Madeira Today Spring 2010

A CO LL E C T I O N O F S PE EC H E S AN D W R I T I N G S 19 88 –2 010

Commemorating Headmistress Elisabeth Griffith’s

Twenty-two Years at Madeira

It is clear that Madeira has prospered under

I N T RO DU C TIO N M A D EI RA G IVE S THA N KS…

Betsy’s stewardship. As a nationally recognized leader on women’s issues, Betsy has guided Madeira into its second century and solidified its position as one of the most highly regarded girls’ schools in the country. Strengthening our founder’s legacy, Betsy has led by example inspiring girls and the entire Madeira community to be engaged and ethical leaders.

In addition to her work to secure endowment dollars, buildings and programs, Betsy’s mentoring and counsel have impacted the lives of many Madeira girls and adults. From choreographing the public fanfare of a closing convocation ceremony to making time for private and personal one-on-one moments with all constituent groups, Betsy’s mark on Madeira’s landscape will be lasting.

We are enormously grateful to Betsy for her extraordinary service and immeasurable contributions to Madeira.

— Jane Krumrine Lawson-Bell ’76, President of the Board of Directors

Contents

CO M M E M O R AT I N G

HEADMISTRESS

Speeches and Writings of Elisabeth Griffith, Ph.D.

ELISABETH

June 1987

6

Application Letter

October 1988

8

Installation Remarks

1989

12

The Case for Girls’ Schools

Spring 1990

14

Interview with Katharine Graham ’34

July 1993

16

Reflections

1995

18

Technology

August 1995

20

The Long, Hard Fight

April 1997

24

Discipline

May 1998

26

Letter to Parents of Seniors

September 1998

28

Bookbags

January 1999

30

School Stories: Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon

May 1999

31

Introduction of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton

May 1999

32

Visit of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton

May 2001

34

Personal Best: Annual Admission of Ambivalence About Awards

September 2001

GRIFFITH’ S

36

TWE NTY-TWO

Diversity: Cultural Biography

YEA RS

AT

M ADEIRA

October 2001

37

Heroism

April 2002

38

Blacklist: Letter to Alumnae

June 2002

40

Now and Then: State of the School

January 2004

42

True Confessions: One Mom’s Hard Earned Advice

April 2004

44

History Lessons: Taft Graduation Speech

July 2004

46

New Initiatives: Annual Report to the Board

September 2004

48

What Your Contributions Support

September 2004

50

9/11 Anniversary Remarks

August 2006

51

Business, Books, and Schools

November 2006

54

Thanksgiving

November 2007

56

Wreaths and the Decision Process

Summer 2008

58

Literature and Leadership

August 2008

60

From the Mountain Top to the Streets

November 2008

63

Madeira Girls Go to the Polls

June 2009

65

Annual Report to the Board

October 2009

67

Smart Girls like Nancy Drew

April 2009

70

Graduation Letter

87

LE TT ER O F A P PL IC AT I ON JU NE 1987

Elisabeth Griffith 9115 Mill Pond Valley Drive McLean, Virginia 22102 15 June 1987

Ms. Anne Curtis Fredericks Ms. Paula Skallerup Osborn Co-Chairmen, The Search Committee The Alumnae Office The Madeira School Greenway, Virginia 22067

Dear Ms. Fredericks and Ms. Osborn: I wish to be considered as a candidate for the position of Head of The Madeira School. Every element of my experience — as an historian, teacher, author, community leader, fundraiser, public speaker, and parent — has equipped me to serve as an administrator and role model at Madeira.

Like Lucy Madeira Wing, I am a strong proponent of single-sex education for women. I aspire to serve as head of a girls’ school because it would allow me to create opportunities for young women and to motivate each of them to be her best self — responsible, resourceful, compassionate, self-reliant, and happy. My commitment to expanding options for women is what connects my academic and activist interests.

I have been trained as an historian at Wellesley College (BA ’69), The Johns Hopkins University (MA ’73), and the American University (PhD ’81), where I was named “the University’s outstanding graduate student.”

As a specialist in women’s history, I designed, taught, and secured foundation funding for the women’s studies curriculum at the National Cathedral School in the early 1970s, one of the first secondary school courses in the country. I have lectured (or substituted) in American history, politics, and women’s studies at Madeira, St. Agnes, Sidwell Friends, Emma Willard, The Mary Institute in St. Louis, and St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H. In 1977 I was a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard’s graduate school of government. Since 1982 I have been an adjunct lecturer in history at The American University.

My primary occupation has been writing history. Oxford University Press published my first book, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which was selected “one of the 15 best books of 1984” by the editors of the New York Times Book Review. In 1988, Random House plans to publish my next book, a comprehensive history of the Equal Rights Amendment from 1923 to 1983. Research and writing have necessarily limited my time in classrooms, but they have expanded my experience in other areas.

I believe it would benefit Madeira’s talented students to have a Head who has successfully explored opportunities outside academic life.

My career has combined academic achievement and community activism. For the past fifteen years, I have assumed national leadership roles in the women’smovement, working for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and the election of more women candidates to public office. I have been an officer of the National Women’s Political Caucus and Co-Chair of the Board of the Women’s Campaign Fund, a political action committee. Locally, I head the Membership Diversification Committee of the Junior League of Washington and serve on advisory councils for the Northern Virginia Information and Counseling Center for Women and Planned Parenthood of Northern Virginia.

I wish to be considered as a candidate for the position of Head of The Madeira School.

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Such leadership roles have provided me with significant administrative and fundraising skills. During my three years as Co-Chair of the Women’s Campaign Fund, I hired and trained the executive director, and with her supervised the staff, prepared budgets, improved accounting systems, and raised a half million dollars annually through high donor solicitation, events, and direct mail. I am good at and enjoy making fundraising appeals to individuals, small groups, foundation officers, and corporate donors. Trained in comShortly after Betsy was selected, a delegation of development office staff brought her a munication, conflict resolution, and management skills, I am considof balloons and an array of Madeira bouquet ered an effective, well-organized, team-building executive. sweatshirts. They found Betsy in her book Lecturing, book promoting, advocating causes, and fundraising writing attire, bathrobe and knee socks, too have honed my presentation skills. I have been interviewed on televiembarrassed to invite them in. The Madeira gear was featured in the Deardourff family sion and radio as well as by newspaper reporters and am a frequent and holiday photo: Mike and Anne D. Sinsheimer, confidant public speaker. I believe I could represent Madeira well in Katie, Megan, John David and John any forum.

Deardourff surround Betsy.

These professional pursuits have been balanced by my domestic roles as wife, mother, and stepmother. My husband, John Deardourff, is one of the country’s leading political consultants. His firm, headquartered in McLean, provides strategy and political media for clients running for U.S. Senate, governor, and occasionally President. In addition, John is a tennis player, art collector, and roller coaster enthusiast. He currently serves as Chairman of the Development Council of the Phillips Collection. We have lived in the Washington area since our marriage in 1970.

Our family includes John’s two daughters from his previous marriage, both of whom now live in New York: Anne, 27, is married and works in real estate; Katie, 25, is a social worker and a drug and alcohol abuse counselor in the Westchester public schools. John and I have two children together: Megan, 10, is a competitive swimmer and fifth grader at Potomac School; John David, almost two and an expert on trucks, will be ready for nursery school in the fall.

As a woman who has combined a professional career with marriage and childrearing, I believe I can serve as a realistic role model for the young women at Madeira. As a teacher and mentor, I have forged strong ties with former students, who tell me that I made a difference in their lives. I’m eager to be back among young women in an academic community and to be part of Madeira’s future. You have established a school with a reputation for excellence and innovation, with equal emphasis on academic curriculum and a commitment to social responsibility, an environment in which each student can find her own gifts and flourish at her own pace. I believe that my experience in the classroom and the community parallel Madeira’s curriculum mix and enhance my potential contribution as Head of the School.

A number of Madeira alumnae and current parents have encouraged me to apply, in the belief that my credentials match the needs of Madeira’s diverse constituencies — of faculty, staff, board, students, parents, alumnae, the educational community, and the public.

I understand that the Search Committee has engaged a consultant to assist you in your undertaking.

Would you please forward these materials to him? Letters of recommendation will follow.

I am enthusiastic about the possibility of serving at Madeira and look forward to discussing it with you.

Sincerely yours,

Elisabeth Griffith

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88 Thank you for this accolade and for selecting me the eighth head of The Madeira School.

ABOVE AND LEFT: Betsy,

just after her installation remarks and with her son, John David Deardourff.

8

IN STA L L ATIO N R E MAR KS SATU RDAY, O CTO BE R 1, 1 98 8

‘‘

Thank you for this accolade and for selecting me the eighth head of The Madeira School.

I am exhilarated at the prospect and I am honored by your trust. I intend to make you proud of my stewardship. As a product and proponent of single sex education, I am especially keen to advance and enhance opportunities for Madeira girls.

My thanks to Prill Hurd for your generous introduction, and for all you have done for Madeira. Your gifts of time, affection, and cash have been unequalled. I am also grateful to you for extending your tenure as President of the Board so that I could learn from your example of strong leadership.

My thanks to Nan Keohane for maintaining a model of female leadership at Wellesley. When I left campus almost 20 years ago, the women’s movement had not yet succeeded on opening doors or battering down barriers to wider opportunities I never considered: becoming an astronaut, a corporate CEO, an Olympic medalist, or a Presidential candidate. What I wanted to become was the head of a girls’ school, because that was the model of leadership I had observed.

I will not demurely insist on a retraction of your praise; I’ve already discovered that head’s need all the flattery you can heap upon them since a daily dose of humility is part of the job. I love this job. I love the challenge of finding solutions, the chance to effect change, and the caliber of people with whom I work.

I often think that the best preparation I had for the daily duties of head of school was parenthood. In the trenches of the sandbox, I learned to cope with constant crises and interruptions, to leap from the trivial to the monumental, to be grabbed at any moment by someone needing immediate attention, to appreciate what’s funny, and to do four things at once. More importantly, heads and parents both focus on growing children, full of spunk and spirit and future prospects, whereas historians dwell only in the past tense.

Before coming to Madeira, I had a co-curricular career as an academic and an activist. As an historian, I have taught women’s history. As an active participant in the women’s movement, I have lobbied for equal rights and worked to elect more women to public office. In professional, political and personal terms I define myself as a feminist.

There is no question of the need for female leadership, for tapping the talents of half our population. The lack of female leaders is apparent in a survey of Fortune 500

Recently we have hung pictures of all Madeira’s heads in the hallway outside my office. Whenever I pass them I wonder if my contributions to this school will measure up to those of Miss Madeira’s other successors — to the devotion Miss Maynard engenders or the creation of the Co-Curriculum under Barbara Keyser, or the endowment

Miss Madeira’s legacy survives and grows stronger because of the commitment all of us share to her school … of master teachers under Charlie Saltzman. Charlie exemplifies the master teacher, as I learned when he prepared me for this post. It is delightful to welcome him back to Greenway. I look forward to the day when it will be appropriate and possible to welcome Jean Harris back as well.

Today is a celebration for all of us. Miss Madeira’s legacy survives and grows stronger because of the commitment all of us share to her School — its strength, capacity, durability, and vitality.

In responding to such generous introductions, Lyndon Johnson used to say that only his mother would have believed the hyperbole. I know what the President meant because my mom thought I could do anything I set out to do. My mother was a teacher, a cookie baker, and one of the most interesting women I ever knew. She died nine years ago and I miss her even more on occasions like this than I do every day. I am fortunate to have loving substitutes and mentors. Like a lot of you, I still try to make my family proud of me. Because I am proud of them and flourish only with their support, I’d like to introduce my family. Will the Griffith-Deardourffs in the fourth row please stand up.

CONTI N UES

I came to Madeira because I am convinced that the most important thing I can do is to participate in the education of the next generation of young women for leadership. The challenge is to turn out the most competent, confident, compassionate cohort of women leaders, to meet our country’s and world’s needs in the 21st century.

board rooms, where the same 27 women sit on 138 boards, or in the United States Congress, where 21 women serve among 435 in the House and the 2 out of 100 in the Senate. The highest numbers of women elected officials — 30%, serve as school board members. The statistics from the fields of education, science, engineering, and publishing are similarly sobering. By Miss Madeira’s snail-like standards progress has been slow and steady, but the pace makes me impatient. There are not enough women in leadership.

9

INSTA LL ATION RE MARKS CON TI NUE D

John David, age 3, will not be joining us until later.

This decision was made for him in part because he would have insisted on a speech of his own. My employment here has already added to his vocabulary such phrases as “Man in the Dorm.”

archical at its worst. The prevailing model is patriarchal.

Kings, popes, Indian chiefs, and fathers know best. This morning’s papers carry news of an apostolic letter from the Pope defining the role of women; you will note that his views and mine are different!

The lack of female leadership is apparent not only in the numbers, but in the policies of our most powerful institutions. I think there is something wrong when decisions which affect women’s lives, their children and families, decisions about child care or job training or social security or abortion or about the economy, the environment, military spending or about our nation’s priorities are made without women present.

In contrast, studies of women’s leadership find it democratic, flexible, respectful of diversity, and principled.

Women can play hardball (a male sport) when required, but prefer negotiation, collaboration, and consensus building. The approach, analysts conclude, leads to creative problem solving. This model seems especially appropriate for educational institutions where leaders, like master teachers, elicit input from constituents, and their learning is mutual. A recent study reported in the Wall Street Journal favorably compared the skills American women bring to leadership to those of Japanese mail managers.

It concluded that American business could benefit from an infusion of female leadership.

After centuries of sex-role segregation, which confined women to a separate and unequal sphere, it is not surprising to learn from psychologists that women have different values than men, or to learn from political pollsters that women vote differently than men. Including women in any discussion changes the outcome. The

Some leadership qualities, like intelligence, energy, and ambition, are innate; and some leaders are born women. issues considered, the debate and the decisions are different, and I would argue better, when women are included in the conversation.

The need for more women leaders in the public and private sectors, from the Pentagon to the P.T.A., is acute.

The challenge for institutions like Madeira, where the prospect for leadership training exists, is to fill that need.

Leadership as an exercise of masculine power is not enough. Leadership as an expression of values and vision of women will make the difference. Such is the promise of single-sex institutions like Madeira.

Some leadership qualities, like intelligence, energy, and ambition, are innate; and some leaders are born women.

But most leadership skills are learned, and for centuries have been taught only to boys. In Greek gymnasiums, in Roman forums, in Medieval monasteries and Renaissance universities, on the playing fields of St. Albans, and in the classrooms of the Harvard Business School, the players have traditionally been men.

Leadership has commonly come to be described by male attributes: bold, competitive and aggressive at its best; autocratic, rigid, judgmental, confrontational, hier-

10

The qualities social scientists now recognize as the strengths of female leadership are produced in singlesex settings like Madeira. It is remarkable to me, although probably not to those of your who knew her, that Miss Madeira’s vision of what single-sex education should entail has been corroborated now by a decade of research by educational psychologists like Carol Gilligan at Harvard.

The research is conclusive. Single-sex schools educate women for leadership by providing an environment in which girls can pursue any area of inquiry from calculus to computers to comparative women’s studies, free from hormonal biases about what courses are appropriate for girls or boys; by providing a curriculum which reflects the diversity of women’s lives and the reality of women’s experience — to consider America’s Manifest Destiny, for example, from the perspective of the women whose children’s graves mark the Overland Trail; by providing ready access to sports facilities and athletic activities, and coaching with encouragement rather than harass-

Shortly after being appointed Headmistress, Betsy called on Miss Maynard in Needham, MA, in January 1988, after which the two became correspondents. Betsy chose Miss Maynard’s office, overlooking the Oval, and when making difficult decisions would ask, “What would Miss Maynard do?”

Betsy and Board President Priscilla Payne Hurd ’38 donned full academic regalia for the Installation. Prill was the recipient of many honorary degrees. At the reception following the ceremony, Betsy chatted with Mary Dee Andrews Smith ’89, who had been one of her tour guides when she interviewed on campus.

Behind them is board member Howard Heun.

LEFT:

ment; by providing opportunities for leadership, as President Keohane has said — not just equal opportunity, but every opportunity; by providing role models in its faculty, administrators, and alumnae. At the core of the matter, Madeira and her sister schools inculcate values of consensus, collaboration, respect for individuals, and care for the community.

Do those values survive and sustain Madeira graduates when they confront the unfettered competition and residual sexism of the so-called real world? — in coed colleges, in law school, on Wall Street, in politics and business, in marriages and divorce courts? Once again the evidence is reassuring.

According to Elizabeth Tidball of George Washington University, recent graduates of single-sex schools succeed in careers, as measured by earnings and promotion, more than female graduates of coed institutions. The explanation lies in their self-esteem and self-confidence.

Women are more likely to compete like men, concluded one study, when they have been educated at a women’s school. They have the confidence to take risks and they expect to be taken seriously.

But some questions remain to be asked by the researchers: How are these women succeeding? By whose rules are they playing, boys’ or girls’? I can remember when girls didn’t play full-court basketball; but playing by girls’ rules today, we’re told, won’t win.

The measure of our success and out impact as leaders will be when Madeira graduates change the rules to incorporate women’s values, changing the terms and the results for men and women.

Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post and Newsweek, Madeira Class of ’34, believes that “leadership has no sex. Ambition and aggression are not masculine characteristics,” she writes. “Sensitivity and consensus building are not female traits. Women must be willing to embrace all these qualities — and use them — to gain power — and exercise leadership.” Women will make a difference, Mrs. Graham concludes, when we do it differently.

Madeira does it differently, in our classrooms, in the Co-Curriculum, on campus, in InnerQuest, and in the community. Madeira inspires and empowers our girls.

A study about teaching the academically talented prepared for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching summarized Madeira’s standard: “High performance takes place in a framework of high expectation.” We need to set high expectations for ourselves as well as for our students. My challenge will be to lead by example, to create at Madeira a model of leadership which is inclusive, collaborative, and principled.

One of the reasons I suspect I was hired for this post is because I answered correctly the questions about keeping Latin in the curriculum. After four years of high school Latin, I can recognize the root in the word education — meaning to lead out. Madeira’s task, and my charge, is to exercise a leadership of values and vision to prepare our students for a life of active engagement, of commitment and community leadership, like the alumnae who preceded them.

The Madeira medallion is engraved with oak trees, a fitting symbol, as Prill explained. It reminds me of a parable about trees: “good timber does not grow in ease; the stronger the wind, the tougher the trees.” The task before us is rigorous. But together, as a community of women and men, students and teachers, alumnae and parents, we will fulfill Miss Madeira’s promise.

’’ 11

The Case for Girls’ Schools

D

By Elisabeth Griffith ESPITE RECENT HEADLINES

R EP RI N TED FROM

12

asserting that the “gender gap” between boys and girls in math and verbal scores on standardized achievement tests has narrowed, differences in the ways boys and girls are educated continue to have detrimental effects on girls.

Girls are the only cohort in our population who test higher in aptitude, achievement, and selfesteem when they enter school than when they leave it. No other group of children starts higher and ends lower.

Self-esteem seems to be the key. More and more, researchers are identifying self-confidence as a major factor in predicting academic success. In most coeducational schools, boys gain self-confidence and girls lose it.

As the graduate of a women’s college (Wellesley), the headmistress of a girls’ school (Madeira), and the mother of a 12-year-old daughter (Megan), I am both the product and proponent of single-sex education. Recent research showing the failure of coeducation to provide equal education for girls alarms me, since most American girls are educated in coed public schools, as I was.

A decade of research confirms that girls’ schools do it better. If this were a classroom instead of a newspaper column, I would demonstrate this point by asking all the boys to take seats in the front of the room. Then I would ask all the girls to move their desks into the hall, and I would close the door. From the seventh grade on, whenever boys and girls are educated in coed classrooms, girls are shut out.

The research proving the inadequacy of coeducation for adolescent and college girls is impressive and persuasive. To cite just one study, David and Myra Sadker of American University, authors of “How to Raise a Successful Daughter,” found that in any coed classroom, no matter what the ratio of boys to girls or the sex of the instructor, boys are called on from two to 12 times more than girls in any class period. Boys are encouraged to speculate, to challenge, to take risks. Boys learn competence, girls lose it.

The results of this lack of intellectual (“good thinking!”) as opposed to personal (“good outfit!”) interaction are evident in test

scores. Girls start with higher test scores, but by the time they take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, trail boys by 57 points overall. According to the latest College Board study, girls are losing their initial advantage in verbal skills—perhaps because they aren’t called on.

Males dominate leadership roles in coed schools—from student government president to yearbook editor to teacher to principal.

Today only 10 percent of high school principals are women. Without role models, girls come to accept supporting roles as the norm.

Curricula in coeducational schools tend to overlook women’s history and literature.

Leaving Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida Wells Barnett, Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, and Mary McLeod Bethune out of the narrative is not unlike ignoring Edith Wharton or Alice

More and more, researchers are identifying selfconfidence as a major factor in predicting academic success.

Walker. The choice is not either/or; male and female experience both need to be taught.

Perhaps because girls’ schools were the solution to the exclusion of girls from 19th century schools for boys, they tend to be philosophically inclusive, in student body makeup as well as course offerings.

Some coed schools still discourage girls from taking math, science, computer and vocational classes, according to the Project on Equal Education Rights of the National Organization for Women. In a girls’ school 80 percent of the students take four years in math and science, compared to a national average of two years in a coed environment.

