the modern environmental movement? People are kayaking on it now.

17


#TASTEMAKERS

HB alumnae (l-r) Becca

Levinsky ’10, Kristen Bowman ’03, Dora Huang ’09, and Julie Golinski ’09 flank Jonathon Sawyer, winner of the 2015 James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef Great Lakes, and chef/owner of several renowned restuarants, including The Greenhouse Tavern on East 4th Street, Cleveland’s trendy dining, entertainment, and residential district. Spanning the distance between Prospect and Euclid avenues, East 4th Street can often be seen on TV, as national networks have taken a liking to the backdrop created by the vibrant cobblestone hotspot at the center of Cleveland’s flourishing food scene. It’s also the address of Lola Bistro, the flagship dining mecca owned by another James Beard Award-winning chef, media personality, and tireless Cleveland champion Michael Symon.


boo∙mer∙ang accommodate habitation, there’s a whole lot of new construction happening in Cleveland as well. With condos, apartments, and other new housing stock under development, people are able to find downtown dwellings that meet their needs. There are still plenty of beautiful homes with nice-sized yards available in the neighborhoods that circle the business and cultural districts too, in places such as Kamm’s Corners to the west and Larchmere to the east.

The first Republican Presidential debate of the 2016 election season was held at Quicken Loans Arena this August, in the same place where media from around the globe convened earlier this year to cover LeBron James’ triumphant return to the Cavaliers, and the team’s historic trip to the NBA Finals. Travel + Leisure listed Cleveland among only 12 U.S. destinations as one of the “Best Places to Travel in 2015,” and the city made Fodor’s “Go List” this year, right alongside Paris and Singapore. Other publications that recently have taken notice of Cleveland’s resurgence include The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Forbes. Tierney Healey ’06 has lived in Cleveland’s Warehouse District, right across the street from the office where she works as a senior account executive for The Adcom Group, for the last three and a half years. In that time, she’s been able to experience parts of the city she never had when she was a student at HB. She’s also able to do things here that she couldn’t do when she lived in New York City working on Ralph Lauren’s Rugby line after she graduated from Amherst College with an art degree. “I have a car here,” she says. “I can drive wherever I want. There’s so much to do in Cleveland, and more and more excitement is added every day. There’s something happening here. You can feel the energy. I wouldn’t want to leave and miss it.” Healey enjoys meeting friends and HB classmates at restaurants and sporting events downtown and in Ohio City. She is working her way through The Plain Dealer’s list of “365 Things to do in Cleveland in 2015.” After a recent trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art, she decided to become a member. She also was part of the cheering crowd on hand at the Q for the August 6 Republican Presidential debate (she serves on the advocacy council for the party locally). She makes the short trek to Case Western Reserve University to take classes at the Weatherhead School of Management in the part-time MBA program. And she lives close enough to her family to see them as often as she likes. She especially enjoys playing tennis and golf with her grandmother during summer weekends. “It’s all about taking advantage of the opportunities,” she says.

A term demographers and city planners have coined to describe native Clevelanders who left the area for a time, but have come back home to live, work, and raise families.

You don’t have to be a permanently returned resident to appreciate how the city continues to grow and evolve, though. Dora Huang ’09 is a 2013 graduate of Princeton University who is now enrolled at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. She loves visiting Cleveland and spending time at such familiar haunts as the West Side Market and Lake Erie. But she’s a big fan of experiencing all the new things the region has to offer as well. “I’ve only been able to come back for one- to two-week trips,” she says, “but Cleveland has changed so much since I was at HB. My friends who have stuck around have brought me to tons of new cafés and restaurants in Tremont and Ohio City—places I rarely explored growing up.”

CHECK OUT the Cleveland Anthem video and find more #ThisisCLE resources about our city on the rise at www.hb.edu/magazine

HB

Notably, Piiparinen also points to “perception” as a driver of residential migration. Cleveland has enjoyed quite a bit of positive press lately. The city was the site of the 2014 International Gay Games, which brought thousands of athletes and spectators to its hotels, restaurants, parks, and sports venues for eight full days. Organizers and civic officials considered the event to be a great success and a test run of sorts for an even bigger event: the 2016 Republican National Convention. In making the announcement that the city had landed the gig, RNC site selection team leader Enid Mickelsen said, “If you haven’t been to Cleveland in five years, you haven’t been to Cleveland. They are undergoing an extraordinary renaissance.” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus echoed the sentiment, saying, “The city is on the rise. If you haven’t been to Cleveland lately, it’s a real surprise how beautiful it is down by that lake.”

(\'bü-mə-ˌraŋ\) n. –

19


“A critical mass of energy and enthusiasm seems to have gathered and one can feel the shockwaves of positive change in every aspect of city life.”

#NEWPERSPECTIVE

Thanks to a partnership

between the Fred and Laura Bidwell Foundation and the Cleveland Museum of Art, visitors to the Transformer Station in the up-and-coming mixed residential and industrial neighborhood of Hingetown on the west side of Cleveland can view original contemporary art exhibitions from around the world free of charge. CMA at Transformer Station is an expansive renovated space housed in what once was a substation of the Cleveland Railway Company, powering the Detroit Avenue Streetcar Line from 1924-1949.

