FROM WHERE I S TA N D
A
ll of the stars were aligned. We would celebrate Georgetown Day School’s 75th anniversary in our first-ever PK–12 unified campus, a year punctuated by an array of firsts—our first Country Market Day in Tenleytown! Our first High School musical attended by Lower and Middle School students who only need to walk across the street to be in the audience! Our first sports season with an expanded fan section to accommodate our younger students! The ribbon cutting would bring together hundreds—or even thousands—of community members, past and present. Together we would take pride in our School’s new home, marveling at the warm, expansive lobby, the cozy, brightly furnished library, the playground’s natural wood and magnificent towers. We had it all figured out. And then, COVID. A pandemic which demanded that we remove the new, collaborative furniture from classrooms and replace it with single desks and chairs, arrayed in rows in order to accommodate distancing requirements and reductions in classroom density. Instead of lunch in our state of the art dining facility, students would eat in the parking garage, and later, their classrooms, sitting silently at their desks. Instead of magnificent papier-mache art projects to decorate our beautiful new stairwells, there would be hand sanitizer. Lots and lots of hand sanitizer. Somewhere Aggie, Edith, Gladys, and Peter were laughing—at least that’s how I imagined it. For the first time in Georgetown
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