At the college level, this pattern appears in the selection of majors. In coed schools many men congregate in the “hard” sciences, math,

T H E WAS H IN GTO N P OST AU GU ST 6, 19 89

and economics, while many women major in literature and languages, so-called “soft subjects.” Only at women’s colleges are economics and chemistry popular choices.

The difference between a coed classroom and a single-sex environment for girls is stunning and disturbing. Girls thrive in girls’ schools. Not just the brains and the beauties and the jocks, but every girl. Quiet girls are called on, slow learners are encouraged, plump girls perform in dance class, leaders are rewarded, each voice is heard.

Girls graduate expecting to be listened to and to be taken seriously. They are competent and self-confident. That by-product of an allgirls’ school makes all the difference, according to Elizabeth Tidball, a George Washington University physiologist who found that graduates of women’s colleges out-distanced graduates of formerly all-male schools in terms of test scores, graduate school admissions, number of earned doctorates, salaries, and personal satisfaction. Another study found that graduates of women’s colleges continue to out-number all other female entries in Who’s Who. In addition to a positive classroom experience and an inclusive curriculum, girls’ schools offer leadership opportunities, role models, and female friendships that can be undermined by the competition for dates in a coed high school.

Girls’ schools affirm young women, nurture their talents and protect them from peer pressure to play dumb. In coed schools even assertive girls demur, afraid that intelligence will repel boys. Remove boys and girls thrive.

This is understandably not an argument with great weight among 13-year-olds. One does not market an independent school like Madeira by footnoting recent research, even though many of the 44 percent of Madeira’s applicants who come from public schools will tell you they were fed up with male antics.

Rather we talk about rigorous academics, computer facilities, Chinese language, our weekly co-curriculum internships, our 400-acre campus complete with environmental science, a resident naturalist, and an elevated ropes course, our proximity to Washington—and boys’ schools! Opportunities for leadership, independence, and female friendship are obvious.

If girls’ schools are so great, then why are their numbers declining? Today there are fewer than 120 all-girls’ independent schools remaining in this country, down from almost 500 a generation ago. The pressure on girls’ parochial

schools is parallel: this year alone four closed in the District of Columbia.

Parents of daughters ought to be alarmed and alert. If they choose not to enroll their daughters in single-sex schools, they should reform the public schools. Coeducation needs to serve its female constituents better. Perhaps the positive elements of girls’ schools could be adapted: teaching style, curriculum content, even the classroom balance. At ChoateRosemary Hall, formerly two separate singlesex schools, girls and boys now study physics in separate classrooms.

What about those girls in the hallways?

They should pick up their desks and find a separate place where they can achieve anything. If it can’t be a girls’ school, then it should have some of the elements that make girls’ schools better for girls. Training girls for failure by undercutting their self-confidence and competence in coeducational schools is not fair.

Parents, teachers, and taxpayers need to pay attention and demand equal education for their sons and daughters. •

89 13

“Big Shot in the GETTY IMAGES

It is a quiet, elegant, efficient space — quite like its occupant.

14

Katharine Graham ’34 in her office at The Washington Post.

I N T E RVI E W WI TH KAT HA RI N E M E Y E R GRA HAM ’3 4 M A D EI RA TO DAY, SPR IN G 1990

Newspaper Racket” Prophesy of Katharine Meyer Graham’s future in the 1934 Madeira yearbook

A

RMED WITH ONLY A TAPE RECORDER and my notes, I approach the security desk at The

Washington Post offices on 15th Street, downtown. While digging in my purse for required proof of identity, I give my name and mission and am immediately and courteously directed to the elevator to the eighth floor. I barely have time to inspect the press room, visible behind a glass panel, or the historic photographs of the city of Washington. The contrast between the bustle of the lobby and the muffled quiet of the executive offices is striking. Dark gray carpets and walls, stunning abstract art and contemporary furniture create an aura of serene authority. A receptionist greets me by name, takes my coat, and offers refreshments. Within moments Evelyn Small, who is assisting Mrs. Graham with her memoirs, appears to meet me. She will sit in on the interview with her tape recorder, available to answer any background questions. We discover that she has grown up in the same small town in Ohio as my husband — and I admit coveting her job. (Only such a biography project could lure me away from Madeira.)

After these preliminaries, I am ushered past two secretaries into Mrs. Graham’s office. She rises to meet me.

She knows how to make a visitor feel immediately comfortable. We sit on small sofas and set up the tape recorders. Furnished in neutral tones and modern styles, the rectangular office overlooks a roof terrace. The wall behind her desk is full of shelves of photographs. It is a quiet, elegant, efficient space — quite like its occupant. Mrs. Graham is a tall, slender, attractive woman with an athlete’s grace. She still plays tennis regularly. She is wearing a brown leather mini skirt and jersey blouse. She is friendly, responsive, and laughs easily. We begin by talking about writing biography and autobiography. As our interview concludes she senses that I still need a couple of good quotes. She presents them — a journalist to the core.

Her father purchased The Washington Post at the very end of her junior year at Madeira, but even before then, Katharine Meyer Graham aspired to be a journalist. Because she wanted to report on labor and politics, she initially resisted his invitation to learn the newspaper business. She thought she would hate the economics of advertising, circulation, and production costs.

The Madeira yearbook predicted the Kay Meyer would become a “Big Shot in the newspaper racket,” but no one could have foreseen the successful career which followed. Mrs. Graham did not assume leadership of The Washington Post until she was a 46-year-old widow. Yet she quickly proved to be a courageous publisher, who helped precipitate the end if a war by printing the Pentagon Papers and who prompted the resignation of a president by pursuing the Watergate investigation. She became a shrewd manager, resolving the paper’s labor problem and taking The Post’s communications network public.

Today, The Washington Post Company has revenues of more than $1.4 billion; its chairman and CEO is routinely referred to as “the most powerful woman in the country.”

Last October Mrs. Graham signed a contract with publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., to write her memoirs. In recalling her years at Madeira, Mrs. Graham reflected that more than the academics or athletics, what made the difference were the values Lucy Madeira and the school stood for. “It sounds like Girl Scout motto and is easy to make fun of — but work, integrity, decency, and equality” were emphasized. Mrs. Graham also recalls Miss Madeira actually saying “Function in disaster, finish in style.”

As much as any Madeira graduate ever has, Katharine Meyer Graham ’34 has carried out the essence of Miss Madeira’s credo. •

As our interview concludes she senses that I still need a couple of good quotes. She presents them — a journalist to the core.

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Reflections

M EMO TO T HE BOAR D: R EFL ECTI ON S ON TH E FIRST FI V E Y EARS J ULY 1 , 1 993

16

TO:

BOARD

FROM: BETSY RE:

UPDATE & REFLECTIONS ON FIVE YEARS

It was five years ago today, July 1, 1988, that I addressed my first Board memo to you on my first day as Headmistress. I remember that my office was empty except for files and that I nervously convened a meeting of what we then called the “senior staff,” only to be corrected by some faculty who let it be known that they had more seniority than most of the administrators, especially the novice headmistress. Looking back from this perspective, a biographer looking for patterns might conclude that frequent Board communications and a cohesive administrative team have been characteristic of my tenure to date.

But the real theme is change. I felt at the time that the Board had hired me in part to carry out the goals of the strategic plan and I was quite comfortable thinking of myself as a change agent, something at which I was experienced. But none of us anticipated how the pace and impact of the changes we made, or reacted to, would affect the whole community. I’ve been thinking about this a great deal, as I consider the last five years, and the future. I may do a mid-summer mailing to the faculty on this subject, as summer reading before we come together again in the fall.

Thinking about change at Madeira was prompted in part by an article in the July issue of Working Woman magazine, “The Psychology of Change.” It discusses how individuals react to changes in the work place (with anxiety, distrust, malice, stress) and what characteristics help one cope with rapid change (self esteem, having survived other crises, optimism). As I read the article, I kept extending the author’s analysis from the individual to the institution, in this case, our community.

The article provoked me to enumerate all the changes we have made at Madeira in the last five years and those events which have changed the School. Although exhausting, the lists are not exhaustive. They do not include such items as changes in enrollment, attrition, annual fund income, interest rates, government regulations about fire prevention or water treatment or asbestos, to say nothing of changes in the American family, immigration patterns, or economic and political trends. The pace of change at Madeira and outside Madeira since 1988 has been unrelenting and inescapable — not unlike the enormous physical, psychological and intellectual changes adolescents undergo between the ages of 13 and 18.

Change may be growth, as counselors tell us, but it is not comfortable; “growing pains” is an apt expression.

Digesting these materials emphasized for me once gain the pressure this community has been under in reacting to these changes, planned or unplanned. Individually each decision may have been sensible, positive and significant. Cumulatively the effect was negative and disruptive. Almost everyone at Madeira has been forced to change in some way in the last five years. For faculty there was clearly a sense that they were expected to take on more assignments, without, in most cases, having been asked if they wanted to or to participate substantively in defining the task.

The cost to individuals and the institution has been very high. Some damage cannot be repaired. Faculty and staff were fired or quit. When I try to decide if the product was worth the cost, I am ambivalent. If we have made the School a better place with procedures and policies and expectations in place, will it matter if the people who work here are unwilling or too wounded to move ahead?

We are poised for a good year; all the prerequisites are there to make it work, if we can accept the changes made to date and move on. As I am meeting with teachers and staff one-on-one for an hour this summer, I am using that opportunity to talk about next year and what we can anticipate. People seem universally hopeful, but keep in mind that this is the self-selecting group who signed contracts to return.

It is time to slow down. My goal for ’93 – 94 is to have only 3 changes for ’94 – 95. Already for the year upcoming we have several big changes looming: a new Academic Dean, eight new faculty, an expanded student and class advisor program, designated dorms for freshmen and sophomores, semester exams in December, no Junior Work Week, and major relocations — new library, new student center, bookstore moved.

This community cannot absorb any more change. It needs a period of stability, time for people to accept and adapt to the new routines and traffic patterns and relationships. I’m hoping that enough people want it to work that there will be positive momentum.

(A relevant aside: John and I were recently invited to a small dinner upstairs at the White House. It was thrilling: I was so undone by the place and the presence of the Clintons that I could barely open my mouth to utter a declarative sentence, especially on such topics as British Thermal Units. However, after dinner the President and Hillary asked the two of us to stay for coffee. The President talked about how they had made

the decision to tackle so many problems all at once, expecting to plummet in popularity, because the changes were so critical. I volunteered that I had done that too, in this role, but I wasn’t sure I would do it again, and that I almost didn’t get re-elected at the end of my fourth year.)

In reflecting on the pace and pain of the changes we have undertaken over the past five years, I have to believe that they were in the best interest of the institution and the students we serve, that we would not be poised for a stable future if we had not taken these steps. But I wish the cost had not been so high and I hope I can create an atmosphere in which people can come together while they recover from the whirlwind. Miss Madeira not only said, “Function in disaster, finish in style,” but she added, “and remain calm at the center of your being.” This campus needs some of that serenity — and some fun — next fall.

I am optimistic. As you see from the two documents delineating enrollment projections, we are doing well.

Paul Hager, the new Academic Dean, has been on the job and on target for two weeks. He is a smart, savvy, funny, likable fellow who will contribute to a positive mood on campus.

Two aspects of Madeira have not changed in five years: the Board’s commitment to the School and my gratitude for your trust in me.

Thank you. Happy anniversary.

CHANGES 1988 – 89 • Campus housing expectations defined • Faculty salary scale • Peer evaluation • Faculty evaluation of Head • Calendar committee created • Counseling consortium (now Health & Retention) created • Board exteriors/interiors committees established • Marketing team created • Resume filing/hiring policy formalized • News & Notes (now Monday Memo) initiated • Crisis team and policies defined 1989 – 90 • Counseling system expanded • PE/Athletic Director roles divided • Madeira Matters (parent mailing) initiated • Change from 1 to 2 “chapels”/week • Resident intern program initiated • Open forums begun • Master teacher policy redefined by Board • Bush Patrol advisor required • Residential Life Task Force approved 5-Year Plan 1990 – 91 • Breakfast check in required • Administrative Team regrouped to anticipate resignation of Asst Head • Multicultural assessment of curriculum • Weekend duty team established (including van driving) • Freshman co-curriculum expanded • Sophomore ethics added

1991 – 92 • Study hall required for freshman (faculty proctors) • Equivalent class sizes established • Terms set for department heads • Boarding school expectations reiterated • Task Force on Athletics redesigns program • Aquatics Director hired • Diversity Day I • Seated lunch 1/month • Admissions expanded to enrollment management

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1992 – 93 • Study Hall expanded to sophomores (campus resident coverage) • Task Force on Discipline synthesizes rules • Required advisor periods • Seated lunch 1/week • Schedule changes: “all school meeting” 4/week • Semester exam experiment • Expanded orientation, return before Labor Day • Sports Center and Library completed • “Five Fifths” definition of teaching job (4 sections plus advising) • Bedtimes re-established for freshmen • Decision to cut Naturalist and Chinese programs

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M A DEIRA TODAY HEAD LIN E, 1995

Headline

Welcoming Technology

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N ADDITION to academic credentials, teaching experience, an enthusiasm for fundraising and an intact if extended/blended family, one of the credentials I brought to Madeira was veteran stripes status as a change agent. Indeed, that role, and an emphasis on women’s issues, were the only coherent elements in a career which had spanned politics, teaching, and writing.

A willingness to accept change as a constant is essential to institutional leaders today. Indeed, business school professors coined the phrase “whitewater” long before it became a headline. The term referred to a new understanding about the pace of change. No longer do institutions undergo enormous change and then return to a plateau of stability. In contrast, the quantity of new information and the pace of communications pitch institutions into shoals and rapids.

The navigator needs to be ready for the unexpected, to anticipate the future.

Whitewater rafting is a sport our family enjoys — but in all other ways I am personally the antithesis of a change agent. Indeed, I’m a stubborn stick in the mud. I’m one of those women who hasn’t changed my eyeliner application or basic hairstyle since high school. I still love Motown. I hate to move. Some days it astonishes me that I applied for this job.

But institutionally I’m intrigued by change, as an opportunity for learning and growth, an essential for survival in a competitive world. In nine years here, times of constant change — in the definition of teaching, the return to a boarding school ethic, the expansion of the curriculum, the reorganization of the administrative infrastructure, the enhancement of the advisor system — as well as the addition of new buildings and an increase in the endowment — have characterized my tenure. That pace has energized some

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people and unnerved others. Indeed, perhaps because they are changing daily both physically and psychologically, adolescents are sometimes the most reluctant to change.

But in response to incorporating technology into Madeira, from the communications network to classroom competencies to creative collaborations, there has been universal enthusiasm. Rather than resist a change which requires adults my age to learn new skills, which puts a premium on typing talent, which makes students the teachers, indeed which redefines teaching, the Madeira community seems to be embracing this challenge. It is a tribute to Madeira teachers and staff that they are becoming examples

I wonder if eventually my pencil bump will be replaced by carpel tunnel syndrome. of “lifelong learning,” a habit we hope to instill in our students. We still have a way to go but we are making measurable monthly progress.

Importantly, the Board has made sensible decisions, invested heavily in training, and sought funding to support every initiative, from laptops and training for faculty to hiring outside consultants and developing our home page.

As a writer I was reflecting on how technology has changed not only the tools I use to research and write but also my vocabulary: online, wired, delete, spell check, disk, download mail, byte, home page, hard copy, distance learning. Is “to key” a verb? I wonder if eventually my pencil bump will be replaced by carpel tunnel syndrome. Certainly my legibility will improve.

If the invention of the printing press resulted in the Protestant Reformation, what will result from this technological revolution? At Madeira we are confronting ethical issues — how do you footnote the internet? What is “acceptable use?” What is the balance between teachers and technology? How do you address the contradiction of an Internet which connects individuals globally but removes them from their immediate community?

As Madeira continues to address these issues, I hope you’ll share your views online, by e-mail, snail mail, phone, or fax. •

to Campus

95 19

THE WAS HI NGTO N POST AUGUST 2 5, 1 9 95

The Long, Hard Fight

F

By Elisabeth Griffith OR THOSE OF US looking forward to

R EP RI N TED FROM

celebrating the 75th anniversary of women’s suffrage tomorrow, the nationwide hoopla over the observance is a little ironic, because the original event, while momentous, wasn’t exactly the stuff of historical tableaux.

When Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby accepted the documents certifying that Tennessee had become the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, he chose to sign it into law in the early morning hours of August 26, 1920. He did so not to avoid the heat of a sultry Washington day but to stay clear of the hot tempers of several women leaders who supported suffrage but couldn’t stand each other.

… the nationwide hoopla over the observance is a little ironic, because the original event … wasn’t exactly the stuff of historical tableaux.

Rather than embroil himself in a cat fight, Colby signed the documents at home without ceremony. When some of the women asked him to restage the event for news cameras later in the day, he refused.

The dispute at that time involved Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (which promptly became the League of Women Voters) and Alice Paul of the National Woman’s Party. Some described it as a battle between age and youth, between shrewd political strate-

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gy and passionate political action, but it was never that simple, and it went back a long way.

Some of the history was recounted by Mrs. Catt in her speech at the founding meeting of the League of Women Voters. The victory of women’s suffrage had taken 72 years, she said, an effort that included “56 referenda to male voters, 480 efforts to get state legislatures to submit suffrage amendments, 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks, 47 campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to add woman suffrage, 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks and 19 successive campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.”

Catt was using 1848, the date of the first women’s rights convention in America, in Seneca Falls, N.Y., as her starting point. That was when Elizabeth Cady Stanton persuaded her friend Lucretia Mott, a Philadelphia abolitionist, and three other Quaker women to organize a mid-summer meeting “to protest women’s rights and wrongs.”

Stanton’s determination to demand suffrage was rooted in abolitionism and natural rights. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which she wrote, reads like the Declaration of Independence, but with George III replaced by an entity called “all men.” Its 18 grievances enumerated women’s lack of economic and educational opportunities, as well as their lack of representation in government and the professions.

But when Stanton urged her co-adjutors to include voting rights in their demands, they balked. “Thee will make us appear ridiculous,” Mrs. Mott cautioned. Stanton persisted, however, and the suffrage resolution passed, although it was the only one not to receive unanimous approval. Indeed, it would have been defeated if Frederick Douglass — former slave, abolitionist leader and editor of the North Star— hadn’t rallied support for it.

The Declaration was signed, finally, by 68 women and 32 men. Their action brought forth a wave of condemnation from press and pulpits, but the first women’s rights movement in America was launched. For the next 20 years, Stanton stayed home, dividing her time between the demands of her family of seven children and the growing reform movement.

merged National American Woman Suffrage Association. The younger women turned instead to her best friend, “Aunt Susan” Anthony, for whom they named the suffrage amendment, even though it had been conceived

by Stanton.

Many of the new leaders, among them Carrie Chapman Catt, had been recruited by Anthony. They were more pragmatic and less progressive than the founding mothers. They based their case for suffrage not on justice but on utility. Some of their arguments had an unpleasant ring. White women voters, they argued, would outnumber immigrant males in cities and black males in the South; such women would “purify” government.

Whereas Stanton’s political metaphor had been maternal (it was only just and right that the “mothers of the race” be represented), her successors used a housekeeper metaphor: superior women would clean up government.

Echoes of both attitudes can still be identified

CON TINU ES

She wrote articles, corresponded with colleagues and recruited as her lieutenant a schoolteacher named Susan B. Anthony.

At the end of the Civil War, in an uncharacteristic display of political naiveté and mean-spirited racism, Stanton opposed giving black men the vote, claiming that white women were more deserving and black women equally at risk. From that moment on, factions divided the women’s movement. The StantonAnthony arm, based in New York, sought a constitutional amendment, was wary of male memberships and believed the agenda was broader than suffrage — that divorce, property rights, employment, prostitution, infanticide, education and dress reform also demanded attention. An opposing faction, with it headquarters in Boston, was appalled by much of this. It welcomed men into its ranks and favored a state-by-state approach and a single focus, on suffrage.

In time the suffrage effort became a threegenerational mother-daughter-granddaughter conflict. Because Stanton believed that women needed more than voting rights, because she remained a radical — especially regarding her criticism of patriarchal religious attitudes — she became something of an embarrassment to the second generation of suffragists. By the 1890s, although she had become enormously popular with the press and public, Stanton was censored by her successors in the newly

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, AMERICAN MEMORY

Everyone dresses up on Halloween at Madeira.

While lots of girls and adults dress up as the Headmistress, she has been a suffragist, Professor Dumbledore, one of Henry VIII’s wives, a “blue stocking” (18th c. female intellectual), and the Nineteenth Amendment.

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TH E LON G, H ARD FI GH T CO NT INU ED

in the rhetoric and agendas of women voters and leaders today.

Second-generation suffragists were willing to ally with southern segregationists and northern nativists, as well as with the admirable and enormous national membership of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. As a

Their action brought forth a wave of condemnation from press and pulpits, but the first women’s rights movement in America was launched. result, they earned the enmity of the liquor lobby, immigrants, blacks, Democratic bosses, labor leaders, New England Republicans and the newly vocal antifeminists, who believed woman suffrage would undermine female morals, render women infertile and destroy the traditional American family.

This active opposition — along with poor finances, weak leadership and declining membership — stymied the suffrage movement during the first decade of the 20th century. But at the same time, support for suffrage was developing a new, broader constituency, which included many people who realized they needed the women’s vote to enact progressive reforms.