The

museum outpost, opened in 2013, is home to a rotating array of art and complementary programming. In July, Tierney Healey ’06 and some of her fellow alumnae toured Crackle & Drag, a photography, sculpture, and cinematic exploration of family artifacts by local artist TR Ericsson.


Two other members of the HB Class of 2001 recently have brought the benefit of their Ivy League educations back to Cleveland. Cassi Pittman, who was designated by Scene Magazine in 2015 as one of “30 Clevelanders who we love from all walks of life” and profiled in the publication’s annual People Issue, is a graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. She’s now living in Cleveland and working as an assistant professor of sociology at CWRU. She loves being back home, she says, where she’s rediscovering all of the things that she cherished growing up, and exploring the many ways that the city has changed. She relishes the chance to make a difference as well. She came to Scene’s attention when she delivered a speech at the East Cleveland Public Library in which she illuminated the pros and cons driving the debate over whether Cleveland proper should annex the neighboring small city of East Cleveland. She also is interested in developing a course to help students understand the socioeconomic characteristics of the region. “There is a lot of growth and development and a need for talented, bright women to lead the city,” Pittman says. “There are so many ways we can bring our knowledge and experiences from living outside of Cleveland to improve and contribute to that growth.” An energy portfolio manager and graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, Angela Amos ’01 is an impressive contributor to the city’s knowledge base as well. As an undergraduate, she studied black culture and politics. She has worked as an electricity trader in New York, Atlanta, and Houston, and after receiving her MBA, she walked the Camino de Santiago, “a semi-spiritual and semi-social 500-mile

HB

Many HB graduates have lived and learned in locales far and wide before coming back to Cleveland to put down roots. Those same women say they aren’t sacrificing quality of life at all in the exchange. Elizabeth Falco ’01 earned her undergraduate degree from Washington & Lee University in Washington, D.C., where she also worked for AllianceBernstein. After a number of years at the investment management firm, she decided to stretch her wings, and she moved to Barcelona, Spain, and got her MBA from ESADE Business School. Back in the States with her business degree in hand, she’s worked in private wealth management and nonprofit strategic fundraising. These days, as she searches for her ideal career, you’ll find her consulting at the 103-year-old City Club of Cleveland, also known as “America’s Citadel of Free Speech.” The community resource is the longest continuously running independent free speech forum in the country. Falco is civically engaged in a number of additional arenas as well. Living in the heart of the city, she’s a City Advocate (class of 2015-2017) for the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, she’s a member of the Corporate Leadership Committee for the Cleveland Play House, and she’s part of the Advancement Committee for the YWCA of Greater Cleveland. She encourages other young professionals to take advantage of the region’s rich heritage and to lend their voices to the mix as well. “Cleveland is a place where you can have it all—access to world-class cultural institutions, a variety of entertainment options, excellent cuisine, and an affordable lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a place where you can roll up your sleeves, get involved, and really impact your community. We need the best and the brightest to come here and help us shape the future of the city.”

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#FRESHPRODUCE

The

historic

Cleveland Trust rotunda building at the corner of East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue is now home to the all-new Downtown Cleveland Heinen’s Grocery Store. Designed by renowned architect George Browne Post (who also drew the plans for the New York Stock Exchange) and first opened as a banking complex in 1908, the building underwent a careful renovation to preserve its aesthetic beauty while being repurposed as a grocery store to accommodate the everincreasing number of downtown residents and office workers. It was reopened as Heinen’s in 2015. Bethany Costilow Baldwin ’01 (l) and Cassi Pittman ’01 (r) enjoy the view on the second-floor balcony under the gorgeous Grand Atrium Skylight and lovely murals painted by artist Francis Millet (who died in the sinking of the Titanic) that tell the story of how the state was settled.


Angela Amos ’01

“There is a lot of growth and development and a need for talented, bright women to lead the city. There are so many ways we can bring our knowledge and experiences from living outside of Cleveland to improve and contribute to that growth.”

pilgrimage across northern Spain.” Back in Cleveland, in addition to the balanced perspective she brings to her work, she brings fresh eyes to view the redevelopment of her hometown, and she enjoys being able to escape the noise of the city in the natural preserves of the Cleveland Metroparks.

Bethany Costilow Baldwin ’01, who now lives in Shaker Heights, has appreciated being able to introduce the area to her husband, a native of New Hampshire. The sales and marketing manager for Hyde Park Mouldings Inc., she holds degrees in political science from Hiram College, and in architectural plasterwork from the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, S.C. When she began working for Hyde Park, Baldwin was living in the New York metropolitan area, but the company allowed her the opportunity to move to any U.S. city of her choosing to complete her work remotely. “My husband and I drew a map of the country and considered such cities as Austin, Chicago, Seattle, and Madison before deciding that Cleveland was the right place for us,” she says. Baldwin was able to become actively involved in the Ohio & Lake Erie regional chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art,

CSU’s Richey Piiparinen agrees that the differences in the scenery are quite noticeable these days. “People who come here expecting to see a depopulated Rust Belt city of abandoned, vacant buildings might be surprised to see that there are people in the windows,” he says. Kristen Bowman ’03 assures others that it’s not at all difficult to simultaneously embrace Cleveland as both a hardworking industrial city and a city on the rise. “I love that Cleveland is not perfect,” she says. “I love that it’s still a little rough around the edges, and that there are thousands of proud Clevelanders trying to make the city a better, safer, more fun place to live. I love the energy in this town and how nice people are here. The mix of development and progress with the gritty backdrop makes the transparency of the city changing and growing so incredibly visible. It makes the city feel alive.” Don’t believe her? Lauren Harris ’06 invites you to come see for yourself. “I encourage those HB sisters who haven’t been back to Cleveland in the past three years to venture back home for a few days,” she says. “Check out all of the excitement.”