The ascendancy of Carrie Chapman Catt as head of NAWSA in 1915 initiated a new national suffrage campaign. Catt was formidable. She was used to getting her way. When she married her second husband, she negotiated a prenuptial agreement which allowed her to undertake suffrage work away from home four months of every year.

Catt developed what she called her “Winning Plan,” a political strategy which called for referenda campaigns in six states east of the Mississippi, the defeat of several key senators,

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an alliance with President Woodrow Wilson — which included tacit approval of American entry into the World War — and identification of supporters ready to lobby in every state legislative district in the country.

Meanwhile, a third generation of suffragists, impatient with the cautious politics of its seniors, grew restless. Many of these young women had been exposed to the “shoulder to shoulder” militancy of British suffragists while pursuing graduate education abroad (having been denied admission to American universities). Among them was another Philadelphia Quaker, Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party — and Catt’s nemesis.

When Paul returned to this country in 1909, she rekindled suffrage enthusiasm with “outdoor” events. Wanting to hold the party in power responsible for the success of suffrage, she organized a protest by 5,000 women on the day Wilson arrived in Washington for his inauguration in March 1913. Paul led the first-ever White House pickets, demanding “democracy at home.” Arrested for disrupting traffic, she launched a hunger strike in jail.

While the brilliant strategist and the passionate protester detested each other, the combination of Catt’s careful vote counting and Paul’s militant tactics was effective. By June 1919, the suffrage amendment had passed both the House and the Senate. It moved through the state legislatures rapidly, and within 14 months was one state from ratification. Both Connecticut and Tennessee seemed likely to put it over the top. Finally, on a sweltering August 20, 1920, Harry Burn, a 24-year-old Tennessee legislator, acting at the behest of his mother, changed his vote from no to yes, and victory was won.

Catt moved on to found the League of Women Voters, which tended more to supporting roles than to being powerful movers in politics. The League supported the agenda of social feminists, arguing with the majority of suffragists that women still deserved special treatment and protection.

Alice Paul went to law school and then returned to Seneca Falls for the 75th anniversary of the first women’s rights convention.

There she introduced the Equal Rights Amendment. Paul did not believe suffrage was enough; she wanted equal treatment, not special treatment.

Every year the ERA was introduced, from 1923 until 1972, the League of Women Voters

In 1998, on the 75th anniversary of the first women’s rights convention, Betsy joined Spelman President Johnnetta Cole, PhD, and other women academics as guests of First Lady Hillary Rodman Clinton, who gave the keynote address in Seneca Falls, NY. In January 2010, Dr. Cole, recently named Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, gave the annual Martin Luther King, Jr., Lecture at Madeira, where she was greeted by board members General Arthur Dean (Angela ’08, Christina ’11) and Lyn Cason ’69.

testified against it. Not until after Congress finally sent the amendment to the states did the League change its position. The legacy of distrust — there was no single voice, no shared agenda — undermined the ERA coalition and contributed to its failure.

Formidable as Catt and Paul were, they were powerless in traditional terms. They had no votes and few resources. They were essentially upper-middle-class educated white ladies of leisure, dependent on men in positions of political power. Yet these women enfranchised half the population. White and black women activists would work together to end lynching, enact protective labor legislation for women and children, launch the civil rights movement, protest the war in Vietnam and protect the environment. Today they shift the balance in practically every election in this country. •

Betsy, General Arthur Dean, P’08, ’11 , Johnetta Cole, and Lyn Cason ’69 when Dr. Cole was Madeira’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Speaker in 2010

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N OTA BE NE A PR IL 1 997

Discipline

W

HENEVER I’m confronting a new discipline case, I remind myself that the Latin root of the word comes from discipulus, meaning a learner or disciple. The best discipline provides an opportunity to learn — about oneself, about consequences, about community.

This year [1997] Madeira girls have been disciplined for drinking, drug use, smoking, having boys in unsupervised rooms, stealing credit cards, computer hacking, cheating, lying, and verbally threatening faculty with violence. All eight Major School Rules have been broken. It is not comforting to say that much of this is typical adolescent behavior. Occasionally I am asked by U.S. Department of Education surveys about disciplinary problems in our school; I feel smug because I can put “not applicable” after questions about gun possession and fist fights, but there aren’t many other differences other than frequency and intensity between what happens here and in other schools. It makes one nostalgic for 1940, when school principals decried such behavioral outrages as cutting in line and chewing gum.

What I hope is different about Madeira than some other schools is that we are not surrendering our standards or lowering our expectations. We have major rules and a code of classroom conduct. We expect girls to behave well and almost all the time they do. When they get into trouble, they eventually confess. The common excuse is, “I wasn’t thinking.” As Dean of Students Kevin Wildeman pointed out in an All School Meeting talk, the miscreants weren’t thinking about the community, only about themselves.

Spring augurs proms, graduation parties, and Beach Week, events characterized by what my catechism class nuns would call “occasions of sin,” and what every parent recognizes with fear in our hearts could be fatal risks — drunk driving, drug abuse, unprotected sex. While I’d like to think Madeira girls are protected from these realities, I know better.

Discipline at Madeira is student-centered and student-directed. Minor infractions — tardiness, cutting assembly, missing appointments — are reviewed by Student Government Judiciary Committee members.

Girls are assigned “hours” of community service — stuffing envelopes, recycling cans, mucking stalls.

Years ago the consequences of not making one’s bed daily or wearing nail polish were counted in “demerits,” which could only be erased by walking around the Oval in silence.

Breaking one of Madeira’s major rules results in a hearing before the Executive Committee. The Committee consists of three elected senior leaders — the heads of judiciary and the day and boarding schools, the

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Dean of Students, and an appointed faculty member, this year Math Department Chair Melby Bush. This group meets with the girl and her advisor or another adult advocate before making a recommendation to me. Theirs is a demanding, time-consuming, unappreciated responsibility. It is rare that I overturn an Executive Committee recommendation, although as Headmistress I have complete authority over all discipline and can hear cases directly, which I do during exam periods and vacations.

We introduce girls to our rules before they even come to School in September. Each summer every family gets a copy of our Student-Parent Handbook. The caveat that following the rules is an obligation of both girls and their grownups appears in the enrollment contract. We spend time during orientation teaching girls about the rules, using skits and role-playing, at convocation and in advisor groups. No girl can run for office unless she passes a rules test. And then, any time a rule is broken, we try to talk about what we can all learn from the incident. Madeira protocol keeps the name of the rule-breaker anonymous, but the student community always seems to know the details anyway.

Frequently assigned consequences include hours of community service. There is also a required written apology. The girls who allowed unknown older boys into their room on the ski trip were required to volun-

The best discipline provides an opportunity to learn — about oneself, about consequences, about community. teer in a rape crisis center. Increasingly, suspensions are served on campus so we know the girl is being supervised and not allowed to stay home and watch the soaps.

When I came to Madeira, the rules required automatic dismissal for some actions. Because individual circumstances do make a difference, because sometimes we can have more influence on a girl and her family if we keep them connected to the School, using the possibility of re-admission as an incentive to change bad habits, I reversed that policy. I remember the first girl I ever dismissed: when I called her mother to explain the situation, the woman said she wouldn’t meet her daughter’s plane. It’s disheartening to remand a girl to an uncertain future with adults who may be indifferent, uncaring or overwhelmed.

97 However, I am not reluctant to dismiss a girl when the case merits that outcome. I’m sorry to report that two girls left Madeira this year, one for repeated rule breaking, which seemed to signal that she didn’t want to be here, and another for completely inappropriate behavior toward adults. I factor in family situations, counseling needs, remorsefulness, and maturity, and I try to balance the needs of the girl with the wellbeing of the community.

No decision, especially involving dismissal, is made capriciously or without consultation. Indeed, Madeira is unique in offering girls and families an opportunity to request a “review” in all cases of recommended dismissal, a legacy of Miss Keyser’s era. If a review is requested by a parent, the case is heard again by a panel of three faculty members. Parents can attend, and so can lawyers. In one memorable case, the students were represented by Brendan Sullivan, Oliver North’s counsel, and Bob Bennett, now the President’s attorney. Only in Washington!

Sadly, it is true that more families are willing to dispute a disciplinary judgment than to apologize for their daughter’s behavior and thank the School for its vigilance. Which is why I’d like to share this story about a parent’s positive action. How many of us would have acted this honorably and responsibly?

A parent called a party her daughter was attending, having been promised that an adult would be home. Alarmed when the phone was answered by a drunken boy, the dad called the Dean of Students and asked him to rescue his daughter. When the Adult on Duty arrived, she found five Madeira girls, four of them

drinking, and removed them just as the police were arriving. They woke up the adult supposedly in charge.

Like many of you, Madeira practices a “rescue me, no questions asked” policy: any girl can call and get a ride home if a situation is out of hand.

One final word about the range of the School’s authority in discipline cases. Girls would like to think that being a day student or going on vacation removes them from the purview of our rules. This is not true.

As long as a girl is enrolled at Madeira, as long as her contract is in effect, she is under our jurisdiction.

Because we feel strongly that being a Madeira alumna will benefit her her whole life, we believe that her behavior reflects on the School. So if a girl is discovered drinking in Georgetown in the summer and I know about it, she’s in trouble.

In the best case, a student will admit her error, accept the consequence, and reenter the community, with the support of her family and friends. Even those girls who have to confess on college applications to having been on probation, suspended, or dismissed find a way to turn the experience into an essay topic and, we hope, a life lesson.

To those of you who believe that discipline is an act of love and learning and who support the School in its education of your daughters, I express my gratitude.

Thank you for being good parents with good kids who support us as we hold the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. •

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Graduation Separation

LE TTER TO PAREN TS O F S ENI ORS MAY 199 8

May 11, 1998 Dear Parents of Seniors: Whether your daughter is a boarder or a day girl, whether she is going to school close to home or across the country, whether you are veteran parents or are launching your oldest or only, whether you are in denial or not, sending your daughter off to college is a Big Deal Milestone. Senior separation anxiety is the topic of research and reports. If you don’t believe the research, just wait until you find yourself weeping during the AT&T cell phone commercial featuring a mom taking her daughter to school. Another common symptom is to pick a fight because it’s easier to leave when you’re mad.

To help families understand what to expect during this next stage in their daughter’s development, Madeira has sponsored a (sparsely attended) separation workshop during Spring Parents’ Weekend.

We may add it to the fall schedule, since the symptoms are evident months ahead of departure.

The group who gathered this year (twice as many as last year) encouraged me to write to the rest of you about what we discussed. You might want to invite your daughter and her friends and their parents to address these questions as a group: 1. What are you excited about for your daughter/parents next year?

2. What are you worried about?

3. What are you looking forward to yourselves?

4. What will you miss?

5. If there’s one thing I would tell you before I go, it would be …

In the workshop, girls and grownups answer the questions in separate groups and record them anonymously, then regroup and share their lists. There were lots of similarities. I’ve attached some sample answers from girls and grownups both.

I hope you’ll find these questions a good starting point. Also, a mom who is one half of a divorced/reconstituted/blended family suggests figuring out in advance who will be packing or driving your daughter to school. (One friend of mine was so annoyed with her son by September that his older sister drove him to college.)

I found I not only missed my daughter, I also missed her friends and their parents. The moms compensated by having brown bag lunches; at Thanksgiving and Memorial Day we have family parties to reconnect.

You may want to reread the last chapter of Charlotte’s Web, when Wilbur is surprised as Charlotte’s babies fly away. Some years I read it at graduation.

Do not underestimate the impact of this change; prepare for it.

Then came a quiet morning when Mr. Zuckerman opened a door on the north side. A warm draft of rising air blew softly through the barn cellar. The baby spiders felt the warm updraft. One spider climbed to the top of the fence. Then it did something that came as a great surprise to Wilbur.

The spider stood on its head, pointed its spinnerets in the air, and let loose a cloud of fine silk.

The silk formed a balloon. As Wilbur watched, the spider let go of the fence and rose into the air.

“Goodbye!” it said, as it sailed through the doorway.

“Wait a minute!” screamed Wilbur. “Where do you think you’re going?”

But the spider was already out of sight. Then another baby spider crawled to the top of the fence, stood on its head, made a balloon, and sailed away. Then another spider. Then another.

Wilbur was frantic.

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“Come back, children!” he cried.

“Goodbye!” they called. “Goodbye, goodbye!”

At last one little spider took time enough to stop and talk to Wilbur before making its balloon.

“We’re leaving here on the warm updraft. This is our moment for setting forth. We are aeronauts and we are going into the world to make webs for ourselves.”

(E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, 1952, pp. 178 – 180.)

A more academic resource is an essay by psychologist Michael Thompson, Ph.D., “College Admission as a Failed Rite of Passage,” in Finding the Heart of the Child (1993). Dr. Thompson reminds us that for families less privileged than ours, the child leaving for college may be charting new seas, not navigated by parents who didn’t go to college or didn’t go away.

Do not underestimate the impact of this change; prepare for it. We’ll miss your daughters, too — and like you, we’re confident that they’ll come back. As one of my predecessors used to say, “Onward!”

Cordially,

Elisabeth Griffith, Ph.D. Headmistress

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BACK TO S CHO OL TA L K S EPTE M BE R 19 98

Bookbags

‘‘

At the end of every school year, the exhilaration of our graduation exercises, only slightly dampened this year, is followed for me by a period of postpartum depression.

I miss the girls and the bustle and brouhaha of daily life in schools. Fortunately, within days, alumnae return.

Reunions introduce me to women who knew Miss Madeira and Miss Maynard and they inspire me to imagine what current graduates might become, ten, twenty-five, fifty years from now. I collect stories, many of them about my predecessors.

This is daunting: which of my idiosyncrasies will be recalled by alumnae from my era?

My annual back to school bookbag talk has already become a Madeira “tradition,” the subject of skits and a mention in Katie Earnest’s 2001 graduation speech.

When head of school candidate Alex Cooley ’99 pulled a Madeira canvas bookbag from behind the podium and, mimicking me, exclaimed, “Metaphor!” the audience erupted into laughter.

That scene ranks with an imitation of me by former Assistant Dean of Students Cristin Redwine ’89, who wore red, carried a bookbag and proclaimed, “Miss Madeira … single sex schools … Carol Gilligan … using one’s voice … women’s rights … Elizabeth Cady Stanton … bookbags.” In a Halloween parade a cross-dressing history teacher [Andrew Sharp] wore my red and white sundress and carried a diet coke and a Madeira bookbag around the Oval. When I worried I would have to miss last year’s opening convocation to take my son to boarding school, we considered propping up a life size cardboard cut out of me and having a tape repeat “bookbags-bookbags-bookbags!”

The metaphor of the bookbag, as I reiterate annually to faculty, students, and families, is that each of us comes to school every September with a bookbag (or backpack or satchel or briefcase — one student distinguished herself by using a small suitcase on wheels, another a plastic milk crate attached to her bike with bungee cords), which represents one’s individual substance and style.

I have Madeira bookbags in every size and sometimes feel like a bag lady toting my homework from office to house and back. I reserve my leather briefcase for alumnae visits.

What we pack in our backpacks is individual. When I came to Madeira in 1988 mine included diapers,

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Springsteen tapes and diet coke. Today it holds my laptop, 2 pairs of glasses, Melissa Ethridge CDs, and diet coke. (Only my caffeine intake has remained constant: the toddler is now 6’3” tall.) But more than new binders or assignment books, each of us packs our past history and future hopes.

I tell girls they need to leave the baggage of bias and prejudice at the gate, to enter Greenway with an open heart and a curious mind. We don’t want any girl to deny who she is, from whatever background or culture or faith or class, but we do expect her to allow others to be who they are, without hasty or stereotypic judgments. We acknowledge “hyphens.”

Everyone at Madeira comes as a “new girl,” eager, nervous, excited about new teachers, new friends, and new adventures. When Miss Madeira welcomed “her girls,” from 1906 to 1956, she always cautioned them not to rush into friendships, rather “to make haste slowly.”

There will be so many opportunities for friendships and learning here.

Because I love learning, going to school, and being Headmistress at Madeira, I look forward to September.

Every autumn a new school year allows us to start over, again and again. One of the reasons I relish September is that it represents a perennial fresh start. The metaphor and reality of a “clean slate” have remained powerfully appealing long after Guffey’s slates have been replaced by black boards, white boards and power point presentations.

Another appeal of September for me is nostalgic. The smell of chalk dust and floor polish, the squeak of new sneakers and the clank of old pipes evoke memories of every other first day of school and of earlier generations who have studied or taught in our classrooms. Every Madeira parent remembers their daughter’s first step, first day of kindergarten, first two-wheeler, as we remember our own. I imagine your family has first day of school rituals like ours. We used to buy new lunchboxes. We still serve a breakfast for champions, measure heights on the doorframe, buy new shoes, and take a photo from front, side and rear.

Because I grew up as a younger sister in the era of matching outfits, my own back to school outfits appear in photos to be the same dress for several years, as I inherited the hand-me-downs. But the shoes were always new. More than a decade ago, when I first heard the Reverend Paula Lawrence Wehmiller, a self

… leave the baggage of bias and prejudice at the gate, to enter Greenway with an open heart and a curious mind.

described “sojourner in schools,” talk about the shiny red shoes snuggled in tissue paper in an open topped box on her bureau, ready for the first day of school, I was prompted to reflect on September, bookbags, first days and fresh starts.

Each of us is part of the 95th year of this School and an even older tradition of single sex education for girls.

I have always admired those women who pushed to create equal opportunities and access for girls and women. Earlier generations of activists fought, organized, marched, were jailed, and died to achieve women’s rights to learn, to work, to vote. We are the beneficiaries of that struggle and have a responsibility to take advantage of our opportunities.

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Editors Note: In September 2009, in her last Bookbag talk, Dr. Griffith read from The Things They Carried,

by Tim O’Brien, a collection of stories detailing what American soldiers carried with them to Vietnam.

“The things they carried where largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds.”

So once again I look forward to welcoming all girls, faculty, and families to Madeira on the first day of school and to a very good year.

’’

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MAD EI RA BOO K R EV IE W JA NUA RY 1 99 9

School Stories Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon (Harper Collins, 1995) If I were a member of the English Department rather than a history teacher, I would propose a senior elective called “School Ties: The Fiction of Independent Schools.” The reading list would include Good-bye, Mr. Chips, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, and a Dickensian sampler.

Madeira girls might not immediately relate to their fictional counterparts, who are predominately male. I would understand the difficulty. Almost all fictional heads of schools also are male, just like 72 percent of the National Association of Independent School heads in 1998.

Male or female, fictional school heads typically are cruel and hateful characters. Dickens’ Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby, 1839), the vulgar, conceited, ignorant schoolmaster of Dotheboys Hall, steals his students’ clothes and money, starves them, and teaches them nothing. Roald Dahl’s Miss Trunchbull (Matilda, 1988), a former Olympic hammer thrower, throws recalcitrant children like frisbees out of second story windows into the cabbages. Mr. Chips, Miss Clavell, and Rue Shaw, the protagonist of Saying Grace, are exceptions.

Rue’s 18th year as head of a California country day K – 8 school is one of unexpected changes. Her marriage of long standing is threatened by crisis, her parents are failing, her adored only daughter is off to college, her assistant moves away, a fifth grade parent is suspected of child abuse, and a new and difficult Board chair assumes leadership.

Capturing the reality of change as a daily element in school life is the first sentence: “It was two days before the opening of school when the Spanish teacher dropped dead.” Page two describes Mike, Rue’s trustworthy, gay, assistant head: “tart, smart, handsome … funny … never afraid to tell her she was wrong … who did not want her job.” On the wall of Rue’s office hangs Miss Madeira’s motto, “Function in disaster, finish in style.”

(I found out about this novel because a Madeira Board member asked me if I’d written it. I wish I had. I’ve discovered that the author is a graduate of Miss Porter’s and the wife of a San Francisco school head. No wonder the dialogue and anecdotes are so telling.)

Every page captures the pace, problems, humor, and humanity of school lives: the design of the holiday pageant, a bully in the eighth grade, the conflict between the third grade teacher and the maintenance department about bird feeders, the power of the school secretary, an alcoholic art teacher, the influence of the carpool caucus, the politics of the Board, and the parents who come to complain about the B– in P.E., which kept their son off the honor roll.

Especially effective is Gutcheon’s description of Rue’s domestic life, much of which takes place in the kitchen and at the dining room table, at which they say grace (hence the title). When daughter Georgia, a classical musician, falls in love with a rocker her father dislikes, she sends her mom a tape with album notes explaining her choices. I wish the publishers had tucked a CD into the book jacket.

The novel is so skillfully crafted that it surprises you, taking you from laughter to tears, from a woman capable of coping with daily problems to a heroine drowning in despair. I can’t decide whether the ending is tragic or hopeful. Strength of conviction and the fragility of community are the significant themes. I bought a dozen copies; feel free to borrow one. It is now required reading for Madeira trustees. •

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Every page captures the pace, and page humor, problems,the pace, captures and humor, problems, lives … school humanity of

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B E TSY ’S I NT ROD UC TIO N O F FI RST L ADY H ILLA RY R O DH A M C LINTON M AY 10, 1 999

‘‘

Introducing Hillary First, a footnote: I want to correct any misconceptions about girls and math anxiety. We can add.

We are celebrating my ten-year tenure even though I have been Headmistress for 11 years and am about to begin my twelfth. In Madeira vernacular, that makes me a 12-year senior; in political jargon, that’s the equivalent of two Senate terms.