Learn more about Cleveland’s renaissance and plan your trip home at www.thisiscleveland.com

HB

The region’s brain gain extends to the inner-ring suburbs of Cleveland too. Lauren Harris ’06, a resident of Cleveland Heights, returned to the area armed with a degree in sports management from Temple University in Philadelphia. She’s now the event manager for the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission, and she has been responsible for managing more than 30 national and international sporting events in her five years on the job. She’s also the owner of an event and brand-management company and the mother of a new baby, Layla Marie, born in 2014. “Much of my time now is spent enjoying my daughter, which has been so much fun because I pretty much get to be a kid again,” she says. “Because of her, I see myself exploring the city way more and attending tons of events that Cleveland has to offer. It’s actually pretty amazing how many free events take place in the city each weekend.”

where she says she has been able to make more of a difference than she could in the New York chapter. Like her classmate Angela Amos, she also enjoys the ease with which she can escape to the great outdoors here. “We take advantage of the incredible Metroparks system,” she says. “We are regulars at the Shaker Square Farmers Market and are passionate about the resources we have here in Northeast Ohio for local food. There are some marked changes in the tone and landscape of the city in just the past five to ten years. A critical mass of energy and enthusiasm seems to have gathered and one can feel the shockwaves of positive change in every aspect of city life.”

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by Thrity Umrigar

PHOTO BY SHANNON AHLSTRAND; TRAVEL PHOTOS BY HB STUDENTS

Joe Vogel’s passion for global education is contagious, and he shares it in his classroom and beyond


I am a citizen, not of Athens or of Greece,

but of the world. In the end,

the best way to explain Joe Vogel and what he hopes to accomplish as Director of the Center for Global Citizenship at Hathaway Brown may be to simply reference that quote from Socrates, which is stenciled on the wall of his classroom. Vogel, 42, has traveled to more than 60 nations, and is the personification of a global citizen, a man truly at home in the world. And it is this sense of ease—which is underpinned by a ferocious intellect and a roving, promiscuous curiosity—that he strives to impart to HB’s Global Scholars each year.

earn it. When he went to the tropical paradise of Belize, for instance, he skipped its famous beaches. Instead, before he left the United States, he sent a fax to the president of Belize, asking for an audience. “I have no interest in the beach and sand,” he says. “What better way to understand a country than by meeting with its president?”

The Global Scholars program is a four-year, comprehensive elective in which students investigate pressing global issues that range from economics and politics to foreign policy. In their senior year, each scholar writes an ambitious 25- to 40-page thesis in one of several capstone courses. Despite its rigor—students must take four years of a global language, pass a comprehensive geography exam, defend their capstone thesis before a committee, and participate in at least one overseas trip—the overwhelming majority of HB students will graduate with a Global Scholar diploma designation. And Joe Vogel is a large part of what attracts students to the program.

It’s all there in that one anecdote—the drive, the intellectual curiosity, the desire to learn, to know—all the sparks that he wants to ignite in the young students who flock to his Global Scholars program at HB. And there’s one other thing he tries to impart: a sense of humility. Vogel is the opposite of the Ugly American. He visits countries that are poor, dirty, and dysfunctional, with not a trace of Western superiority. Whether he is in Uzbekistan or Yemen or Laos, he is there not to teach the locals; he is there to learn from them. “It has to do with humility, an open mind and not being judgmental,” he says, the dark eyes shining with passion. “And a love for the complexity of the world.”

And thus began a life of travel. He earned a degree in political science from Grove City College in Pennsylvania. And then he traveled. In 1995, he joined the Summit County Prosecutor’s Child Support Enforcement Agency as a caseworker. In his free time, he traveled. But no matter where he went, Vogel never saw himself as a tourist. When he visited a country, he wanted to understand it, to learn it, to

Indeed, differences in cultures don’t scare him; they excite him. “For so many people, this (way of life) is so normal. And if it’s normal for them, it’s normal for me. I’ve never felt like an outsider, no matter where I’ve gone,” he says. That even includes the region in Yemen where Osama bin Laden’s family lived and where Vogel visited in 1998. “It was very tribal. And I’ve never felt more like an honored guest.” Overseas travel is an integral part of the Global Scholars program and every student has to take at least one trip abroad in order to graduate from the rigorous program. The Center for Global Citizenship offers roughly 10 travel opportunities a year, most of them to the developing world, and more than a quarter of HB’s students go abroad each year. While the country they go to may differ, as may the focus of their program—literature, the performing arts, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or development issues—what the students share is their attitude toward the countries they visit. Continued on page 27.

HB

It was a long, circuitous route that brought Vogel to HB, but in hindsight, it seems as if he has spent his life auditioning for his current role. His father was a history buff and Vogel’s home in Akron was filled with objects from around the world, including a photograph of King Hussein of Jordan, autographed to Vogel’s dad. The wanderlust bit Vogel early, during a high school trip to Austria and Germany accompanied by his German teacher, at a time when the first cracks had already appeared in the Berlin Wall. Vogel and two other students traveled with their teacher on a nostalgic tour of the Berlin apartment where she’d lived during World War II. He was hooked. “I wanted to do this forever,” he recalls.

As it turned out, the president wasn’t available. So Vogel hung out with the Attorney General and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Belize.

25


STAMPS OF APPROVAL

Students, parents, alumnae, partner agencies, and others have strong feelings about the benefits of the Center for Global Citizenship at Hathaway Brown. Fuller versions of the testimonials contained here and several additional endorsements of the program may be found online at www.hb.edu/global. To lead implies that someone is following. By that standard, Hathaway Brown is not only leading its students on a more globalized path through school, but it is also leading the nation on both global curriculum with its leading Global Scholar program, and on travel programs that set the standard for innovative, transformative experiences. Willy Fluharty, Director of the Nexus Center for Global Studies at Cape Henry Collegiate School, Virginia Beach, Va.

The Center for Global Citizenship at Hathaway Brown is instrumental in preparing its students for a multicultural, multidimensional world and to be effective citizens and leaders. The CGC immerses HB students in academics and practical experiences to be self-aware and well prepared for the 21st century. I am particularly impressed with the trips to India where HB students have a genuine exposure to that culture and economic system.

Thomas C. Barry, Founder, Zephyr Management and Harriet Mullin Barry ’32 India Fellowship

In a world where conflicts emerge on an everyday basis, having knowledge of how the international system functions is imperative. The Center for Global Citizenship equipped me with a foundation better than anything I could’ve imagined. The passion that I discovered for international relations through this program influenced my decision to major in International Studies with a focus in national security and foreign policy. With the guidance of the faculty in the CGC, I acquired the skills that enabled me to secure an internship with U.S. Senator Rob Portman on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, a subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Arielle Goldberg HB ’13, American University School of International Service ’17

Our family has an inherent excitement

and

curiosity

about different people, places, and

cultures.

We

chose

Hathaway Brown for high school hoping that the Center for Global Citizenship would encourage

these

interests

in our daughters and instill a sense of responsibility to participate in the global community. What we got was even better—our girls came away not with a feeling of obligation, but with a genuine eagerness to travel, to learn, and to communicate without borders.

Peter and Allison Catanzaro, Parents of Alice HB ’13, Princeton University ’17; and Isabel HB ’16

Going to Cambodia profoundly changed my life. It’s hard for me to fully express what happened to me, for I am still changing from it. The way I view the world, interact with people, and engage with my surroundings has been forever altered from the experience. Elana Scott HB ’14, Pitzer College ’18


“In preparation for these trips, there is a lot of discussion about the cultural traditions of the country,” says McKenna Ritter ’16. “For instance, Senegal has varying faiths. You have to have respect for the local culture.” Her classmate Madeline Shade ’16 agrees. “Each culture has good things and flaws. Looking down at a country that doesn’t have wealth but has other things of value doesn’t make sense.”

And just like that, Vogel has tied the deadly dull issue of energy security to gender politics. But he isn’t done yet. The recent earthquake in Nepal is on everybody’s mind and Vogel uses it to talk about that developing nation’s lack of hydro-electrical power. Because of this, he says, Nepal lacks manufacturing jobs and as a result, most young people have left the

But it is not enough for the Global Scholars to learn these lessons themselves. “You have to show the rest of the world what you’ve learned,” Ritter says. “You have to dispel (false) notions that people have.”

If Joe Vogel comes alive overseas—whether it be eating street food in India (he apparently has an enviably strong digestive system) or hobnobbing with the Attorney General of Belize— he is equally at home in the classroom. In fact, he is something of a force of nature in the classroom. His students tease him about the theatrical quality of his teaching performance. “He whispers for emphasis and he shouts for emphasis,” Shade says with a grin. country to seek employment elsewhere. “Fifty percent of the workforce is out of the country,” he says. And this, he explains, looping around to where he started, is why it was the elderly who helped with the searchand-rescue efforts, because so many young men had left the country.

Today’s lesson is on energy security and a group of 18 girls—half of the usual class, since the others are off taking an exam—sit in a semicircle. Vogel starts by telling them that Charles Dunbar, former U.S. ambassador to Yemen and Qatar, will be visiting the school and urging them to attend. He spends five minutes introducing Dunbar, then comes up for air. “Who should want to go? Besides everybody?” he asks, and then proceeds to discuss who should attend based on their specific interests. Then comes the kicker: 80 girls have already signed up to hear Dunbar speak.