Speaking of future plans, last week the First Lady was in New York acting as a school principal for a day. I’m sure she discovered that there is no better job than working with students and teachers who love learning and respect teaching. Teachers everywhere make a difference every day in the lives of children. I can recommend few jobs as fulfilling as this one.

When Sarah Daignault ’66 told me about this enormous honor, for which I thank the Board of Directors wholeheartedly, and that the First Lady had agreed to give the inaugural address in the Elisabeth Griffith Women Leaders Lecture Series, I was literally speechless — a rare event. But I was not surprised by the link between Madeira and leadership.

A few years ago, at a faculty spoof, Cristin Redwine ’89, who had returned as Assistant Dean of Students, impersonated me. She arrived on a bike wearing signature red and headmistress hair.

From a podium she addressed the student body. “Miss Madeira … all girls’ schools … women’s rights … Elizabeth Cady Stanton … women leaders.” It’s a speech I give a lot because Madeira is not a cloister or a convent; it is a leadership training camp.

Girls in single sex schools serve in every leadership role. In student government, as class presidents, team captains, editors, Model U.N. diplomats, PEERS, STARS, and heads of house, they get used to leading and expect to lead. Long before women had the vote nationally, Miss Madeira’s girls were voting.

But not all our leaders are elected. We recognize the unelected leaders in our community, who lead by examples of honesty, courage, compassion, and grace. We “teach” leadership at Madeira and in our summer program, called “Girls FIRST,” by offering examples of women leaders, by practicing leadership and role playing, and by linking leadership to ethics and service.

We invited student government leaders to participate today because they represent the whole school and because Hillary Rodham was head of student government at Wellesley College.

Born in West Virginia to a Union veteran, raised in a boarding house her mother ran on Tenth Street, Lucy Madeira went to Vassar on scholarship and became a Fabian socialist and a history teacher at Sidwell Friends. She opened her own school in 1906 and established the practice of girls attending every Presidential inauguration. She was an ardent Democrat, despite the outrage of tuition-paying Republican papas. When the School cast a straw ballot in the 1936 Presidential election, Alf Landon won in landslide, prompting Miss Madeira to post this note: “Will the 12 girls who voted correctly please come to tea?”

In the late 1930s, when two Roosevelt cousins and the daughters of Henry Morgenthau and Harry Hopkins were enrolled, the ties between the First Lady and the Headmistress increased.

Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Miss Madeira about homework habits and rules, came to the Christmas play, spoke to seniors, and invited Madeira girls to birthday luncheons and debutante parties at the White House.

One of the blessings for an historian and biographer in this job is gleaning these stores. During my tenure, Madeira has hosted the 50th reunions of alumnae here when Mrs. Roosevelt visited.

To hear them tell it, the First Lady came for Miss Madeira’s Tuesday evening senior seminar every week. Called Bible study, it was really current events and sex ed. Whether just twice (in December 1938 and May 1940) or 20 times, alumnae remember Mrs. Roosevelt’s connection to Madeira with great pride, as will these girls.

I first met this First Lady freshman year at Wellesley. We were both Midwesterners from big public schools and both progressive Republicans. I remember her bellbottoms and brains, her glasses and great guffaw. We lived in the same dorm and devoured The New York Times at breakfast. We were both political mavens who would intern on Capitol Hill after junior year, doing what Madeira juniors do every Wednesday.

The first First Lady I met was Eleanor Roosevelt. I was five years old, younger than my husband’s granddaughter Emily there in the front row. I remember an old lady, a red carpet, a bouquet of roses, and the adults applauding.

As a sophomore, Hillary became president of the Wellesley Young Republicans and I succeeded her, something we are both now reluctant to admit. Newly installed at the beginning of my junior year, I attended a dinner honoring Illinois Senator Charles Percy (Taylor’s ’01 grandfather). That night I met a tall, dark, and dashing political consultant named John Deardourff.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the first First Lady to visit Madeira (although some alumnae of the old school at Dupont Circle claim to have spied on President Wilson when he was courting Mrs. Galt). Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Madeira became friends in the early years of the New Deal, when the First Lady invited heads of area schools to tea. Or perhaps they knew one another in the network of social feminists, which linked the graduates of girls’ schools and women’s colleges to settlement work and reform.

One of the reasons Madeira seniors now have a speaking role at our graduation exercises is that Hillary Rodham, then president of our college government, spoke for our class, at our graduation in 1969. She made national headlines when she challenged the speakers support for the Vietnam War. All of us who knew her then expected her to commit her life to public service. So it is no surprise to me to welcome to Madeira Hillary Rodham Clinton as the First Lady of the United States.

’’

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EVEN T R EPO R T MAY 1999

Visit of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton IT WAS JUST A MONTH AGO, on Monday, April 12, at 8:00 a.m., that Board President Sarah Daignault ’66 called to tell me that the Board had decided months ago to establish the Elisabeth Griffith Women Leaders Lecture Series AND had invited the First Lady to give the inaugural address. Mrs. Clinton had been invited for May 21 but declined, so they did not expect to hear from the White House again. But the White House scheduling office had called Kate Hillas, Director of Development, at 7:55 that morning to offer any one of four dates in May. Kate gasped and grasped May 10. I was so stunned I was speechless.

She was substantive, powerful, intense, passionate, poignant.

We decided to keep the news secret for a little while, while we thought through what preparations we would need to make. Kate convened a planning group which included my staff, the PR people, security, housekeeping, and eventually faculty ushers, theater techies, volunteer drivers, and our archivist, who extended our research about first ladies visiting Madeira to the FDR Library at Hyde Park.

We made lists and lists and lists of lists. After we had worked out every detail and made charts of tasks and timetables, the White House Advance and Security Team arrived on the Friday afternoon, May 7, at 3:00 p.m.

They turned the whole plan upside down, changing the location of the “meet and greet” photo op, rearranging the seating in the auditorium, and suggesting more flags and ficus trees for the stage! Imagine finding either on the Friday before Mother’s Day. They said nine agents would come with the First Lady, to be preceded by the bomb squad, including a sniffing dog, who would inspect every space even close to where the First Lady would be.

By Monday excitement was contagious.

We had 20 men in black on the Oval, who 32

eventually became invisible behind the curtain, under the stage, on the catwalk. Our security director was in his element. We had issued a special class schedule, gotten special permission from the Advanced Placement Testing Service to reset the English Lit AP (which required keeping the early testers secured until the speech so they wouldn’t call anybody in another time zone with the questions …!), planned to have all the girls seated by 1:45 before opening the foyer doors to other guests without assigned seats. We intended to greet the First Lady at the front door of Main, introduce her to student government leaders for pictures, then follow her to the auditorium.

But then she was running late on account of the White House conference on violence and the advance man asked if I wanted to cancel?! Instead, we let everybody into the auditorium and had a little time to relax.

It was fun; I got to work the crowd and see everybody who had come. We had invited current and former Board members, some donors, but only those parents who were on the Parents’ Leadership Council or whose daughters were on the program. Megan came home from Duke, John David took half a day off from Potomac, my sister came, and John’s daughter Katie brought Emily, age 7, who was a model of good behavior.

As soon as we heard Mrs. Clinton had left the White House we started the madrigals, who sang beautifully. The stage looked its best — centered podium with the School seal, surrounded by red geraniums, ficus trees and flags, upholstered chairs for the speakers, a new mic, excellent lighting. The girls had all dressed up without being asked. The students had practiced their remarks. As soon as the madrigals began, I had the sense it was all going to be perfect.

They ended with the alma mater as her limo and lead and tail cars pulled up. Headlights, flashing lights, staffers all around passing her notes with names were overheard, saying “intro, speech, gift, work the line.” From that moment the click of cameras became constant. She had requested no flash pictures

99 while she spoke, but for the rest of the time the audience blinked like a Christmas tree.

But I barely noticed.

She was wearing a pale blue Chanel styled suit and matching shoes which looked white, lots of pearls, excellent makeup, and perfect helmet hair. She looks prettier than people expect. Her posture is military and I suspect she wore a Wonderbra.

As soon as Mrs. Clinton entered the auditorium, people were standing and clapping and cheering. The program began with the three student government leaders (head of day, boarding and judiciary) opening the program. Then Sarah Daignault spoke about the lecture series and I introduced the First Lady, but mostly talked about leadership, Madeira, Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary at Wellesley.

Then she took the podium and took control of the room. She spoke for almost 40 minutes, half of which was ex temp. She had a prepared text which some staff person had put on the podium when I wasn’t watching, but from what I could see she only used the beginning and the end. In the middle she did an entire riff on her day at the conference, about violence in American culture and about the responsibilities of parents. She was substantive, powerful, intense, passionate, poignant.

People cried. The students were absolutely mesmerized. Me too.

People cried. The students were absolutely mesmerized. Me too.

Then three more students thanked her and presented a gift, which she gave to the advance man before working the crowd in the front rows (reserved for Board members).

From there she went to the adjacent art gallery for photos with my family, the student government leaders, the Board chair, and my staff. I was impressed by her ease with small talk. She listens well but she must be an extrovert to do this all day. She did not act like she was already late for the next event.

Originally she was going to come to the house for tea and a tour of John’s art collection, but that had to be cut.

The whole event felt like a wedding — lots of happy anticipation and lots of logistical details — except my feet don’t hurt from dancing. Today we are reliving the event. I get to hear everybody’s perspective. It was just a very special day for all of us.

NBC sent a news crew, but I never saw any coverage. Of course we filmed it and photographed it, so there will be lots of photos soon. •

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CLOSI NG CO NVOCAT I ON TAL K M AY 2 5, 2 001

Personal Best

Annual Admission of Ambivalence About Awards

‘‘

In many schools this is the season for winners: class day, prize day, honor days.

In some schools, every child receives a ribbon; in other schools, the same child receives every ribbon.

The argument in favor of giving awards is that there is a need to recognize excellence and achievement. Awards value the enterprise and validate the action and actor.

For the winner the award can increase self-esteem and inspire more achievement.

Parents get to take pictures and applaud their offspring, and themselves.

Public recognition is a reality of the real world. Teams and candidates win and lose in competition, in public, usually decisively, sometimes depending as much on a referee’s call or the overtime clock or a recount or a Supreme Court decision as on luck.

A lot of achievement is forecast by gene pool.

Statistics show that highly educated, affluent parents produce smart kids. Genomes — and miracles — also produce excellent athletes, lyric poets, visionary leaders and brave hearts. Some of whom we celebrate at Madeira, some of whom we don’t.

Miss Madeira did not believe in prizes, because she prized individual girls. She did not award academic honors, or publish GPAs, or post a dean’s list, or name a valedictorian. Nor do we. (Now that we have a student speaker at graduation, reporters ask, “Is she the valedictorian?” Some of you will go to colleges at which the valedictorian will speak, in Latin …)

Miss Madeira wanted to establish a school in which each girl would be encouraged to achieve her personal best. She held out a standard of excellence and hoped girls would strive to achieve it, as it applied to them.

For some, those achievements would be acknowledged by the wider public: National Merit finalists, Project Excellence scholars, Advanced Placement high scorers, National Council of Teachers of English award recipients, English Speaking Union Shakespeare orators, science researchers, language exams summas and magnas, Model UN delegate honors, literary magazine prizes, McDonalds Art awards, Governors School awards, Rotary Club citizenship awards, volunteer of the year awards like the one Columbia Hospital for Women presented to a sophomore this year, drama “cappies” and assorted Oscars, Tonys, Emmys, Pulitzers and Nobel Peace prizes. I know

34

there are even more, each of which we have tried to herald in some way in Madeira Matters and at All School Meetings.

And then there are the athletic awards we do acknowledge. We are especially proud or our school winning the Blackmun Sportsmanship award for the fifth year — and so proud of your sportsmanship in cheering your classmates’ victories and honors on the playing field.

Today there will be more occasions for welldeserved applause, the cacophony of clapping and cheering, the open celebration of community achievement. In keeping with Miss Madeira’s legacy what we are saluting here today is service — the work of the student government, PEERS, student admissions representatives (STARS), yearbook and newspaper staff, teachers, and longstanding members of our community.

But not everyone will be acknowledged or applauded. I trust in this community we have found individual and private ways to honor accomplishments too rarely highlighted, to celebrate each personal best.

I hope you will pause and think about what you are most proud of this year. Perhaps you are proud of overcoming the anxiety of starting a new school; recovering from homesickness; making friends; questioning preconceptions, assumptions, bias and prejudice; studying hard, trying harder; taking a demanding course; showing up, on time, notebook open, pencils sharp; being kind; keeping secrets; not keeping a secret; not gossiping; being brave; confronting what was scary; accepting loss.

I recently read that some competitive college admissions offices rank applicants based on their achievements: a one is high, a five is low. For example, being a class president, valedictorian, or Eagle Scout gets a five because it is so common. Writing a symphony might rate a three; performing it at Carnegie Hall gets a one. Here are some awards which that college is unlikely to rank at all: • earning the bravery badge for moral courage, making the right decision; • the kindness badge to the girl who sends the note, is a secret psych, invites somebody home, goes to a game, high fives the winner, hugs the loser; • the good humor award to the girl who lightens our lives with laughter and wit, makes a joke on a bad hair day, makes us smile; • for the noblest failure, the girl who missed the shot, didn’t get the part, tried to make a friend and was shunned, applied to 8 colleges and got into one; went out on limb and it broke. As Hemingway wrote at the end of A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the

01

broken places.” Losing can defeat you or make you resilient. Some wise folks believe that only failure provokes growth and creativity — think of Thomas Edison or Babe Ruth.

• the “midnight milers.” This award is for the worrywarts who wake up in the night worrying about the rest of us — more likely earned by parents, teachers, friends and board members who worry about the well being of us individually and collectively because they want to safeguard us.

At Madeira we won’t be giving any of these merit badges today. We will have occasions to applaud and cheer and high five. Recognition is the reinforcement that we matter and that our actions have meaning. I hope you have felt that every day at Madeira.

I trust in this community we have found individual and private ways to honor accomplishments too rarely highlighted, to celebrate each personal best.

Back when I used to watch Mr. Rogers more frequently, before he retired from the neighborhood and John David was considerably shorter, I recall one of his wise expressions. “The best we can do is the best we can do.” That was Miss Madeira’s expectation for us as well, that we strive to do the best we can.

After the cheering fades and the alma mater has been sung, I urge you to go and give out the rest of the trophies, kudos, laurel wreaths, blue ribbons, purple hearts, gold stars, and A+s written in red, to your friends and faculty and family members, who deserve recognition for personal acts of courage, honor, kindness, and generosity.

Today, congratulations to everybody.

’’ 35

O P EN IN G CO N VOCATION R E MA RKS SEPTE MBE R 2 001

Cultural Biography

‘‘

Many of you know that I was trained as an historian, not a headmistress. I revel in biography, autobiography, personal stories.

I read the lives of women like the devout used to read the lives of saints. I’m looking for examples to follow.

If Elizabeth Cady Stanton, about whom I wrote a biography, could manage to launch the women’s movement, raise seven children, make their clothes and put up jam, certainly I can manage whatever. If Lucy Madeira could launch her school on a shoestring when no one would loan a single woman mortgage money and earn a reputation for excellence, having two tests on one day ought not daunt us.

Each of you is a biographer. You are writing your autobiographies, already several chapters long, and without

Looking back, those events might have generated my sense of self as a smart girl and my later commitment to diversity — and history. a climax yet, unless you peaked early and have already played at Carnegie Hall, published a novel or won Olymipic gold. Whether you are a new girl with clean paper in your loose-leaf binder or a senior drafting admissions essays, you have the opportunity to write your own script.

One of the reasons some people wait until they are older to publish an autobiography is because distance offers some perspective on events. I’m not sure I will ever write a memoir, but I have imagined some chapter titles: Little Sister, Tomboy, Wellesley Woman, Militant Marcher, Trophy Wife, Stepmother, Author, College Professor, Mom, Headmistress, Grandmother, Widow.

Since I do not want that phase to be the last chapter, who knows what will come next? Who knew going to a women’s college would change my life? Who knew that dashing fellow glimpsed across the room at a political dinner would change my life? Who knew a family field trip would launch my career?

Here’s an earlier chapter of my story: In 1957, two events of national note would have impact on the direction of my life. I was ten years old when the 36

Russians launched Sputnik — the first satellite to orbit the earth. (For creating such a sensation, it looks like an aluminum basketball now displayed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.) In the frost of the Cold War, Americans felt threatened. President Eisenhower ordered acceleration in public education, so from the fifth grade on I was “tracked” with the same 25 classmates for advanced work. Seven years later, we graduated at the top of a senior class of 750. (Long after, the Center for Talented Youth at The Johns Hopkins University determined that if ten-year-old girls are told they are smart, and especially if they are told they are smart at math and science, they internalize that validation and it will survive puberty and peer pressure to play dumb.) So for me, being smart became a norm that didn’t conflict with being popular, as it might have for other generations of girls.

That same year, 1957, was the 350th anniversary of British colonists landing at Jamestown. The young Queen Elizabeth II came to commemorate the occasion. (Editor’s Note: as she did again in 2007) So my mom, the teacher, decided to take a family field trip to Virginia. While I do recall the fort and re-enactors in doublets and half-moon helmets, what remains more vivid in my mind were the signs: “colored only” marking bathrooms, drinking fountains, and cafeteria lines. There was segregation in Michigan, but it was less overt.

Looking back, those events might have generated my sense of self as a smart girl and my later commitment to diversity — and history.

Whatever chapter you are writing at Madeira, it won’t be the last. Lives change, people grow, life interrupts, opportunities arise, tragedy hits. It is possible to re-create yourself again and again, every September in school, every year of your life.

Excellence and failure, accomplishment and self-doubt, are not mutually exclusive. Re-creation is possible: a shy girl can become head of school or publisher of The Washington Post; a full-time mother can become a full-time attorney and a First Lady a senator. It is possible, as the writer Carolyn Heilbrun says, to write and rewrite your life, to go from being a good girl to a great woman, to take those hands demurely folded upon the desktop and learn to wield a gavel or sign legislation or stop the presses. And that it is possible to do it without pretense, without pretending there is no fear, that there have been no mistakes.

We hope you will find Madeira an environment in which you will thrive, a safe place in which you can explore who you are and to imagine who you will be. A new school year offers each of us the opportunity for re-creation, and the re-expression of our best selves.

’’

MAD EIRA TO DAY HEADLI NE, OCTO B ER 2 001

Headline

Heroism

L

EADERSHIP IS NOT A NEW THEME for these essays, or a new lesson for Madeira girls.

Leadership, like citizenship and ethics, is an integral part of Madeira’s curriculum and culture.

Indeed, we “market” Madeira as a “counter culture leadership training camp.” Counter culture because we see our community as a refuge from what psychologist Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls calls the “girl poisoning toxins” of our contemporary culture — the media’s emphasis on sex and violence and its insistence on how girls should look (thin) and act (provocatively).

In contrast, Madeira’s emphasis is on how girls think, behave (cogently, honestly, kindly, gallantly). We uphold Miss Madeira’s standard of excellence, of aspiring to one’s personal best.

For some girls, “best” will include leadership roles, whether elected or unelected. Last spring 67 girls ran for student government offices. Others aspire to be “STARS” (Student Admissions Representatives) or “PEERS” (People Engaging in Empathy and Respect) or heads of TRANS (Teens Reacting Against Negative Stereotypes) or team captains or play directors or Model UN committee chairs. The list is as diverse as Madeira students.

Some people lead by example, without the pomp of a public role, like teachers who inspire others with encouragement as well as life lessons. Some people rise to the occasion of leadership, like Katharine Meyer Graham ’34, when she took over as publisher of The Washington Post. Others, like me, are part of a leadership team, dependent on the combined gifts of the group.

Some people may never have considered themselves leaders until they found themselves in circumstances which demanded courage, vision, charisma, and decisiveness, like the heroic passengers on the fourth plane, who thwarted the hijackers on September 11. I do not believe leadership can be separated from integrity, which is why many from my generation became disillusioned about our country’s political leadership in the 1960s and 1970s.

As a specialist in social history, I am ambivalent about the “great man” theory of history — that the action (or inaction) of one outstanding leader (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Edison, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, Jr.) made all the difference. Then I think of the horrors wrecked

by Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler or the bombers of the Birmingham, Alabama, Baptist Church in 1963, who killed four girls, or Timothy McVeigh or Osama Bin Laden.

In my field, I have searched for less well-known leaders. Women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady

Betsy with Perry Carpenter Wheelock ’69, P’98, ’01 who was President of the Board of Directors from 2001 –2008.

Stanton launched the suffrage movement, enfranchised half the population, and until recently rarely rated a footnote much less a sidebar in most high school textbooks. Ida Wells Barnett’s muckraking campaign against lynching was a one woman act of courage. Stanton and Wells were educated middleclass women one white, one black. What about the indigenous, poor, or illiterate who left no written record of their acts of leadership and courage? Does it matter that we don’t know their names or deeds?

Among the lessons of September 11 is that people whose names we only know from obituaries or whose names we will never know have given us thousands of examples of leadership, heroism, and courage. •

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Blacklist

LE TT ER TO ALUMN AE : BL AC K LI ST APR I L 2002

April 2, 2002 Dear Madeira Alumnae and Friends: Following the example of Miss Madeira’s friend, Canon Charles Martin of St. Albans, since becoming Headmistress in 1988 I have written regularly to current parents about current issues. My letters have addressed additions to the curriculum, changes in the schedule, the “green goop” chemistry experiment gone wrong, discipline cases, and our responses to the attacks on America last fall.