And so it goes, an exhilarating, brain-polishing hour that goes from the Carter Doctrine to the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s, to the energy investor T. Boone Pickens. Along the way, Vogel demonstrates an iron-clad mastery of his subject matter, even as that subject matter keeps growing: Fracking. Fukushima. Petrobras. Shale fields around the United States. Arcane details such as the number of new permits for oil well exploration issued by the state of Ohio in the last six months. Economics, history, geography, politics, foreign policy are all connected, as Vogel skates around the room, gesticulating, the deep voice rising and falling, asking questions, prodding for answers. And here’s the most amazing part: His students are with him every step of the way. Every question he asks, someone knows the answer. Every connection that he draws, a girl responds with a question of her own. It is as if he has created miniature Vogels in the classroom—a group of girls who are articulate, engaged, and imbued with the same restless energy and intellectual curiosity of the world in which they live.

Energy security doesn’t seem like an exciting topic, but before Vogel is done, he has made it seem like the most important subject under the sun. His genius is in his ability to connect the dots, linking not just politics and economics but also tying these to foreign policy. He begins with a deceptively simple question: “How many people across the world lack access to electricity?” A student has the right answer: Three billion people live in energy poverty. “So,” Vogel asks, “if you were a young woman living in a place that was energy poor, what would you be spending your days doing?” “Gathering firewood and water,” a student answers. “Aha,” says Vogel. “So what would that girl not be doing? She wouldn’t be in school.” A student raises her hand and recalls a “girl our age,” that she’d met during the class trip to Senegal. “She only slept four hours a day because she was gathering water and trying to go to school,” she tells the class.

In 1998, Vogel moved to Columbus to work as an assistant to Ohio Lt. Governor Maureen O’Connor. “I loved my job, but part of me felt like something was missing,” he says. He was coming to the slow realization that teaching would be a way of connecting his love for government, law, and global issues. And so, in 2000, he quit his job to earn a master’s degree in Social Studies in Global Education from The Ohio State University. His goal was to teach overseas. He was in rural Vietnam when 9/11 happened and learned about it almost 15 hours after the fact. He remembers the plane ride back to the U.S. two days later. The flight attendants on the plane were crying. They had lost friends in the attack.

HB

In class, Vogel is an animated, constantly moving presence, a cross between Stephen Colbert and Jim Carrey, interspersing his stream of words with an occasional command: “Write it down,” or “Think critically.”

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The year that followed was a hard time for the country and a hard time for him. There was a roadblock—he couldn’t get a work visa overseas without two years of teaching experience. The fruitless job search left him discouraged. Finally, he took a two-year position as a substitute teacher at Brooklyn Middle School on Cleveland’s west side.

Upper School Global Scholars visit the classroom of Kristen Wise and Emily Mount to read The Spider Weaver, A Legend of the Kente Cloth by Margaret Musgrove and Julia Cairns to the Early Childhood students. The older girls then assisted their young charges in decorating their own kente cloth squares inspired by the vibrant Ghanaian textiles described in the book.

His luck changed in 2004 when a fellow teacher, Bridgette Nadzam-Kasubick, who had recently been hired at HB, told him of another opening there. He applied and was hired as a fifthgrade teacher. By Vogel’s second year, HB’s Head of School Bill Christ was encouraging him to implement a preliminary version of what would become the Global Scholars program. They began with 50 students attending classes during their lunch break, eating their bagged lunches as they participated. Administrators expected to end the session with only five or six girls remaining. They were wrong. Only five or six dropped the class. From this small beginning, the program grew in numbers and popularity. For instance, Vogel says that out of a class of 104 freshmen in 2014, 99 girls signed up for Global Scholars. For many students, the program has been a life-altering experience. “It’s important to be an educated global citizen,” says Evie Schumann ’16. “I want to have an international component to whatever I do.”

Global Guides

Early Childhood students learn about diversity and multiculturalism from their Upper School sisters And because of her interactions with NGOs in Senegal, McKenna Ritter is now interested in studying international relations and joining the Peace Corps. Vogel still remembers his first day at the HB Middle School morning assembly. He was one of only three male teachers at the school. A lessconfident man may have been nervous to see that sea of female students and teachers. Not Vogel. He felt energized, challenged by what seemed like an opportunity to educate young minds. Today, he says he still loves teaching at a girls’ school. “It is so empowering to me to see the tangible results of what they’re doing here. We are chipping away at gender stereotypes. The girls can decide their own futures. We are giving them the skills to do anything they want to do.”

Hathaway Brown’s Upper School students aren’t the only ones who reap the benefits of a multicultural, globalized curriculum. Joe Vogel, Director of HB’s Center for Global Citizenship, established a collaborative initiative in 2013 in partnership with Early Childhood Director Jane Brown and EC teacher Kristen Wise, who oversees the program. Global Scholars in grades 11 and 12 work in EC classrooms for a full semester, sharing broad international perspectives through lessons they design with faculty assistance. For HB’s youngest students, an understanding of community evolves from home and family, and widens as children actively engage with the world. Although places around the globe can be a far reach, bridges of understanding can be built by highlighting connections as well as by celebrating differences. Based in storytelling, the EC Global Scholars program provides an opportunity for US Global Scholars students to communicate their greater cultural experiences through this universal language as they enrich the lives of their young audience and deepen their own understanding.


PHOTOS BY SHANNON AHLSTRAND

Way to go, Class of 2015!

Beginning in our Infant

& Toddler Center and continuing all the way through senior year, Hathaway Brown students are nurtured, supported, and challenged to reach their maximum potential. A recent column in The Atlantic points out that

young scholars do not suddenly become successful just because they’ve gained admission to a top-tier college: “… the truer thing is that their lives have already been shaped decisively by the sum of their own past decisions—the habits developed, the friends made, and the challenges overcome.”

Baldwin Wallace University Barnard College Bates College Boston University Bryn Mawr College Bucknell University

The HB Class of 2015 was offered more than

Howard University (2)

The Ohio State University (6)

The University of Iowa Kenyon College Lehigh University (2)

Tulane University University of Utah Vanderbilt University

London School of Economics (UK)

Case Western Reserve University (3)

Loyola University Chicago

Wagner College

Macalester College

Wake Forest University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Washington University in St. Louis

Miami University, Oxford (6)

Wesleyan University

Chapman University Clark University

University of Colorado, Boulder (2)

University of Miami

Cornell University (4)

University of Michigan (3)

Dartmouth College (2)

New York University

Denison University

Northwestern University

DePaul University

University of Pennsylvania (5)

Eastern Michigan University

Rhodes College

Elon University

University of Richmond

Emory University (3)

University of Rochester

Franklin University Switzerland

Saint Louis University

George Washington University Georgetown University (2) Hamilton College (2)

Skidmore College University of Southern California (2)

University of Vermont

Williams College (2) The College of Wooster Worcester Polytechnic Institute Yale University (3)

In total, 18 HB seniors received

24 OFFERS to attend Ivy League schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale.

HB

Colgate University (2)

100% of the HB Class of 2015 is off continuing their studies at some of the best colleges and universities in the world, and 80% of those students were accepted to their top-choice schools, or one of their top choices, if they ranked them by group. We couldn’t be prouder of our girls.

University of St. Andrews (UK)

Carleton College

Colby College

in merit and other college scholarships, including full tuition packages.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

29


Presenting the 2015 Hathaway Brown Distinguished Alumnae and Alumnae Achievement Award recipients


admirable alumnae by Lisa Kroeger Murtha ’88

PHOTOS BY JASON MILLER

She’s been working since 2011 as a coordinator for the D.C. Senior Advisory Coalition, but Fox says she’s now slowly changing her focus. In the spirit of her career, she’s spending more time giving back to her own community, helping residents “build volunteer services for each other so that people can age in place.”

Distinguished Alumnae Award Winner:

Elizabeth Stewart Fox ’60

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It started nearly 40 years ago in graduate school during her social work field placements. “I was at the D.C. city council and assigned to work on final stages of some nursing home legislation,” she says, when she encountered a Catholic Charities representative who wanted to build a group home for low-income senior citizens. After graduation, Fox went on to open that Washington, D.C.-area group home, plus two more. Expanding seniors’ community connections was the goal of Fox’s ensuing professional endeavors: becoming Executive Director of Iona Senior Services in 1982—a feat she calls her “most lasting accomplishment”—and starting up D.C.’s first Experience Corps program. While at Iona, Fox watched the organization grow from a small social service agency with one community center, into a major provider (offering everything from meals to transportation, adult day care, art classes and case-management services) with several D.C. locations, a globally accessible Helpline, and “hundreds of volunteers.” In 1993, Fox was named “Washingtonian of the Year.” Experience Corps, which she brought to D.C. in 1999, connects senior citizen volunteers—tutors and mentors—with inner-city children in need of academic guidance. Fox eventually became a lobbyist for the organization, and helped establish provisions of both the 2006 Older Americans Act and the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which included initiatives including “working community volunteers into No Child Left Behind,” and making sure that enough emphasis was placed on “asking state and local agencies that funnel funds to local nonprofits to have a plan about what they’re doing.” After all, says Fox, “it’s not just about handouts to older people, it’s about engaging them.”

HB

Making sure aging Americans live full, connected, and meaningful lives is at the crux of everything Elizabeth Stewart Fox ’60 does.

Staying in place is an important concept to Fox—one that likely stretches back to her HB days. “My parents died when I was starting my sophomore year,” she says, noting that she had no other family in Cleveland. With the help of then-Headmistress Anne Cutter Coburn, Fox was able to finish out her high school years at HB, living with other boarders in the school’s dorm. “I had only been at HB three years,” she says, “but it was my life. I felt very secure there.”

Distinguished Alumnae Award Winner:

Jean Mackenzie ’65 Jean Mackenzie ‘65 is living proof that age should never be a barrier to achieving your dreams. Mackenzie—the founder of Mackenzie Creamery, an award-winning goat cheese producer that’s been featured in Town & Country, The New York Times, and Cleveland Magazine (hers was named “Best Goat Cheese in Northeast Ohio”)—attended HB for four years, from fifth through eighth grades, and often credits the school with helping make her who she is today. “The education I received in those four years was so superior to what I received in my high school years—the stick-to-it-iveness, thinking out of the box, creative thinking—that I carried it with me,” she says. Mackenzie’s early career was eclectic—she was a flight attendant on Air Force Two (the Vice Presidential jet, under Lyndon Johnson), an


executive secretary in a law office, and a licensed real estate agent for the Western Reserve Land Conservancy. It wasn’t until she took a Penn State cheese-making class on a 2007 vacation, though, that she discovered, at age 61, her true calling. “It was like an epiphany,” she says of the immediate draw she felt to the art of goat cheese making. “I felt this tremendous sense of urgency that if I don’t do this now, I will never do it.”