To communicate with alumnae I have relied on essays in Madeira Today, briefings of the Alumnae Association leadership, remarks at reunions or individual notes and conversations. But the topic compelling attention on campus this spring touches all of us, students, faculty, alumnae, friends and families, because it contradicts our mission and damages our reputation. The discovery of a blacklist compiled by seniors, my “zero tolerance” response, the reaction of our community and some unwelcome press coverage have provided many “teachable moments.”

I’m enclosing a recommended reading list and a compilation of the correspondence and commentary this event has generated to date. No doubt there will be more, all of which I have shared with Joan Morgan ’71, President of the Board of Directors, and have kept for the Archives.

The response of younger girls and their parents contrasts with that of a cadre of seniors, their parents, and some recent alumnae, who believe I have overreacted.

While almost everyone supports the School’s position and condemns a blacklist, critics make these points: • The “blacklist” is a beloved tradition and I have no right to infringe upon it.

• The blacklist isn’t hazing; it never really hurt anybody.

• Adults must have known about this all along, so they were also compliant.

• My response has been too harsh.

• My response has been too lenient.

As a former girl, a parent and teacher, I know girls can be mean, although I believe “alpha girls” are a distinct minority at Madeira. As far as I can discover from alumnae reports, the blacklist first surfaced sometime in the seventies, along with some initiation rites, one of which resulted in a student being hospitalized. Together with the faculty I have tried to stamp out all vestiges of hazing. I am not going to give hurtful, hateful behavior the imprimatur of institutionalizing it as a “tradition.” White dresses and red roses are a tradition; blacklists are not.

Despite efforts to forbid it, the blacklist apparently went underground. Rumors of its existence could never be proven, although I recently learned that the class of 2002 found last year’s list last spring, and recent alums have now shared their accounts. I can assure you that had I discovered it sooner, I would have responded with equal vehemence.

In trying to express how strongly I oppose blacklists, I spoke at an All School Meeting about the connection between hateful language and hateful acts, from the murder of Matthew Shepard to the Columbine shootings to lynchings and terrorist attacks. I also emphasized that I saw this as an isolated, aberrant act by a senior class usually characterized by strong leadership and positive energy.

I am not going to give hurtful, hateful behavior the imprimatur of institutionalizing it as a “tradition.”

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Because, when asked, almost the entire senior class acknowledged that they knew about the blacklist and knew that it broke a major rule, I have held both the class and the individual instigators responsible. The three girls who were honest and brave enough to admit responsibility for the list’s creation were reprimanded by me and have apologized. (At another area school, senior offenders were asked to withdraw and their colleges were notified. Most colleges, worried about lawsuits resulting from lists which are racially biased, antiSemitic or homophobic, have a zero tolerance policy about blacklisting.)

The class punishment was a restriction of “senior privileges.” I closed the clubhouse for three weeks, opened “senior doors” (which underclassmen were still afraid to enter for fear of later reprisals), cancelled senior prank, and asked the class officers to apologize to the whole school.

With the discipline case resolved, we are now focusing on what we can learn — about the power of words to hurt, rebuke, and heal; about the nature of female friendship and community; about the psychology of superiority and insecurity. Rosalind Wiseman, the educator profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine story, “Mean Girls,” had already spoken at Madeira in January. We are inviting her back in April, for a parent-student forum. We are also meeting with girls individually, in advisee groups and class settings.

Someone who opposed my decisions sent a copy of the letter I sent to all parents anonymously to The Washington Post, where it became an item in the Style Section gossip column, “The Reliable Source” (03/27/02). This act hurt the School in the week that newly admitted students were deciding whether to accept our invitation or not. I’m hoping these applicants and their families will want to attend a school where blacklists will not be tolerated and tough issues are addressed.

My responsibility, as Madeira’s steward, is to carry out our founder’s mission, to foster “the most ethical and effective leaders of tomorrow … possessing a clear sense of self, of community, and of the world as well as a strong commitment to lifelong learning and social service.” I am grateful for your support in that endeavor and welcome your opinions.

White dresses and red roses are a tradition; blacklists are not.

Respectfully yours,

Elisabeth Griffith, Ph.D. Headmistress

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RE UNI ON S SAT UR DAY S ESS I O N JU NE 8 , 2 002

Now & Then State of the School

‘‘

Good morning.

I would like to welcome you all to this Reunion and to this beautiful Huffington Library. I have met so many of you for the first time, and you have shared with me your stories, so I would like to share my story with you.

I am an historian and writer, temporarily employed as a head of school. I am also an activist in the woman’s movement. I am the wife of John Deardourff, a prominent political consultant. John and I have been married for 32 years. I have been a stepmother to John’s two daughters, two son-in-laws, and 4 grandchildren.

John and I are also the parents of two: Megan (NCS ’95, Duke ’99) and John David (Taft ’04.) I am just completing my 14th year as head here and proudly hold the record of the longest tenure since Lucy Madeira. In my early days here, I thought I might not last as long as Marion Smith, who brought more experience and independent school credentials to Madeira than I did. Mine turned out to be a fortuitous match. Like the Madeira admissions philosophy, the search committee saw some possibility in me, and from my perspective, this job offered the opportunity to strive for my personal best. I remain honored and grateful to be your steward.

So welcome to you “twos and sevens.” And welcome to “my girls” from the class of ’92 and ’97. I always look forward to Reunion for selfish reasons: because historians are storytellers and I love your stories and because you help me recover from the postpartum depression which follows graduations.

Speaking of history, someone once described Reunions as an act of love, trust and revisionist history. Another writer views Reunions as a competition sport. To quote a Wellesley observer, “at early Reunions, classmates compete with each other about job and incomes; at the 25th its spouses and children; later they brag about grandchildren and vacation homes while regarding, with envy or glee, classmates waistlines, hairlines, invisible lines. Everybody hates the streamlined. With our 45th Reunion, we entered a new phase of Reunion competition — the one described by Woody Allen — ‘90% of life is just showing up!’ It is said that there are 3 ages of life: youth, middle age and ‘you haven’t changed’ — but change is the name of the game.”

When we are in school, every Monday and Thursday we have All School Meeting, just as the class of 1952 did when the school assembled upstairs in Schoolhouse for study hall before dinner with Miss Madeira — or as the Class of 1977 would at noon in the Chapel/Auditorium to sing hymns and hear a New Testament reading and directives from Miss Keyser. On Mondays, I speak before students and usually refer to some historical event. One of the aspects of history I love is that it engages the imagination: think about the settlers, suffragists or soldiers. When I reflect on the return of the class of 1952, I realize I actually remember that year. I was 5 years old, we had one of the first televisions on my street and we watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and

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the Republicans nominate General Eisenhower. (It was not until later that I became a Stevenson democrat.) We were deep in the Cold War, men were drafted, and we witnessed the collapse of imperialism in Asia and Africa. Could we have imagined the division of the Soviet Union, free markets in China, and advanced industrialization in South Korea? Now girls from all those countries are enrolled at Madeira. There were other generational differences, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1952, many more people smoked, many fewer used drugs, nobody worried about diets, and about the same number of people drank alcohol. According to national data, people who graduated in 1952 experienced very little divorce, had more than 2 children, accrued considerable wealth, but only 9% of that age group give to charity. And only 32% of Madeira alumnae overall give to The Madeira School.

At past Reunions, we have wanted to emphasize that, like you since you graduated, your School has changed. For example, there are new buildings, adaptive use of old ones, and new policies (or in some cases, a return to earlier ones — like breakfast check in, study hall and bed times). The students use new tools — like the internet and PowerPoint presentations, and there are new courses, which are more multicultural. There are new sports opportunities and winning teams. Some changes were reactive rather than creative. A notable exception was the creation of Co-Curriculum in the late 1960s, which today is one of the hallmarks of the Madeira program.

Madeira has changed in response to the political climate, the economic situation, educational trends technology, demographics and societal changes. Yet, your School has tried to remain true to Miss Madeira’s vision, mission and legacy, which is to provide a vigorous education of young women of various gifts in a boarding school environment provided by stellar faculty.

But what has changed most is not political or economic or personal (my hair color) but the nature of adolescence in America.

If you are like me, when you reflect on high school days and compare them with what girls experience today, I am struck by the differences rather than the similarities: Before 1970 boarding schools were single-sex, structured, homogenous. It was the era of handwritten letters, church on Sundays, hymns in Chapel, and amateur athletics. People admired John Wayne and Doris Day and had blind faith in government. Girls applied to Vassar or Smith and their brothers entered Ivies with equal ease. Today most young people live multiracial, coeducational, unsupervised lives. They communicate via computers and email. Few attend church. The most religiously observant at Madeira are muslims. They never sleep, at least at night, have short attention spans, and absorb offensive lyrics on videos and DVDs. They view so much corruption and violence with little sense of outrage.

They are obsessed with college admissions. Girls compete against brothers and boyfriends for spots in the Ivies.

Girls today see issues clearly but dispassionately. They are not surprised by degradation, violence, misery — or planes flown into skyscrapers. They take terrorism for granted.

Taking off one’s shoes in airports is normal. They are not indifferent or self-absorbed, but rather self-protective.

Adolescence in the “real world” is tougher now than ever.

However, there are still plusses and joys. Even when exposed to the world’s excesses, they are still kids/children (although we never let them overhear us use such nouns.) Being 14 is not easy: getting through the day avoiding embarrassment, being utterly dependent on and completely at odds with parents, spending much mental energy worrying. Developmentally they are supposed to achieve psychological milestones during adolescence: separate from parents, develop independent friendships, figure out how they feel about sex and intimacy, decide values, create an identity, and take AP US History, study geometry and conjugate their verbs in French and Chinese.

Adolescents are between here and there, constantly preoccupied with getting their bearings in prevailing winds of media messages. What do kids need? They need guidance, structure, safety, assurance and reassurance, limits and rules, attention and affection, the opportunity to grow in a positive “counter culture.” What they need is a boarding school. The challenges of changing from a child to an adult can be hazardous. They need to accomplish psychological tasks as well as earn high GPAs and perfect SATs, to establish what the Harvard Dean of Admissions calls “distinguishing excellence.” What Madeira offers is a safe place where girls can take risks to accomplish their personal best.

A place where they are known by adults, something that is absolutely critical during this turbulent time. Whether you are a day girl or a boarder, boarding school is an ideal environment for learning and growing. It provides a faculty, advisors, coaches, and other adults who stimulate the mind, spirit and body; allows freedom of choice in clear, reasonable limits; provides structure for development of self control; and most of all, it is a community in which students know they are cared for. This is elemental Madeira.

I hope that you met some Madeira girls during your visit so you could sense that your alma mater continues to fulfill Miss Madeira’s mission despite the distractions and dangers of contemporary adolescence. Madeira graduates are well educated, write clearly and creatively, speak cogently, reason logically, solve problems and find answers. They are also ethical, brave, and passionate. I do not worry about indifference or declining civic mindedness here. These girls are committed to the common good.

In addition to teaching a seminar in Women’s History, I also assist Co-Curriculum by teaching public speaking to ninth graders. In one exercise, I ask girls to imagine what they would be doing 25 years from now, returning to receive the Alumnae Achievement Award. I ask them why they would have deserved it? These girls imagined themselves as doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, vets, and horse trainers, as an Olympic gold medallist, and a founder of the Women’s Hockey League.

One planned to be the architect of the new World Trade Center, as well as several scholars (including a PhD in Tibetan studies), novelists, and a poet laureate. The class has three future Oscar winners, including one for costume, a Metropolitan Opera star, several missionaries, a marine

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biologist who rescues turtles, a Meet the Press anchor and a National Geographic photo editor. We have activists in the class who want to save the Siberian Tiger, abolish the death penalty, cure AIDS, or lead the American Cancer Society.

They will have won the Nobel Peace Prize, served as Ambassador to France, and been elected Senator. Three will be president — of the United States, Nigeria, and Liberia.

On a personal side — one girl was married 4 times, once to actor Josh Hartnett. Mr. Hartnett also figured in the marriage plans of several other girls in the class! Many of the girls had children named Lily, Chelsea, Natalie, and Joshua. Several of the girls planned to adopt Chinese orphans. Sadly, not enough wanted to be teachers!

I was recently invited to take four Madeira girls to the Women’s National Leadership Summit, a gathering of women political and business leaders. The girls were part of a distinguished panel of dinner speakers, including Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. They were the only young people, however, and they dazzled the audience with their poise and, more importantly, with the clarity of their message and goals. They thanked women pioneers who went before them. “We look forward to assuming the mantle of leadership in the days to come.” They finished their talk to a standing ovation. I have recently learned that PBS plans to feature the four in a special about women leadership.

These girls are going to be as sensational and impressive as you are. They are ready to live and lead in an increasingly diverse, complicated and divided society. And most important, they know they can make a contribution.

Which leads me to all of you, women who love your alma mater enough to risk coming to Reunion. And more importantly, who gave generously. Thank you for your loyalty and commitment. I am now going to mention money. Some people find talking about money unladylike, but they were not educated here. Madeira women understand school finances.

They know that the School’s future depends on past graduates like you. Some of you, I know, are shocked by the current tuition, which is indeed high. But the only way we can keep tuition affordable for future Madeira students, and the only way to guarantee financial aid, is to increase contributions to The Annual Fund and to triple our endowment.

So I thank you for your generosity to date and ask you to do more. And I pledge to make Madeira the best school of its kind, to be worthy of your trust.

’’

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COLL EGE COUN SELI NG H AN D O UT JAN UARY 2 004

True Confessions One Mom’s Hard-Earned Advice

To be honest, I was reluctant to accept this assignment.

To write about what I’ve learned from sending the four Deardourff offspring to college over a 20-year span would force me to drop my cover as the supposedly calm, supposedly wise, occasionally cool Headmistress, the everprofessional educator. In truth, I was just as obsessed about colleges as every other Washington-area, welleducated, high-achieving, status-seeking, ambitious parent. But compared to my husband, I was rational, so I do not feel too hypocritical offering this hard-won advice.

Repeat daily or hourly, as needed: “I am not applying to college. My spouse is not applying to college. We are not applying to college. Our child is applying to college.”

Do not sign in at the info session. Do not call the interviewer, the coach, the dean, the president of the college. Do not ask questions without permission. Do not — do I even need to say? — write the essay.

If you want to apply to college, take the SAT and put yourself on the line.

Application risks rejection. For our children, being measured by strangers on standards not of their choosing and then risking rejection are not that appealing. Our children, both privileged and lucky, have not had much experience with losing, let alone rejection. Not until the college admissions process do some of us learn that there are more senior class president/valedictorian / threeseason state champion varsity captains in the country than there are spaces in the freshman classes of all the Ivy League colleges put together.

Princeton’s iconic former Dean of Admissions had a fivepoint scale on which the above attributes rated only a one. Being first chair violist in the county youth orchestra might earn a two; performing at the Kennedy Center a three; only conducting one’s own composition at Lincoln Center at age 12 earned a five.

Repeat chorus following paragraph No. 1.

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Do not follow the crowd. Look for schools where your daughter’s unique characteristics may be interesting to the admissions committee. If you visit a school and everybody looks like your daughter, do not assume they want your daughter, too. (Deardourff daughter #3 was delighted to read in the catalogue that UCal-Santa Barbara was in search of brunettes who looked good in bikinis.) They may be looking for ways to diversify their student body in all kinds of ways. For you, this may mean researching outstanding schools less familiar to the other partners in your law firms: Grinnell, Drew, Reed, Earlham, Rhodes, the College of Wooster. Deardourff daughter #2 did pick a smaller school, then purposely chose a well-known graduate school for which she had been very well prepared.

Pay attention to the person who is applying. My husband would have celebrated his 50th college reunion this June. He was one of four kids in a small town Ohio high school class of 100 to continue their education. His best friend went to Notre Dame, which John could not afford.

One girl went to nursing school, another boy to the GM training school. John thrived at a small men’s college in Indiana, which our son John David refused even to put on his safety list. While his dad loved the intimate professor-student contact, J.D. told us he wanted “cute girls and fraternities.” Whether he said this to annoy his dad or alarm his mom, sociability is very much part of who our boy is, so we had to listen to him.

Create criteria for starting a list. When pressed, J.D. added strong studio art programs and Division III sports to his list of what he hoped to find at college. His parents added a traditional liberal arts education and hopefully a required core curriculum. These components led to a list of colleges diverse in size, geography, and academic reputation. It included: Davidson, Lafayette, Pomona, Savannah College of Art, Skidmore, University of Wisconsin at Madison, UCal-Davis, UVA, and William and Mary.

Boycott the rankings. Having a child applying to college will offer many opportunities to argue with your spouse. I was especially outraged when my husband bought not one but two copies of the U.S. News & World Report guide (I had trashed the first one). Lists like this contribute to the hysteria of this process and particularly to the increase in numbers of applications received by colleges high on the list. When a college receives 20 times more applications than the spaces available, it will rely more and more on scores or become even more random in its selection process.

Do Your Research. Accept that most students will care less or pretend to care less than you do about this

part of the process. I’m not sure any one of our children read all the info any college sent. We all entirely missed the fact that Duke had two science classes as a graduation requirement until passing one became a senior year cliffhanger. At a minimum, somebody needs to track application due dates. One of our children created color-coded files; another had an overstuffed drawer. For the devout, there are shelves of books about the process. The Hidden Ivies was a particular favorite because it listed Carleton College in Minnesota, a small liberal arts school with an outstanding history department. My husband wanted all four Deardourffs to attend. None applied.

Repeat chorus following paragraph No. 1.

Visit. Some people think students should go on their own, but I was too invested to give up this rite of passage, plus we were paying. True, after several embarrassing tours with two parents and miscellaneous siblings in tow, we broke into research teams. In exchange for promising to ask my question, only one other person went on any tour while the hangers-on checked out the student union, the dorms (vetoing those reeking of beer), the gym. My question was a feminist test, either “How many women professors do you have?” or “What women authors have you read?” You can see why I was banished to the bookstore to buy the boxers and baseball caps.

All of this assumes you can get the applicant out of the car. Some of our visits became “drive bys” in which the kid refused to do more than look out the rear window before dismissing the campus as “uncool.”

Do not nag. Worse, do not harangue. The consequence of an incomplete or unpolished essay is just that. You have to let it go. I did not always follow this advice. Indeed, I screeched and then sobbed about essay due dates inadvertently in front of a child’s roommate. In penance, I know I will see that person at every major family event in the future. At every graduation, wedding, christening and funeral, I will remember I was a virago. The essay did not benefit from this display of theatrics, but it did meet the deadline.

Accept advice. Throughout these years of angst, I benefited from the advice of Madeira College Counselor Sheila Reilly (Dottie Hayden had not yet joined our college counseling staff). Ms. Reilly’s professional acumen, common sense, intelligence, resource library, good humor, and handholding helped. With advice mundane (who knew there were guides to hotels in college towns) or strategic (this college counted the number of times an applicant contacted them), we were well served.

Some of the counseling our children got in other schools was excellent, some seemed indifferent, some selfinterested — or political, advising against some colleges if they would impact the school’s overall acceptance list.

Some were as good, but we never found anyone better than Ms. Reilly.

I am so pleased with the recent addition of Dr. Hayden to our college counseling staff. A Madeira teacher with

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nearly 30 years of experience teaching and coaching girls, she also brings knowledge of athletics and a Ph.D. in counseling to help families negotiate the anxieties attendant on this whole process. Both our advisors put equal emphasis on counseling and college admissions.

Reading can provide invaluable perspective on the college search. One of Ms. Reilly’s recommendations, which she shares with all junior parents, was to read The College Mystique by Bill Mayher, a former independent school

Love the child you have, who may not be class president, ace athlete, or academic whiz. college counselor. Several points resonated, and I close with these two.

Find another topic to talk about. Do not let college be the topic that dominates senior year — or junior year — or high school. Your daughter already knows you care intensely, and has known since she was a toddler. Every time you commented on a college decal on somebody’s rear window, she got the message.

Those of us who advise seniors share a conspiracy of silence. We don’t talk about college in group meetings.

Parents should resolve not to talk about it at breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime, during carpool, or in the checkout line. It is bad manners to ask anybody else about it. It is too important to talk about because children might get the message that where they go to college means more to you than they do.

Love the child you have, who may not be class president, ace athlete, or academic whiz. I have no doubt that our son will be a great grownup, a fine man, a good guy like his dad. But in the panic of the college application process, I wasn’t confident of his success. His early decision application was denied at a school that did not defer anyone. If he did not get in anywhere, I would reassure myself, I would be proud (and terrified) if he were a Marine, or he could take a gap year like the royal heirs and increasing numbers of American students. Somewhere there would be serendipity.

None of the brief obituaries of the people who died on 9/11 published in The New York Times reported the victims’ SAT scores or alma maters. Rather they emphasized the individual’s character and personality. So should we. •

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TAFT GR AD UATION SP EECH M AY 2 9, 2 0 04

History Lessons

‘‘

Because Madeira girls have something to say, we require them to take public speaking, so they will be effective as well as outspoken.

One assignment is to introduce a speaker, linking listeners to the person at the lectern, as Mr. MacMullen just gracefully demonstrated.

My connection and my primary credential today is motherhood. I am the devoted, indulgent mom of John David Griffith Deardourff, an introduction I’ve offered often in our two-name household. After three Deardourff daughters and a nine-year gap, we produced a caboose boy. You know him as J.D.; the big guy; Kelley’s beau; the only boy in AP studio art; the athlete who gave up swimming, golf, basketball, crosscountry and lacrosse to find his ultimate sport in ultimate Frisbee; the fan leading cheers at the Hotchkiss football game in red body paint and a matching Speedo, which I worry he’s wearing today.

In addition to being a mom, I am Headmistress of a girls’ boarding school. This medal bears witness to both roles: on one side is the seal of The Madeira

… life is a voyage of discovery… there are lessons in the past, so you should listen to your parents …

School; on the other the teeth marks of the toddler who was gnawing on it when I was installed sixteen years ago. That boy’s first full phrase was “man in the dorm,” one I understand he continues to use.

J.D.’s joie de vivre has been a source of enormous entertainment to us and, I suspect, to you. In fact, one of the reasons we decided to investigate boarding schools was his charm.

When he was in sixth grade, he was kidnapped by Madeira seniors. This “Ransom of Red Chief” was their class prank.

The prospect of J.D. living in a girls’ school for the rest of his adolescence prompted his Taft application.

I was grateful to accept Mr. Mac’s invitation to speak today, as some assurance that J.D. would graduate. Since 97% of high school seniors cannot remember who spoke at their commencements (in my case it was either Peter or Paul, Mary I would have remembered), I hope any embarrassment I cause will be fleeting.

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I was asked to speak as a parent, so I will begin by expressing the affection and pride of every parent here. We love you.

We are grateful you have survived the risks of adolescence in America and the rigors of a Taft education. As parents we offer our abundant and heartfelt thanks to Taft faculty and staff, for challenging our children to rise to your standards of excellence.

Another assignment in public speaking for Madeira girls is to imagine themselves returning to campus in 25 years, to accept the Alumnae Achievement Award. I revel in the ambitions expressed. This spring we had the future presidents of three countries, several senators, the poet laureate, a soup kitchen supervisor, a dancer, an astronaut, and assorted Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Grammy, and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Whatever you imagine you may become may change entirely between now and your next graduation or your 40th birthday or your 50th reunion. The United States Department of Labor predicts that most of you will have seven careers in your lifetimes. For the first time ever, young men and women will be admitted to graduate school in equal numbers, will be hired for the same positions, and paid the same salaries. The historic discrimination, which results in college educated women being paid less than high school drop-out men, won’t become evident in your lives until you are in your thirties — when you are making decisions about having babies, how many babies, who will care for the babies, and who makes partner. I’m hoping that the young people in this class will work to change those institutions which undermine the stability of families and which still discriminate against women less privileged than you.

As parents we hope you find a vocation you love — in banking or biophysics, farming or fashion, poetry or politics; an occupation which covers the rent and pays for health insurance; and passion, something to inspire your life — a calling, a cause, a person. Lucky people find all three.

I will insert here a public service announcement on behalf of teaching, nursing, firefighting, and serving to your community and country. Come back to Taft and be a triple threat.

Consider the Peace Corps or the Job Corps or the Marines.

Be a police officer or army ranger.

This weekend in Washington, Memorial Day is being celebrated with the dedication of the new World War II Memorial.

Many of us here are old enough to remember calling the holiday “Decoration Day” and going to cemeteries to decorate graves with flags. According to research by a Duke professor, until recently, very few Americans your age even knew a veteran, much less contemplated becoming one. Despite recent outrages in Iraqi prisons, service to country is honorable.

Your leadership, your patriotism in politics or the military could change the course of our country’s future.

I also want to invoke you to vote and to run for office. It is alarming to me that more people voted for American Idol than voted for President in the last election. Young people ages 18 to 34 volunteer in enormous numbers. Yet this cohort rarely votes. Clearly there is a connection between the country’s needs and your vote. Have you seen the t-shirt, “If you aren’t appalled, you haven’t been paying attention?” It’s time to pay attention.

In addition to being a mom and a headmistress, I am an historian. So I considered past events for my rite of passage metaphor today. During your senior year we will have commemorated the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the 50th anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education decision and the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. One hundred years ago last December the Wright brothers launched their bi-plane at Kitty Hawk. Two hundred years ago, on May 2, 1804, Lewis and Clark launched their “voyage of discovery.”

That two-year odyssey from St. Louis to the Pacific coast, exploring and mapping unknown territory, offers provocative and singularly American life lessons for all of us.

Purchased from France for $15 million, the Louisiana Territory doubled the size of the United States, gave us control of the Mississippi River, provided invaluable scientific data, and encouraged our sense of “Manifest Destiny.”

Acquiring the Louisiana territory would test our nation’s ability to absorb and assimilate different cultures, a characteristic which has defined us as a nation of immigrants but a concept with which we still struggle. It forced the overwhelmingly Protestant and white east to confront the polyglot culture of the west.

This new land west of the Mississippi was a savory multicultural gumbo, populated by French and Spanish Catholics, free blacks, pirates, backwoodsmen, and nations of Native Americans. The question of whether slavery would be extended into its 800,000 square miles was a cause of the Civil War. Its magnificence gave us “amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesty.” Its frontier gave us a recurring theme in American literature, as men like Leatherstocking and boys like Huck Finn “lit out for the territory,” and families like the Joads searched for a promised land.

The story of Lewis and Clark appeals to me in part because when the troop was lost they had to ask directions from a woman. Married to a French trader, Sacagawea was only 16 and pregnant when she acted as their guide. The band was also biracial — Captain Clark had brought his slave York. It impresses me that once the corps reached the Pacific and established camp, the commanders called for a vote on which route to take home, including both York and Sacagawea in the tally.

I hope you found resonance in that account: that life is a voyage of discovery; that there are lessons in the past, so you should listen to your parents; that taking risks and embracing diversity are rewarding endeavors; and that pursuing your dreams could require undaunted courage.

My second history lesson offers a more recent example of courage. No one here today will forget that your time at Taft included September 11, 2001. For many of you, who came as sophomores, it was your first day in a new school. It was the first day of classes and Mr. Mac’s first assembly as headmaster. Our world changed forever on 9/11. Those changes haunt us today, when the country is on orange alert and anti-aircraft guns circle the Capitol.

As a way of remembering and respecting those who died escaping the buildings or rushing into the buildings or in other acts of heroism that day, I made myself read every “Portrait of Grief” published in the New York Times. Only a few of those short obituary paragraphs mentioned where the dead went to college, much less to prep school. No SAT scores, no job titles were included.

The focus in each entry was on the character of the individual, as defined by deeds like coaching Little League, singing in a gospel choir, volunteering in a soup kitchen, or teaching tap dancing to retirees. The dead were devoted dads and dutiful daughters, pet lovers and pranksters. They were remembered not for what they earned but for how they behaved — honorably, bravely, kindly, ethically.

They were loved for themselves, as you are by your parents.

With your teachers, we wish you farewell on your life’s adventures — no matter how challenging or perilous. Even if you find your route unmapped or if you get diverted from your original destination, you will always be welcomed home, by your families and by Taft. You will never need to introduce yourselves or present your credentials to us.

We love you. Godspeed.

’’

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04 As with all new initiatives at Madeira, we will try it out, tweak it, keep it or change it until we get it right.

ABOVE:

2005 Board of Directors

Three heads: Kathleen Galvin Johnson ’53, Charles Saltzman and Betsy LEFT:

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M E M O TO TH E BOAR D J ULY 2 004

TO:

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

FROM: BETSY RE:

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE HEADMISTRESS

Despite Hurricane Isabel, which closed school for several days in September, and false charges of race-based harassment by a new student, which threatened the safety of girls on campus as well as challenged our identity as an inclusive, respectful community, this was a calm and happy year. Whether measured by the goals set for me by the Board Executive Committee in August 2003 or by Independent School Management’s “Stability Markers” (attached) or by my personal “LA” index (the “Lucy-Allegra” scale: were girls learning, thriving and growing in a happy, healthy community?), it was a very good year. Much of the credit is due to the Class of 2004, who were well and responsibly led and full of good humor, easy equanimity, and high energy.

My role in the School’s continued improvement and stability is both central and secondary. As CEO, I organize our resources (smart people, seasoned leaders, adequate resources, limited time) to carry out Board level goals and keep the ship on course, despite hurricanes, reefs, and unexpected icebergs. Navigating among the needs and demands of myriad constituencies and public regulations, all the while searching for more fuel, is demanding. (I may have carried this metaphor too far but it appeals and has triggered both Patrick O’Brien allusions and Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics in my brain.)

Other than strategic direction and general oversight (plotting the course and ordering “carry on!”), quotidian responsibility for admissions, marketing, fundraising, faculty evaluation, curriculum, student life, technology, business operations, and more is delegated to excellent “line officers.” The “captain” (more poetic quotations) needs to hire, inspire, support, fund, monitor, trust and take responsibility for the lieutenants, the passengers and the ship.

I’m particularly pleased this year to have established a new model for directing our admissions, marketing, alumnae, campaign, annual fund, and centennial operations, by assigning them all to Meredyth Cole. This connection will improve all of those areas. I’m optimistic about its potential for success. As with all new initiatives at Madeira, we will try it out, tweak it, keep it or change it until we get it right.

That’s the rubric we are applying to the changes we made last year in the physical education requirement (reducing it from 12 to 6 trimesters), to allow us to experiment with more appealing kinds of PE programs for adolescent girls who are not competitive athletes(aerobics, pilates, yoga) and to address the competing need for time for extracurriculars like play rehearsal or Model UN. Similarly, we moved graduation into the school year. The feedback to date reflects that neither seniors nor their teachers wanted them to leave any earlier than necessary!

I continue to search for the best way to staff my work and that of the Board and Parents’ Association.

I have benefited from the energy and enthusiasm of younger assistants who prove themselves so able that other people poach them. In my experience these candidates do not consider working for me as a life-long career.

Our strong ATeam and seasoned staff support will allow me to manage my public roles. I’m committed to the success of the Centennial Campaign and look forward to being “back on the road again.”

When we work with ninth graders in study skills, we sometimes do an exercise using paper plates. The assignment is to list all the activities expected of a Madeira girl in a day, including sleeping, eating, and bathing (girls do not usually list room cleaning), and then to make a pie graph on their plates. On my pie chart, it remains a challenge for me to fit everything into my day, week, month and year. I have increased the number of days devoted to fundraising and Board committee work, which cuts down on the time spent wandering the campus, planning agendas, writing for sundry publications, answering correspondence, etc. To help me manage better, I’m reading The Organized Executive, which may not help because, in the first example, the exec is dictating answers to his 15 in-box items to his secretary …!

I need to solve this conundrum so I can have time for thinking broadly about the institution and its needs.

I want to explore alternatives to the inflexibility of our present salary scale, to think creatively about global education, year-round school, community relations, environmental issues, etc, while not neglecting the needs of members of a small school community like ours to feel acknowledged and attended to by their Headmistress.

Such challenges energize me to find solutions and employ new strategies. I’m fortunate to be in a position and an institution which challenges me to reach my “personal best” and I’m honored to have this appointment. •

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PAREN TS W EEKEN D: STAT E OF THE S CHOOL S P EEC H S EP TEM B ER 2 004

What Your Contributions Support

‘‘

I love the energy and optimism of September.

The start of school is always filled with excitement and anticipation, for girls and teachers alike.

At Opening Convocation on September 7, the seniors marched in wearing white, student government leaders welcomed a full school of 310 girls, and I gave my annual “book bag talk.” With 164 boarders, every bed is full.

Our students come from 21 states, the District of Columbia, and 18 countries. One-third of the girls are students of color and one-fifth are legacies. One-sixth come from foreign countries, including Australia, Bahrain, Bhutan, China, France, Ireland, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, and South Africa.

Our record high “yield,” the percentage of accepted girls who decide to enroll, may be linked to the success of our residential summer leadership program (“Girls First!”) or our sports camp (“Just Girls!”) or Camp Greenway, our coed day camp. Madeira’s riding camp filled up within hours when registration opened last January.

Our 101 incoming students (76 ninth graders, 21 sophomores, 4 juniors) follow the particularly high-spirited, strong and accomplished Class of 2004. As usual, last year’s seniors applied to a range of 191 different colleges and universities, earning admission to Carlton, Duke, Georgetown, Kenyon, Mt. Holyoke, New York University, Oberlin, Reed, Smith, the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, Washington University, Wellesley, William and Mary and Yale, among many others.

One measure of the strength of the Class of 2004 was the manner in which senior leaders addressed a spate of academic dishonesty cases, meeting both with the student body and the faculty to propose possible solutions. As a result, we have chosen honesty as this year’s theme, have asked each department to be more specific about its expectations, and have added an additional component of research and writing skills to the ninth grade curriculum. A confidential survey conducted by the student government last spring suggested that girls were found guilty of plagiarizing when they had not learned to paraphrase and footnote, when they were panicked or under pressure, or when they succumbed to the

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temptation of the internet. While part of the problem, technology also helped us track miscreants.

Our teacher turnover rate remains level and low, and seems to be due primarily to babies, relocation, or family responsibilities. Every hiring season offers opportunities to add diversity to our adult community and enhance its quality overall. Among our faculty and staff are several alumnae: Paula Skallerup Osborn ’70, Katy Steele ’75, Heidi Santner Freeman ’89, and Alex Malin ’99. Like schools everywhere, we are facing retirements of senior teachers and experienced staff. Next June, Christine Langford, Director of the CoCurriculum Program, and Sally DeMott, iconic Advanced Placement biology teacher and beloved campus leader, will retire. We intend to send them off in style.

Faculty and staff took advantage of Madeira’s professional development budget this summer to enrich their minds and enhance their classrooms. A biology teacher learned to extract DNA and just last week repeated the experiment on a Madeira strawberry. A Spanish teacher continued graduate work in Spanish at the Madrid campus of St. Louis University. A math department chair signed up for a woodworking class; she believes even master teachers need to remember how it feels to learn something new. Other faculty members attended workshops for Advanced Placement teachers.

Summer scholarship also resulted in the addition of new courses in the curriculum: Comparative Government and Biotechnology and Bioethics. This year’s senior English electives include Songs of Ourselves, Philosophy and Literature, In Another Country: Modern Literature from Outside North America and Europe, Monsters and Visions, Shakespeare in Love, Creative Writing (Poetry), and Advanced Placement Literature. Younger Madeira girls are still memorizing Chaucer, performing Shakespeare, and reading The Odyssey.

When Meredyth Cole and I invited the new sophomores to dessert this week, they were prepping for the first of several Modern World History map quizzes. For the first, they must memorize and identify every country and capital in Europe from Iceland to Turkey (Reykjavik to Ankara). Would you pass? This is just one element of global education here.

More teachable moments took place in Bhutan on a trip organized by Madeira’s History Department.

Another element of global education at Madeira is the range of speakers we invite annually. Since September 11, 2001, when this year’s seniors were freshmen, we have marked that date with a program combining reflection and learning. In 2002, we had a “teach-in,” featuring historians, journalists, and

diplomats. Last year we had an all-day workshop on prejudice and stereotypes. Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire, spoke about the Muslim women she covered for The Wall Street Journal. This month we invited Nancy Updike ’86, an independent producer for Public Radio International, to report on her coverage of the Middle East. Her remarks provoked tough questions and lively discussions.

Of course, as we remind parents often, in addition to class work, girls are engaged in many other activities: sports, the arts, and extracurriculars ranging from Model U.N. to the Muslim Student Alliance to the Latin Club and Habitat for Humanity. Our still unique Co-Curriculum Program offers opportunities for learning on many levels. Please consider hosting Madeira girls as interns.

Last spring the School completed an 18-month reaccreditation process, required by the Virginia Association of Independent Schools (VAIS) and the Commonwealth of Virginia. To prepare, we produced an in-depth self study of every aspect of school life. In January, a 15-person visiting team spent four days on campus observing all we do, visiting every class, measuring reality vs. reporting, ensuring we do what we say we do. I’m proud to report that Madeira passed with flying colors. This is a healthy process and helps us develop goals for our governance groups.

Centennial planning continues its countdown to 2006 with creativity and enthusiasm. Meanwhile, we have begun plan-

The most important work of adolescents is growing up and outgrowing their parents and teachers. These physical and psychological milestones are as critical as meeting Madeira’s graduation requirements or ethical standards. Ironically, one of the reasons we surround our girls with so many adults — teachers, advisors, coaches, house adults, deans, the AOD, and campus residents — is to help them navigate the highrisk journey to adulthood and independence.

We continually work to increase the size of the applicant pool of both boarding and day girls here. To accomplish this goal, we promote the concept that “Madeira girls have something to say,” literally and figuratively. You will see this theme appear throughout our publications and on the website.

We are all anticipating the opening of the Student Center / Dining Hall this week with balloons, strawberries, and a parade led by seniors, maybe even a bagpiper. As soon as the current dining room is empty, we will begin its conversion into Schoolhouse II, which will house the Math and World Languages Departments, the academic hub, and the writing center.

The Board’s stewardship of the School requires them to attend to the infrastructure of pipes, roofs, and boilers, many of which, at 73 years old, are showing their age. We worry about the unexpected need to replace the boiler in North, when our long-term maintenance budget is underfunded.

I’m looking forward to the Board’s first meeting on October 1, the date Miss Madeira opened the School in 1906. I am grateful to be paired with Board President Perry Carpenter Wheelock ’69. Her leadership is inclusive and graceful, her counsel wise and steady.

ning Reunions for April 2005, a new date that will allow girls, alumnae and teachers to interact. See ww.madeira.org, where you will also learn about our Lives and Legacies program in October and other speakers coming to campus throughout the year, including pollster Celinda Lake offering a post-election analysis on November 4.

The generosity of alumnae, parents, and friends allows us to do all we do for Madeira girls, directly and indirectly, from underwriting faculty research to funding speakers to providing “smart board” technology in math classrooms. In fact, all of that was partially funded by your gifts to The Annual Fund.

This bustle is Madeira. The excitement, noise, action, creaks, shrieks, and groans are the sounds of girls learning and growing up. We enact Miss Madeira’s mission and enable girls to thrive and become their best selves through daily effort, diligence, and vigilance. The work we do helping adolescent girls live authentic lives deserves our collective best, which is why I appeal to you to contribute to The Annual Fund.

I know I speak on behalf of the Board, faculty, staff, and students in thanking you for helping Madeira fulfill our mission and serve its goals.

’’

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A LL SC H OOL MEE TIN G SEPTE MBER 9, 2004

9/11 Anniversary Remarks

‘‘

Three years ago, September 11 fell on a Tuesday. In Washington and New York City, it was a perfect fall day, clear, sunny, crisp.

The Class of 2005 were new ninth graders. Today’s four-year seniors had been at Madeira barely a week.

I was working in my office when our registrar, whose husband was assigned to the Pentagon, dashed upstairs to tell me an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center. Time stopped at 8:46 a.m. as we tuned into radios, located a TV, and watched, stunned.

I imagine everyone here remembers where they were on that September morning. For students, 9/11 has become your grandparents’ Pearl Harbor or your parent’s Kennedy-King-Kennedy assassinations.

I also expect that some of you have images seared into your memory bank — film footage of crumbling towers, falling or fleeing people, walls papered with pictures of the missing, holes sheared into the side of the Pentagon.

I remain haunted by the stories and obsessed with the “Portraits of Grief” published by The New York Times— not so much obituaries as vignettes. I developed even greater respect for firefighters, who ran into the inferno. Three hundred forty-three died — more than any other occupation (My daughter, who was living in New York City, adopted a firehouse and delivered brownies and pints of rocky road ice cream.)

More people (2,792) died on 9/11 than any day in American history, other than at the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862). For the families of those victims, every day is an anniversary.

I also remember how this community responded by taking care of each other, with teachers working overtime, and campus residents sleeping in dorms, people hugging, lighting candles, praying, clinging and posting signs at the gate.

Girls painted a quotation from Lincoln’s second Inaugural on a canvas: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have bourne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

We grieved together, grateful to be together, relieved there were no immediate losses.

We didn’t let girls watch television coverage without adults present. I was in the dining hall during the national day of mourning, the Friday after the Tuesday attack. One younger girl was sitting to the side. I could see her shoulders begin to quiver.

Before I could move, Caroline Salamack ’04, who was sitting nearby, noticed and changed seats to be next to this ninth grader, putting her arm around the younger girl’s shoulder, a not-so-random act of kindness.

We grieved together, grateful to be together, relieved there were no immediate losses.

To remember the day and honor the dead, we have crafted days of remembrance and reflection.

On September 11, 2002, we held a teach-in about the Middle East, with a panel of journalists, historians, and diplomats who offered their perspectives. There were music and moments of silence.

On September 11, 2003, we held a teach-in about prejudice, assisted by the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI). The community read Ali & Nino and we heard from Geraldine Brooks, a New York writer and author of Seven Pillars of Islam, who spoke about the lives of Muslim women.

How long will we mark this date, keep this All School Meeting on the calendar? Should it become a day of national service? It could be a day on which Americans donate books or deliver canned goods to soup kitchens or do repairs for the elderly or volunteer at schools. It could be a day on which we ask, as every American did on September 11, how can I help?

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’’

O P ENING FACULTY / STA FF O R IENTAT ION MEET ING AUG UST 2 9, 2006

Business, Books, and Schools

‘‘

A week from today at Opening Convocation I will pull six Madeira red and white canvas tote bags in graduated sizes out from behind the lectern.