Alumnae Achievement Award Winner:

Danielle Bradshaw Lane ’90

So she learned all that she could, developed and perfected her own chevre recipes, and started Mackenzie Creamery on the Hiram, Ohio, farm where she and her “beau,” Jim, an architect, live. “It’s been eight years and we’re now distributed in 23 states,” says Mackenzie, whose most award-winning recipe is her cognac-fig chevre. “We have seven dairies milking for us, (and) our sales in December were 400 percent above last December’s sales,” she says.

“We work hard to keep our pregnancy rates high,” says Danielle Bradshaw Lane ’90, founder of the Lane Fertility Institute in Marin County, California. But unlike other fertility clinics, she goes on, “we try to have an individual relationship with our patients in an environment that is warm and compassionate. Patients know they’re getting the best practices but they don’t feel like they’re in a Petri dish.”

Her daughter, Liz, learned the craft from Mackenzie and has launched the Portland Creamery out in Oregon (she, too, has won numerous awards for her recipes). And her youngest son, Rob DeMuch, who joined Mackenzie Creamery in 2011 as business manager, is now “running the company.” This, in turn, has allowed Mackenzie to pursue her next favorite pastime: weaving.

That vision has developed over a significant career in medicine—a natural choice for Lane, who both “loved math and science” (she credits HB teacher Don Southard with helping nurture that love), and “always wanted to do something in women’s health.” She explored everything from obstetrics to oncology during her college, graduate and post-graduate years, earning a Bachelor of Science in physiology from McGill University, finishing her medical training at the University of Pittsburgh, and completing her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Yale-New Haven Hospital at Yale University. During her training, Lane noticed that there were lots of women going through residency and medical school who were having a hard time getting pregnant.

“All the things I love to do, they all have this rhythm,” says Mackenzie. “You can’t weave faster. Goats dry off the end of December. They don’t start giving milk again until February or March. I love the Internet, and what did we do before smart phones? But there’s a pace to all of that that just is not natural. Working with dairies and seasons—it forces you into this rhythm, and it’s wonderful. It’s healthy.” And, as she has proven, it can be rewarding, too.

Is there an HB alumna you’d like to nominate for a 2016 Alumnae Award? Turn to page 35 to learn how.

Distinguished Alumnae Award First awarded in 1983, this award is presented to an alumna who has, through extraordinary effort and dedicated service to Hathaway Brown or her community, made a significant contribution in her particular field of endeavor, professional or volunteer.

Alumnae Achievement Award First awarded in 2004, the Alumnae Achievement Award recognizes an alumna who has graduated in the past 30 years and has achieved significant accomplishments in her professional or civic roles.

“The societal trend is how not to get pregnant,” Lane says, “but there is very little conversation about the reproductive timeline, the biological clock and how quickly we come out of it, especially when we’re on a career path.” On a quest to help women who faced difficulty conceiving, she completed her fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of California, San Francisco. Today, Lane’s practice has grown to three locations and she and her husband have five children of their own. Even so, balancing career and family hasn’t always been easy. “For my first three children,” she recalls, “I was told not to have a baby.” Pregnancy, her employers said, got in the way of work. Lane has made it a point to emphasize exactly the opposite in her own offices. “One of the goals of opening this practice,” she says, “was being able to ensure that people coming out of fellowship have a place to go that balances career and family life.” A worthy goal to be sure, and one that ultimately, she notes, “had a lot to do with the social structure I saw at HB. It reinforced the sense of beauty of having a family.” A 1988 graduate of Hathaway Brown, Lisa Kroeger Murtha is a freelance writer living in Cincinnati.


Alumnae Weekend at a Glance Celebrating Sisterhood 2015

All class years welcome! For more information and to see a gallery of images from this year’s celebration, please visit www.hb.edu/alumnaeweekend.

SAVE THE DATE!

Alumnae Weekend: May 20-21, 2016

HB

PHOTOS BY JASON MILLER

Thank you to everyone who attended Alumnae Weekend 2015. Over 240 alumnae came back to events on campus or to class gatherings to celebrate the friendships and traditions inspired by their alma mater and to see how HB girls today are MAKING the future. From the Engaging Global Issues class to Head of School Bill Christ’s Shakespeare presentation to the Trolley Tour of Cleveland, there was something for everyone!