Returning girls and grownups will recognize that I am about to launch into “The Bookbag Talk.” It has become a back-to-school tradition and an element of my 19-year legacy, as was establishing opening and closing convocations.

My talk about book bags and backpacks symbolizing the individual hopes and history each of us brings to school, especially new girls, asks listeners to take two affirmative steps: to “leave the baggage of bias at the gate,” so they can enter this community with hearts and minds open to others, and to trust us to create a school in which they will feel safe enough to reveal their genuine selves.

The book bag talk will be the opening essay in Nota Bene, a four-page publication mailed to parents and alumnae six times a year. Given that most of our book bags are stuffed with books, that books are the tools of our trade, the NB centerfold lists what Madeira adults have been reading this summer, without giving our names. I wonder if we formatted the page as a matching game, if people could guess which of us read Stephen Ambrose or Edward Jones or Nora Roberts?

Barnes and Noble at Tyson’s mall now displays the books required as summer reading by Fairfax County Public Schools, a table I’m eager to inspect, wishing I knew some of the teachers who had assigned these diverse choices. Yesterday in the lunch line Kim Newsome admitted staying up until dawn to finish the only book she read this summer which was not required.

Another staffer had left her seventh grader at home with strict instructions to finish his assigned book.

Some of us are probably relieved that the deadline for discussion of Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, and Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax was extended until we regroup on September 27. Ninth grade teachers and advisors will have an opportunity to discuss The Diary of Ma Yan with new parents during Parents’ Weekend.

Those last two titles, Good to Great and Gentlemen and Players, juxtapose the joint realities of school life and identify the tension between the corporate and the educational.

When Lucy Madeira founded her school one hundred years ago, she was purposefully starting a small business to make money to support her mother and siblings.

Miss Madeira rented space, arranged for renovations, printed advertisements, hired Vassar classmates to teach and appealed to others for their daughters or donations. She installed her mother as Head of House.

After two decades of success and her marriage to David Wing, widower of another Vassar friend, father of two and a man of some means from Maine timber interests, she decided to move her School to the country. Together the Wings bought 150 acres of this property in the

CONT IN U ES

Like many of you, my book bag, office, and house are overstuffed with books, too many unread, all welcoming temptations and engaging, if silent, company now that I live alone. Into my summer book bag I tossed Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, which three people

had given me, bumping it to the top of the pile. In comparing President Lincoln’s war cabinet to our Administrative Team, I wondered if Paul Hager or Braughn Taylor were Salmon P. Chase; perhaps M.A. Mahoney is my William Seward. In addition to two mysteries, I read Dava Sobel’s Longitude, an intriguing history of scientific inquiry and exploration. I acquired many new odd facts, about scurvy and sextants and gears replacing pendulums in clocks. Finally, at the prompting of Meredyth Cole and the example of former Director of Admissions Jeannie Norris, now head of Miss Hall’s School in Massachusetts, I skimmed Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (Harper Business, 2001) and finished another sample of “prep lit,” Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris (William Morrow, 2006).

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B US IN ESS, BOOKS, & S CHO OL S CON TI NUE D

1920s. Mr. Wing built the cabin used now by Inner Quest and Mrs. Wing began to layout the Oval and interview architects, hiring Waldron Faulkner. His wife “Bussie” Coonley Faulkner had graduated in 1920; his mother-in-law, Queene Ferry Coonley, was another friend and member of the Vassar class of 1896. Her family had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design the Avery Coonley School outside Chicago.

04

David Wing died in 1929. His estate was complicated and his children inherited some parcels of Greenway property. Miss Madeira, once again a single woman with no credit rating, incorporated the School soon after and invited a dozen powerful men to become its first Board of Directors. Among them were Dean Acheson, Eugene

Like Lucy Madeira’s, our business is still to educate girls “to lead lives of their own making…”

Meyer, Charles Robb, and Judge Edward Burling. (The law firm he founded, Covington & Burling, remains our legal counsel.) School ownership shifted from a sole proprietorship to a corporate entity.

It is not clear to me that Miss Madeira was the employee of her board, as I am, since she chaired the Board from 1929 – 1957 (as Miss Maynard would be from 1957 – 62).

The only other woman member of the Board besides the Headmistress was President of the Alumnae Association.

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In 1965, the Board elected its first alumna president, Nancy Baxter Skallerup ’42, mother of Paula Osborn ’70, our English Department chair.

Miss Madeira incorporated her school because she needed funds to expand and move her enterprise. With the stock market crash and bank failures, her Board borrowed the needed funds from the Yale endowment.

Today Madeira is a not-for-profit corporation with 150 full and part-time employees, $17M budget, $50M endowment, 376-acre campus, demanding clientele, a shrinking market share, an aging plant, and some outstanding debt. Even though the School receives no federal or state funding, our business is subject to regulations ranging from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, governing employee benefits and wages, to the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act, covering our environment and effluents, and Fairfax County zoning regulations, limiting our land use and population.

Like Lucy Madeira’s, our business is still to educate girls “to lead lives of their own making…” It is demanding work, requiring layers of expertise, patience, perseverance, passion — and a positive cash flow from tuition, contributions, investment earnings, and auxiliary programs. While Jim Collins’ book addresses the challenges of doing business, novels set in schools remind us of the complexity, humor, humanity, and frailty of our undertaking.

If I were a member of the English department rather than a history teacher, I would propose a senior elective called “School Ties: The Fiction of Independent Schools.”

The reading list would include Goodbye Mr. Chips, A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, a Dickensian sampler and Harry Potter. I would exclude Prep, which I found overrated but brilliant in its pink and green belted cover art, and add Black Ice (making an exception for memoir), The Fall of Rome, and the recently published Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.

4

The list of choices is lengthy as any bibliographic search proves: Tom Brown’s School Days, The Rector of Justin, All Loves Excelling, The Headmaster’s Papers, Academy X, Saving Miss Oliver’s, The Headmistress …. Would the Gossip Girls count? The syllabus for a course taught at Bowdoin College is fifteen pages, and one might be tempted to add movies: “Dead Poets Society” or “School Ties,” for example.

A recent New York Times book review lamented that the narrow genre of prep lit was overwritten and observed that the number of first novels in this category suggested high unemployment among the ranks of recent independent school graduates.

Madeira girls might not immediately relate to their fictional counterparts, enrolled at St. Oswald’s, St. Galway, St. Grottlesex or Hogwarts, who are predominately male. I understand the difficulty. Almost all the fictional heads of school are men, like most of heads of independent schools counted by the National Association of Independent Schools.

… they reiterate the lesson that the success of a school depends on relationships …

Betsy with the Facilities Staff on whom the School depends daily.

In Gentlemen and Players, “The Old Head was foul-tempered, overbearing, rude and opinionated; exactly what I enjoy most in a Headmaster,” observes a senior master. “The New Head is brittle, elegant, and slightly sinister” and has been in office fifteen years (p. 20). Madeleine’s Miss Clavell and Rue Shaw, protagonist of Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon (1995), are exceptions.

the ATeam how the school is governed. As I will admonish girls next week, I’m asking you to unpack bias and open minds and hearts, to trust and respect each other and the work you do. Let us learn from and about each other so we will become better teachers and professionals. Mutual respect sustains group efforts. Leaders at every level and in every department need to create an atmosphere of trust and dignity, to nurture personal best not only in girls but also in adults. I am committed to that effort.

Contemporary settings are coed, with girls as appealing or venal as the boys. In early works of prep lit. plots revolve around boys and masters, an honorific with a double meaning.

In that era parents are physically absent. In modern school fiction, parents are haughty, neglectful, ambitious and psychologically absent. In the subset of prep lit called admissions lit, parents are villains, vicious and corrupt in such works as Academy X, Jane Austen in Scarsdale, or Love, Death and the SATs.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes about companies which excel: “Good is the enemy of great …. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for the good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good and that is their main problem.”

The most honorable and effective characters in prep lit novels are the head’s assistant (with the exception of the woman having an affair with her boss’s husband) and the Latin teacher (with the exception of The Fall of Rome).

Madeira is a good school. I’m not sure how I would define great for us or if I have the ambition or the stamina to achieve it. Instead I would apply Miss Madeira’s standard of individual excellence and personal best. I challenge us to become a community of teachers and learners.

So what do books about corporations and novels about schools have in common? The novels are more fun to read.

They can be charming, funny, insightful, and on occasion inspiring. They appeal to me because they are rooted in human frailty and they reiterate the lesson that the success of a school depends on relationships, between student and teacher, school and parent, school and alumna, teacher and teacher, teacher and head of school. How do we safeguard and enhance those relationships, no matter how corporate?

By listening, learning, trusting, sharing. We began this morning when we talked in groups of two and three about our “crafts,” answering these questions: What do we do? How does our work support the mission of the School? How does it relate to the theme of teaching and learning? What do you want us to know about what you do? We also learned from

Madeira needs to succeed not to be on some top ten list but because the work we do is so significant. I believe we have a responsibility to safeguard single sex education into the School’s second century, to send Madeira girls who have something to say — not as whining wimps but as ethical leaders and alpha women — into the wider world, which needs them.

So let us enter the one-hundredth year of Miss Madeira’s “home and day” School for Girls in reflection and celebration, honoring our profession of working with students, respecting teaching, and learning in an atmosphere of mutual respect, trust, and excellence.

’’

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06

FIR ST E-NEWS LETT ER NOVEM BER 2006

To: Subject: From:

Madeira Community THANKSGIVING Betsy@Madeira.org

Like a colonial town square or an old world plaza, Madeira’s Oval is the heart of our campus. The Board refers to it as a “sacred space” and girls respect it enough not to carve paths across it. In warm weather, classes meet on the grass and campus kids play tag there after supper. At Halloween it is our parade route; after Winterfest we circle it with candles as we did in the days after 9/11. On the day before graduation, it becomes an outdoor ring for the Senior Gallop. The Oval symbolizes the connections and relationships on our campus. It was intentionally designed so we would bump into each other, so “Around the Oval” was a felicitous title for this weekly column.

If the weather had been warmer, we might have had a political rally on the Oval this week. As it was, Mr. Pratt took his AP Government and Politics class with him to vote, where they bumped into Buckley Kuhn ’91, the precinct captain, and Merrill Roth’s mom, who was on duty as an election lawyer. In addition to changing the makeup of the House and the Senate and electing a record number of women Senators (16) and governors (9), the midterm election toppled four of our Republican hosts on Capitol Hill.

Juniors working for Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee (whose wife is a Madeira alum ’76), Montana Senator Conrad Burns, and Representatives Jim Leach (Iowa) and Charlie Bass (New Hampshire) will need to find new placements in January.

I would love to invite Leader Nancy Pelosi to speak at Madeira.

Does anyone have any connections to her?

I’m glad Election Day and our honoring of Veterans (formerly known as Armistice) Day at an All School Meeting fell in the same week. Our speaker, Stuart Kenworthy, Rector of Christ Church, Georgetown, volunteered to serve as chaplain to the 372nd D.C. National Guard Military Police Battalion. He served in Iraq from January to August and remains on active duty status until his unit returns. Grace Taveras ’07 appreciated his “unique perspective and excellent oratory.” I feel strongly that girls protected by the safety and security of our democracy and privileged to get a Madeira education need to remember and respect the veterans who have put themselves in harm’s way.

Girls are also talking about the fall play, Stage Door, and the success of Madeira’s thespians, especially Dr. Hager’s cameo appearance. Ninth graders will be attending A Midsummer Night’s Dream next Tuesday evening at the Folger Shakespeare Theater. That same day Latin students will be participating at the University of Maryland Latin Day. The theme is athletics in the ancient world with a focus on the Roman version of the Olympics. Schools submit videos. Ours features Marian Wurzel ’08 as Phidippides, the runner of the first marathon, and Sarah Glaser ’08, as a fleet footed reporter. Meanwhile, girls enrolled in Chinese along with Dr. Canabal, who is auditing the class, literally, can be heard around the Oval practicing their tones.

Madeira girls have a lot to say, some of it goofy, giggly, teary, poignant, and totally adolescent.

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English students, who have been reading Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, enjoyed the protagonist Nick Adam’s favorite meal of flapjacks and apple butter. Spanish students ate pan de muerto on All Saints’ Day, while chemistry students are building molecular models using gumdrops. Muslims and friends who had fasted during Ramadan, eating breakfast before dawn, decided to share breakfast in daylight. Seated dinner continues to be an enormous success. This week it was followed by the fall concert, featuring the Madrigals and the Chamber Orchestra. Fifty-one girls, plus Ms. Barton, Mrs. Khoo, and Mrs. Morris, presented a program of classical music

by Tchaikowsky, Vivaldi, Mozart and others.

Next week Wednesday seated dinner will be a Thanksgiving feast for the whole School, day girls and boarders, seated in advisee groups at 6:00 p.m. This is a dress up occasion with grace, special guests, and a generous buffet. Unlike the Pilgrims in 1523, we will not be dining on swan, cod or venison.

Our community meal is the first part of our Thanksgiving observation, which also includes an assembly and a collection for the needy organized by the senior class. This year they are asking for toiletries for the homeless.

The Thanksgiving Assembly begins with “Come Ye Thankful People Come” but moves quickly into a recitation of thankfulness. Led by the seniors, girls line up at the mics to express their appreciation in short sound bites. Their blessings range from faith, family, and friends to “Starbucks, Gray’s Anatomy, all my teachers, boys, Capt’n Crunch for dinner, clean laundry, being without boys, Harry Potter, field hockey …” The list goes on and on. Madeira girls have a lot to say, some of it goofy, giggly, teary, poignant, and totally adolescent.

We thought up this format ourselves but have observed others following suit. On his weekly Prairie Home Companion radio broadcast, Garrison Keillor collects expressions of gratitude from the live audience and converts them into a cantata. Imagine new words to Bach’s Ode to Joy: “Public servants, Eagle Scouts, maple syrup and the Green Bay Packers, and spell check.” (See also Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Crown, 2005.)

Like the “Book Bag talk” at Opening Convocation, the Thanksgiving Assembly generates random emails from alumnae, who remember the gathering and report on how it has been replicated in their lives. I hope Madeira girls will be grateful their whole lives for the gift of education and empowerment you have given them.

Thank you for sharing your daughters with us. In counting my blessings, I remain thankful and honored to be Madeira’s steward and a colleague of this outstanding faculty and staff. Happy Thanksgiving. •

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07 TO:

MEM O TO FACULT Y AN D STAF F NOVE M BER 28, 2007

FACULTY AND STAFF

FROM: BETSY RE:

WREATHS AND THE DECISION PROCESS

This memo is about the holiday decoration decision made by me on the advice of the Diversity Council, but it is also about decision making at Madeira. Because many 12-month employees do not go to All School Meeting, at which I addressed this topic for the first time, I decided I needed to communicate to the whole adult community.

One of the reasons I love working in schools is that I am not only teaching but learning — about waste water effluent and the origins of the Sunni-Shia schism or about how adolescent brains function. Like our students I also learn from my mistakes. I do not think the recent “no wreaths” decision was a mistake but I recognize that the process was rushed.

I believe decisions are improved when there is an opportunity for discussion, revision, compromise, and consensus.

Indeed, one of my “management mantras” is “convene a committee” with opposing perspectives included. When time allows, I try to follow that format. However, in this robust, vibrant, fast-paced community, decisions are made all day long.

I need to rely on the good will of this community to understand that no decision is made to hurt someone. If a decision causes someone hurt, I appreciate hearing that concern. In a community as diverse as ours, we need to recognize the need for both balance and occasional neutrality. Living and working in a community like ours, which aspires to be multicultural, requires balancing individual and community wants and needs. I believe Madeira embraces inclusion rather than exclusion.

Back to wreaths. Eventually.

In early November, Buildings and Grounds asked me how many wreaths needed to be ordered, so they could be put up the Monday after Thanksgiving. The wreath topic coincided with the deadline to issue invitations to the campus resident caroling party. With just two weeks of school in November, finding time to meet, much less reflect, was a challenge.

Because underlying both of these topics was the question of religious diversity in our ecumenical community, I put them on the Diversity Council Agenda for November 7.

I’m not even sure how many of you know who is on the Diversity Council, which I chair. Together with the Affinity Advisors, it consists of people with authority about student life, financial aid, curriculum, etc. It represents every School constituency except the Board, as well as the NAIS “Big 8” diversity categories and every academic department. It also represents the community’s commitment to the NAIS’ “Principles of Equity and Justice,” to which we pledge as an accredited school by a Board vote every September. The Council is a group well-grounded in diversity topics; they attend workshops, share readings, and strive to help Madeira become a multicultural community. There is great mutual respect and enough trust that we can debate topics with passion and candor.

The topic I put on the agenda was what color bows to put on the wreaths.

Let me insert some historical background, which I shared at All School Meeting as well. I have described Miss Madeira as “an FDR democrat, a Fabian socialist, a feminist, and an occasional Episcopalian.” She had worked for a decade in a Quaker school before starting her own school. She did not establish an Episcopal school, although boarders were required to attend Sunday chapel and vespers (in the gym when we had one). She invited rabbis to speak at chapel, although Jewish alumnae from that era have since reported to me that it was easier to “pass” than to be in such a small minority. Christmas was celebrated with an enormous tree in Main, with Miss Madeira reading Christmas stories (one of which now seems racist to me), and Santa appearing from the terrace to distribute gifts. (We have a tape recording in the Archives of Miss Madeira reading those stories, the only time I have ever heard her voice.) A Christmas pageant, an Episcopal version of “Lessons and Carols,” was produced in the gym. Alumnae recall an enormous stained glass triptych painted by art classes. The morning students departed for the train station, seniors caroled the dorms before dawn.

When I arrived in 1988 we still had the tree, with a menorah on the mantel, a crèche in the foyer, sporadic caroling, and a holiday performance. Although my predecessor read from the King James version of the New Testament to convene assemblies, the cross had been removed from the side wall of the Chapel Auditorium and Baccalaureate had been replaced with Affirmation long before.

As the new head, I was keen to re-root the community in appropriate rituals. I initiated opening and closing convocations and sought advice about a holiday event from the Episcopal priest who had participated in my installation. She had been an actress before going to seminary and worked in a downtown parish made up mostly of homeless people.

When I described how ecumenical Madeira had become, she suggested focusing on the symbol of light because it could be found as an element of observation or as a metaphor in every major world religion. She even suggested the candlelighting we used to do in the C/A and recommended aluminum roasting pans of kitty litter to hold the tapers. Some of you may remember Mr. Holzman in his Santa suit hovering in the wings with a fire extinguisher.

I also decided against the big tree in Main or the menorah and the crèche, eliminating as many religious symbols as possible. I rationalized that the wreaths were pagan symbols related to the Winter Solstice. At the Land, where I lived for 16 years, because it was my residence, I decorated as I always had, with candles in the windows and lights on the holly tree. I also hosted the first caroling party for campus residents.

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At some point in recent years, as these new traditions evolved, Jewish songs were added to the caroling and bows were eliminated from wreaths, so they appeared to be less Christmas-y and less Christian. The year without bows an underground resistance group added bows.

All of these items would find their way into the Diversity Council’s conversation about bows. Some members of the community expressed discomfort with trees, wreaths, Christian carols, so more issues were put on the table. When I recalled no longer authorizing a school tree, it was recommended that the mitten tree be changed to a cardboard box.

This decision was acted on precipitously, without any discussion with the sophomores or others, so many teachable moments were lost.

After a lot of dialogue and email exchanges between November 7 and 14, the Diversity Council recommended these steps to me, with which I concurred. Neither the faculty, staff nor ATeam was consulted.

1. We would have no wreaths on School buildings. Individual campus residents and dorm adults could decorate their homes as they chose (within the Design Guidelines mandated by the Board B&G Committee).

2. Because one reason to decorate the campus had been to look cheerful in the dark days of winter, we would substitute more white lights in more places and keep them up longer, until Presidents’ Weekend in February.

Let us focus on inclusive tolerance and respect but keep religion out of our workplace and in the learning elements of classroom experience.

3. The scripts of Winterfest would be reviewed to make sure the element of education about different religions was evident.

4. After Winterfest, when we circle the Oval with candles we would not sing “Silent Night” but another song, possibly with a universal peace theme.

5. Since the caroling party for campus residents was paid for by the School and came a week before the all facultystaff party, we would eliminate it. Individual residents could host whatever holiday parties they wished.

6. We invited the world languages and fine arts departments to consider how girls might carol, if at all, 7. We decided against an equal access policy, attempting to represent all religions and traditions. There will be no crèche, no menorah, no Diwali votive, no Kwanza candles. Individuals may use those symbols in appropriate places but not in their offices.

8. Our goal was to have every campus community member feel psychologically “safe” here. We wanted to contribute to community building.

In essence, we were trying to differentiate between public and private spaces, between professional education and private observation. These decisions were eventually unanimous but hotly debated in a meeting with a majority of Christians, the designated “affinity advisor” for that group in our meetings. In the end, we acknowledged that religious faith was individual and private. Christmas did not need to be demonstrated in public spaces here in ways that made non-Christians uncomfortable. Nor do we erect a sukkoth on the Oval for the Festival of the Tabernacles in the autumn.

In order not to divert attention and to stir the pot before Thanksgiving break, I asked the Diversity Council not to discuss this matter until we returned and the lights were in place. Then I would communicate our decision to the whole community, as I did at yesterday’s ASM. However, our meeting adjourned 20 minutes before Thanksgiving dinner and wreaths were a topic served up with relish.