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uncommon credentials

I

n 2015, Hathaway Brown graduating senior Emily Spencer became the fifth HB student to be named a finalist in the illustrious Intel Science Talent Search. The competition, which is open to all U.S. 12th graders, was formerly called the Westinghouse and is sometimes referred to as the “Little Nobel.” The Intel STS is one of the nation’s most well-respected math and science competitions, rewarding rigorous original research conducted by high school seniors. Every year, the Intel STS names 300 semifinalists and selects 40 finalists from the semifinalist pool. Emily Spencer, who conducted polymer research at Case Western Reserve University, and her classmate Emily Amjad ’15, who conducted cardiology research at CWRU’s School of Medicine, both were semifinalists this year. The girls were two of only five students selected in Ohio and the only private school students selected from Northeast Ohio. All program semifinalists received individual $1,000 prizes, along with $1,000 for each of their respective schools. The HB prizewinners were enrolled in the school’s signature Science Research & Engineering Program. As an Intel STS semifinalist, Emily Spencer received an additional $7,500 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., where she visited the White House and met President Obama in March. She also presented her research to an esteemed panel of judges and enjoyed a gala ceremony and dinner at which she was joined by her parents and SREP Director Patricia K. Hunt. She had the additional distinction of being the only finalist in Ohio and the only girl in the state to be recognized by both the Siemens Foundation Competition and Intel STS for her work.

Emily’s project “Synthesis of Photo-Healable and Thermal Shape-Memory Disulfide Polymers” was the culmination of her research at CWRU’s School of Engineering. Specifically, her work focused on chemically formulating shape-memory materials that can recall former shapes and return to them in response to certain stimuli. “In our lab, we make a polymer film, scratch it, then apply a UV light to it and it goes back to its former state before it was scratched,” she explains. This new material has numerous potential real-world applications, including in the automobile industry. It has taken many years of testing and recalibration to reach this point, as Emily and her colleagues in Dr. Stuart Rowan’s lab have worked with several types of materials, made adjustments to molecular weights, and varied the ratio balance to achieve a polymer that not only has a shape memory but also responds to stimuli. The Intel STS has awarded the work of HB SREP students with 20 semifinalist and five finalist designations since 2000. In addition to Emily Spencer, other HB alumnae who were named Intel STS finalists during their senior year of high school are Ann Lai (2001), Erin Schikowski (2007), Lizzie Coquillette (2009), and Caitlin Mann (2009). Along with cash prizes and trips to Washington, D.C., these young researchers also won laptop computers and had minor planets named after them by the Intel STS awards committee.

Emily Spencer had the additional distinction of being the only finalist in Ohio and the only girl in the state to be recognized by both the Siemens Foundation Competition and Intel STS for her research in 2015.


PHOTO BY JAMES DOUGLAS

A

s he embarks on his final year as Head of School, we asked Mr. Christ to reflect upon his tenure and to share his thoughts about a few things with the school community.

You’re the longtime male head of an all-girls institution. What’s the most important thing people should know about girls?

HB girls are incredibly imaginative, passionate, and fearless. They’re visionaries in training who are learning what it takes to get big things done in the world. Normally we think of mentors as older people who mold the young; that can work the other way, too. The girls are a glowing filament brightening and energizing this whole community, and they actually mentor those of us who have the privilege of teaching them. Their boldness and passion inspire us to elevate our game, and they feed a school-wide culture of optimism and accomplishment.

How would you describe your colleagues? In a word, amazing! We’ve never had a more talented or inventive group of faculty and staff. They’ve made the school what it is today, and their influence resonates for a lifetime in

head of school search update

the lives of the girls—who well know how fortunate they are to have such smart, caring, and cool teachers who are so deeply committed to helping them grow as learners and as outstanding human beings. I’m honored to have the chance to teach amongst so many legendary educators and dear friends.

How about the HB experience? The atmosphere is electric—everybody’s all in—doing their best for our girls and striving to make HB the most outstanding girls’ school on the planet if we’re not already there! I couldn’t imagine a more rewarding place to be. It’s a powerhouse with a loving heart.

What should everybody know about HB? We’re making history every day, shaping a new and more expansive future for women. And when the possibilities expand for girls and women, life gets better for everyone, everywhere. We truly have redefined the meaning of girls’ education by developing uniquely powerful vehicles for blowing the doors off of school, and liberating the potential of every girl, helping her uncover her true gifts and discover her best version of herself.

he Hathaway Brown Head Search Committee continues to make progress in locating a successor for Bill Christ. The committee has been meeting regularly and interviewing candidates with a planned goal to present a recommendation to the Board of Trustees sometime late this fall. For the most up-to-date information about the process, please visit www.hb.edu/headsearch.


Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID

Cleveland, Ohio Permit #3439

19600 North Park Boulevard Shaker Heights, Ohio 44122

PHOTO BY KEITH BERR

HB.edu /upcomingevents TAAL October 9, 7:30 p.m., The Ahuja Auditorium Multicultural performance event celebrating dance Middle & Upper School Open House October 22, 5 – 7 p.m. For parents of prospective students grades 5 – 12 Young Writers and Artists Festival October 30 – 31 Lectures and hands-on immersive workshops Infant & Toddler, Early Childhood, and Kindergarten Open House November 7, 10 – 11:30 a.m. For prospective Infant & Toddler through Kindergarten families Upper School Fall Play November 20 – 21, The Ahuja Auditorium 7:30 p.m. Fri. – Sat. The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Fair Trade Sale December 7, HB Atrium, 11 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. Support artisans from around the world Masterworks Choral and Music Concert December 8, Tri-C East, 7:30 p.m. Middle and Upper School musical ensembles Winterfest December 18, 10:30 a.m. HB students and alumnae gather to celebrate the spirit of giving and the arrival of Winter Break


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