Among the many lessons I have learned and keep learning is that change agents need to communicate better than I have in recent weeks. Perhaps I should have anticipated the impact of this decision on our community or the community’s response to an unexpected, unexplained change in pattern. Perhaps I should have paused a year before implementing the plan or held an open meeting to invite more conversation. But I did not.

So the decision stands. I welcome conversation and the opportunity to hear concerns and answer questions.

Someone emailed asking if wearing Christmas sweaters or Santa earrings would offend. I hope not, any more than a Star of David on a chain or a head scarf would. Let us focus on inclusive tolerance and respect but keep religion out of our workplace and in the learning elements of classroom experience.

Finding time for that open conversation will be a challenge, in a fortnight in which we have board meetings, comments due, exams, and for me fundraising forays and meetings, meetings, meetings. It might tempt me to say “Bah Humbug!”

Please let me know if you want an opportunity for conversation. I hope you will join me and the Diversity Council. •

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INDEP EN DE NT SC HOOL M AG AZIN E SUMM ER 20 08

Literature and Leadership

By Elisabeth Griffith

I

WONDER HOW MANY heads of school

R EP RI N TED F ROM

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are former English teachers? Since I can count a biologist, music theorist, economist and mathematician among my colleagues, maybe it’s the teacher in us that prompts us to assign summer reading to our students, faculty, staff and, in my case, the Board. My welcome gift to new members of The Madeira School Board of Directors is a copy of Beth Gutcheon’s Saying Grace. Attached is a note of welcome and warning. It suggests they empty a file drawer or open an electronic file folder for the deluge of data, agenda, rosters, reports, budgets, spreadsheets, minutes, proposals, and readings — the paper trail of their Board tenure. I should also remind them to clear a bookshelf for their summer reading.

Assigning summer reading is a staple of school life. Many schools and colleges select a book every new student will read and discuss at an orientation bonding exercise. At Taft, in Connecticut, the authors speak at early autumn assemblies. At St. Patrick’s, an elementary school in Washington, D.C., parents are invited to join the dialogue. At Lowell, another elementary school in the District, reading books about diversity in independent schools has been one way to generate dialogue among parents about topics sometimes avoided.

At Madeira, new ninth graders read a novel or memoir suggested by the Diversity Council, to set the stage for thinking more inclusively and globally as girls join this community.

Conversations about recent choices like Ali and Nino by Kurban Said and The Diary of Ma Yan: The Struggles and Hopes of a Chinese Schoolgirl by Ma Yan and Pierre Haski take place in English classes, advisee groups and class meetings. Parents’ Weekend book groups continue the discourse. Once we had a Parents’ Weekend panel about The Fall of Rome, at which a student read a passage including “F_ _ _ ,” provoking an unexpected discussion about the language in contemporary fiction.

The task of picking summer reading at Madeira begins with members of the Faculty Development Committee, none of whom is a department chair. The committee presents options for a full faculty vote. We began years ago with books about our craft, like The Elements of Teaching and The Elements of Learn-

ing, both by James M. Banner, Jr. and Harold C. Cannon, Endangered Minds by Jane Healy, and The End of Education by Neil Postman. This year there were too many temptations so we divided into book groups to read and discuss Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, Looking For Alaska by John Green, Third Culture Kids by

Books about technology, brain development, adolescent behavior and contemporary families were less popular beach reads …

David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken, and several other titles.

Books about technology, brain development, adolescent behavior, and contemporary families were less popular beach reads than novels set in schools, which touched on some of the same themes. Many of our choices had been reviewed in Independent School magazine. The books are paid for from professional development funds. I use leftover books as gifts for donors.

This year we asked the Board to read Saving Miss Oliver’s by Stephen Davenport and Good to Great in the Social Sectors by Jim Collins. The juxtaposition of those two titles highlights the tension between the two realities of independent school identities as educational institutions and corporate entities.

There are no required essays or reading quizzes for Board members. Even finding time to discuss assigned books is a challenge. Like many boarding school boards, we meet four times a year for at least two days, but topics like

strategic financial planning, fundraising goals, admissions and marketing reports, faculty salaries, and the need for a new waste water treatment plant take precedence. This year, however, our Board President has linked a discussion of Saving Miss Oliver’s to an analysis of board governance issues at Dartmouth College (alumni representation on the board), Randolph Macon College (the sale of its art collection), and reports in the Boston Globe about a Board dispute at a New England boarding school, which spilled over into campus protests by parents and resulted in the head’s resignation.

In Saving Miss Oliver’s, a new head of school is forced to confront a depleted endowment and the prospect of coeducation for an historic girls’ school. In Saying Grace, the head deals with a renegade board donor, an alcoholic art teacher, the power of the carpool caucus, and a perennial conflict between the third grade teacher and the maintenance department over a bird feeder. The book opens with this compelling sentence: “It was two days before the opening of school when the Spanish teacher dropped dead.”

In late August, when I had to report to my board the unexpected departure of the new math teacher, one Board member replied, “It made me think of the first few pages of Beth Gutcheon’s book as she begins to depict a fraction of heads of schools’ challenges.”

“I absolutely loved Saying Grace,” averred another board member, an alumna who works in schools, “although I have to admit that it made me realize that maybe I did not want to be a head of school.” Fiction may generate more empathy than whining.

Encouragement like, “The summer reading you have assigned us has been one of my favorite parts of being on the Board,” has been balanced by “unfortunately, Saying Grace arrived during a very busy time for me [and] is still on the ‘to be read’ shelf.” That member did complete this summer’s homework and looks forward to relating it to issues of “communication, leadership transitions and loyalties.”

That theme was reiterated by another board member who noted that both Gutcheon and Davenport “focused so much on how the constituents you are trying to serve may be the very ones trying to undermine you … I found myself wanting to yell at the characters on the boards and say, ‘Hey, that’s not your job!’”

An additional insight came from the senior member of our board, class of ’46, who labeled her reaction to recent “prep lit” fiction “old fashioned.” “I don’t recall my years at boarding

school as being at all sexually active or aware.”

She asked for more information about adolescent promiscuity. I’m tempted to send her a copy of the recently published Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School, although I found little to commend.

In addition to books, like many heads, I send the board reams of articles on schoolrelated topics: another school’s expansion and subsequent dispute with its neighbors, infor-

08

mation about the Advanced Placement audit, or cell phones in classrooms, or parenting practices. Another head of school sends her Board copies of resumes of every new hire. Concludes a Madeira Board member, “The package of reading (both electronic and paper) is always interesting and meaningful. The content provides context for decisions and knowledge that the non-educators would not normally come across. Also, receiving reading materials gently reminds us that we have responsibilities to Madeira even in the midst of hectic lives.” •

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CAM P D UDLE Y CHAPE L TA LK PAREN TS’ W EEKEND AUG UST 1 7, 2 00 8

From the Mountain Top to the Streets

‘‘

Thank you. Good morning.

That generous introduction omitted only references to my life as a camper. I spent four summers, eight weeks each, at Four Way Lodge in Northern Michigan — no electricity, no windows, but Sunday chapel, canoe trips, camp fires and “duking” [skinny dipping] by another name — and two summers during college at Camp Bryn Afon in northern Wisconsin, as head of the waterfront, in charge of swimming, sailing, and canoeing.

Initially, at age ten, I was homesick and scared — of horses, of having to eat what was served, of cranky counselors.

Like Dudley boys I learned life lessons at camp, about risktaking, perseverance, courage, and leadership. Even though I was the tallest girl in camp, I was afraid of even taller horses.

But I learned how to control and collaborate with an animal, and how not to signal fear in any way. Now I work at a school with a strong riding program and surprise students by joining their annual “senior gallop.”

The more daunting challenge for me at camp occurred when a sudden squall interrupted my solo sailing test. I was taking a twenty foot two-sail sloop out alone on Torch Lake. Strong

son may have been lack of money, I think is was also lack of mission. There was no compelling value like “the other fellow first.” Camp Dudley’s motto is one of my texts for this morning.

I appreciated the invitation to speak at a Dudley worship service. Until recently it was rare in Judeo-Christian tradition for women to speak from the pulpit or the pews. Many major world religions still expect women to remain silent, with their heads covered. The first woman to speak to mixed male and female audiences in America in, 1836, was Sarah Grimke, the abolitionist daughter of a South Carolina slaveholder. She was branded as promiscuous. I learned recently that it was [iconic director] Willie Schmidt’s decision to include women in leadership roles at Dudley, which likely led to my board service here.

I was honored to serve as the first woman on the Camp Dudley Board of Managers. I immediately developed an unprofessional and collective crush on my colleagues, guys with nicknames like RD, Fungo, TC, Billy, Stitch, and CJ4.

As every Dudley mom, sister, and wife — women who passed the “Dudley test” — can attest, Dudley guys are good men.

Due to the strategic work of these high-powered committed Board members, Dudley thrives and has expanded so girls can benefit from Dudley values at Camp Kiniya.

I was inspired to speak this morning about the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., because of all the King milestones in 2008.

• It has been 45 years since Dr. King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people. Next week, on the actual anniversary, August 28, Senator Barack Obama will accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States.

President Lyndon Johnson meeting with civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House, 1964.

winds and high waves made it hard to get back to the buoy.

As you know, you head into the wind, release the sheets, drop the main, and grab the buoy. After several passes, I eventually succeeded: with both hands on the buoy, both feet on the boat and my body parallel to the water. Abs I no longer have saved me. Nothing, truly nothing since has been as frightening. But because I managed to rescue myself then, I believe I can rescue myself whenever.

Unlike Dudley, my camp no longer exists — no counselors, no tribal rings. The cabins are now condos. While the rea60

• It has been 44 years since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, ending a speech to the nation by quoting the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”

• It has been 40 years since Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to lead a garbage collectors’ strike.

Forty years ago was long before most of you were born, possibly before many of your parents were born. But Martin Luther King, admired and reviled during his lifetime, is now the best known historical figure in America.

A recent research project conducted by Stanford University asked 2000 high school juniors and seniors and 2000 senior Americans to list their top ten historical figures, not counting

Presidents or First Ladies. Dr. King was first on both lists.

(As a challenge and a car game for your drive home, make a list of ten notable African Americans and ten women, not counting Dr. King, celebrities or athletes. Most college freshmen fail this challenge.)

So Dr. King’s life is well known. He was born in 1929 into an elite African American family in Atlanta. His father and grandfather were both ministers at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

But Atlanta was a segregated city, under harsh Jim Crow laws. Racially motivated lynching was virulent. In 1928, more than 1000 black men were murdered in America by vigilante lynching, burning, and castration. That horror began to decline in the 1930s, when white women finally refused to be used as an excuse and joined black women inspired by Ida Wells Barnett.

his funeral. He was reassuring his followers that the cause would continue no matter who led it.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over.

And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.

But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to

(As a footnote of pride, since Dudley is a YMCA camp: In 1925 the YWCA of Atlanta was the first racially integrated board in America, as black and white women came together to improve playgrounds and provide milk for school children.)

Young Martin was a middle child and very bright. He loved monopoly and stylish clothes. He entered Morehouse College at age 15, was ordained at age 18 and enrolled in a doctoral program at Boston University, where he studied social change and Gandhi’s policy of non-violent resistance.

In 1954, at age 25, he was offered the pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. From there he would begin his ministry as a change agent, supporting the Montgomery bus boycott and founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King was 39 years old when he was killed. He has been dead longer than he was alive. He was killed by a single bullet as he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He had just leaned over the railing to ask a staff member that his favorite hymn, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” be played at the upcoming rally. He had already given two speeches that week, a Sunday sermon at the Washington National Cathedral and an impromptu speech to Memphis supporters the night before.

At the National Cathedral, Dr. King preached about the parable we read, about the rich man ignoring Lazarus begging, dying at his gate. (I learned recently that Lazarus derived from root word of lazar, meaning beggar, and leper, meaning someone diseased and shunned.) Dr. King added references to the rich passing the poor on the road. “What will happen to them if I don’t stop?” asks one. “What will happen to us if we don’t?” respond his companion. Dr. King was raising questions about the responsibilities of the privileged for the poor, hungry, homeless, sick, disenfranchised, and abused. By 1968, he had extended his crusade from civil rights for African Americans to anti-poverty and anti-war for all Americans.

the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Dr. King grew up in the oratory of the black church and the metaphors of America. Like Dudley men, he liked mountains and refers to them often, as Biblical references and as a device to link his listeners to a common geography. When he says he’s been to the mountain top, he’s referring to the Old Testament story of Moses, who led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt, through the Red Sea. Moses got to the mountaintop and got the Ten Commandments but did not get to the promised land of Israel.

CON TI NUES

From Washington that Sunday, Dr. King went home to Atlanta and then boarded a flight to Memphis. His plane was delayed due to a bomb threat — death threats now came daily.

Then a huge storm almost kept him from the rally that night.

That was the last speech he gave and would be replayed at

Dr. King called on his allies, on his enemies, on his survivors, on all of us, to be “drum majors for justice”…

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CAM P DUDLEY CH APE L TALK CON TINUE D

In the “I Have A Dream” speech, Dr. King segued from repetitions of “I have a dream” to “let freedom ring.” Listen for all the references to mountains.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed. (Those are lines from the Book of Psalms and lyrics from the Messiah.)

This is our hope …. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope …. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day … this will be the day when all God’s

I’m asking you to take the Dudley motto of “the other fellow first” from the high peaks of the Adirondacks and the shores of Lake Champlain to your neighborhoods … children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!” (Words from a national anthem) And so let freedom ring from the … hilltops of New Hampshire …

And then King continued from the mighty mountains of New York … the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania … Rockies of Colorado … slopes of California … Stone Mountain of Georgia … Lookout Mountain of Tennessee … (Sites of Confederate victories and defeats) And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring … black men and white men … will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

How many of you hiked this summer? (Show of hands.) Up Giant or Dix, Gothic or Wolf Jaw or Hurricane? Up Mount Marcy? (where Vice President Teddy Roosevelt and his family were camping in August 1901, when he learned President McKinley has been shot in Buffalo.) So you know how arduous it can be to hike up, how splendid when you get there, even when it’s raining. That inspiration, that accomplishment, you can carry back down, another hard trail, to daily life.

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Dr. King called on his allies, on his enemies, on his survivors, on all of us, to be “drum majors for justice,” to be change agents and advocates, to put other people first. Dr. King took his vision of the promised land to the streets of Selma, Montgomery, Washington, and Memphis. I’m asking you to take the Dudley motto of “the other fellow first” from the high peaks of the Adirondacks and the shores of Lake Champlain to your neighborhoods in Westchester, Greenwich, Boston, Chevy Chase, Baltimore, Philadelphia, wherever you live.

Expand “the other fellow first” beyond Dudley. Make it mean more than fair play among friends, more than taking turns in school. It can be a challenge for young men privileged enough, lucky enough to go to Dudley, who are safe, healthy and loved, to imagine yourselves as the other fellow. What would it be like to be a boy in Darfur or Afghanistan or Iraq, in New Orleans or on an Indian reservation or in a migrant camp? Can your thinking progress from sympathy to knowledge to empathy and action? Think about the faces of children you see on the news and the Internet.

Perhaps you will find inspiration in the actions of other young people. After Hurricane Katrina, three sisters, ages 14, 11 and 8, in Bethesda, Maryland, set a goal to send 1000 backpacks of school supplies and toys to school children in New Orleans.

Within a month they had 25,000 backpacks and within two months, 50,000 backpacks collected by people in 100 communities in 25 states. Maybe you were part of that effort.

I know you have been out of the news cycle so you may not have seen the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Basketball star Yao Ming, who was playing for China, led his country’s delegation into the arena. A nine-year-old earthquake survivor, Lin Hao, held his hand. He was a primary school student in Sichuan Province, whose school was destroyed in the May 12 earthquake. He hauled himself from underneath the rubble of his collapsed school and then pried his way back in to rescue two classmates. When asked why he went back in, Lin Hao replied that he had been appointed hall monitor by his teacher and it was his duty to see that everyone was safe.

Twenty of the kids in his class of thirty died.

You may not yet have had the chance to behave so heroically.

Your actions could be more simple and individual. How will you face the challenge of being true to Dudley values in the real world? How will you keep from letting your tribe become a gang? Maybe you could begin by purging words like gay, retard, ho, bitch, and hate from your vocabulary, thinking about the power of words to hurt the other fellow.

Knowing Dudley men as I do, I imagine many of you are already involved in service projects, with your Dudley dads and families and schools. Keep it up. Meet the challenge.

Set an example. Take your Dudley honor and motto from the mountain top to the streets. • Editors Note: Camp Dudley YMCA, located on the New York side of Lake Champlain, is the oldest boys sleepover camp in the United States, established in 1885. After John David Deardourff became a “cub” there, Dr. Griffith was asked to be the first woman on the Dudley Board of Managers.

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MAD EI RA TO DAY HE ADLI NE, FAL L 20 08

Madeira Girls Go to the Polls

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in the back of the amphitheater and left as soon as Pat’s name was called.

As a biographer, I wish I knew more about the roots of Miss Madeira’s political passions. When she graduated from Vassar in 1896, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were still alive. Leadership of the suffrage movement, of the National American Woman Suffragist Association, was shifting to younger women.

Their cause had to compete with populism, progressive reforms, nascent American imperialism, international affairs, and Jim Crow racism. The Supreme Court legitimized “separate but equal” segregation of railroad cars in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the same year Miss Madeira graduated.

In her era, a college education was not commonplace for women. By 1900, women were 36.8 percent of all undergraduates, or 2.8 percent of all women. About one-quarter of those were daughters of immigrants and .03 percent were African American. College education for women remained an act of courage and nonconformity and depended on two critical factors, family support and financial resources.

What women would do with college educations puzzled social conservatives, some of whom believed, with contemporary medical experts, that diverting vital energy to female brains would shrivel their ovaries. Onequarter of women who graduated from college before World War I never married. While the overall birth rate had dropped by 1900 to four children, it was lower among women who earned college degrees.

Miss Madeira did not marry until she was 44 and bore no children.

CO N TIN UES

HE FIRST EVIDENCE we have of Madeira girls voting in straw polls for president of the United States relates to the 1936 election, in which Kansas Republican Governor Alf Landon challenged the Democratic incumbent, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

At Madeira, unlike the country at large, the Republican won in a landslide, prompting Miss Madeira to post this note: “Will the twelve girls who voted correctly for President Roosevelt please come to tea.”

Finding political allies among the daughters of families wealthy enough to afford her tuition may have been a challenge. Like her candidate FDR, who claimed he was “a Christian, a gentleman and a democrat,” Miss Madeira has been described as an occasional Episcopalian, a Fabian socialist, a democrat and a suffragist. Although alumnae later expressed surprise that she had voted for incumbent Herbert Hoover over FDR in 1932, by the 1940s, Republican fathers would be expressing dismay about her liberal leanings. Ebersole Gaines, whose daughter Martha Gaines Wehrle ’46 would become a Democratic leader in the West Virginia State Senate, wanted to withdraw his daughter from Miss Madeira’s influence because, as Martha told her Headmistress, “My father likes everything about your school except your ideas.”

Patricia Headley Green ’45 remembers her father as a “rip-roaring Republican.” When he learned that she would be attending FDR’s 1945 inaugural parade and sitting with other student government officers (she was President of Social Welfare) near the reviewing stand, he threatened not to attend her graduation. As it was, he was so annoyed by Miss Madeira’s politics that he stood

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HE AD L I NE CON TI NUE D

In the 1890s, college educated women organized the A.A.U.W., the American Association of University Women. Among its first projects was to conduct research to refute the brains v. babies claim and to fund the work of Marie Curie. The A.A.U.W. continues to undertake studies about the strengths of single sex education. “Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education,” published earlier this year [2008], presents a comprehensive look at girls’ educational achievement during the past 35 years, paying special attention to the comparison between girls’ and boys’ progress.

Historians are frequently tempted to hypothesize, asking “What if?” What if Miss Madeira had not been compelled to repay her college loans and support her widowed mother? Would she have become a muckrak-

Long before they were old enough to vote, Madeira girls campaigned for political candidates. ing journalist like Ida Tarbell or Ida Wells Barnett, or followed the pattern of Frances Perkins? The first woman cabinet secretary, appointed by FDR, Miss Perkins was inspired by her Smith College graduation speaker in 1898. Florence Kelley, a socialist and the daughter of Pennsylvania Congressman “Pig Iron” Kelley, was active in the social welfare movement. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Perkins volunteered in the New York City equivalent of Jane Addams’ Chicago Hull House. That experience prompted both women to pursue protective legislation for workers, immigrants, and women. (One of Jane Addams’ lieutenants was Charlotte Carr ’11.)

I wonder if Miss Madeira joined the Vassar delegation, wearing their academic gowns over white dresses and carrying banners, in the first national suffrage parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in March 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration? He arrived at Union Station during the protest and was annoyed by the diversion, only one of the reasons he would be ambivalent about suffrage.

Miss Madeira clearly supported women voting and leading. In 1910 she established the student government before it was a common custom in other independent schools. Originally only boarders voted. When day students were enfranchised, the result was co-heads of student government. Girls also ran (but never campaigned) for the equally important heads of the Athletic Association and the Social Welfare Society.

Long before they were old enough to vote, Madeira girls campaigned for political candidates.

In 1940, Joan Morgenthau Hirschhorn ’41 started an independent news sheet called Around the Oval, with editorials about the 1940 election, in which President Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term. The daughter of FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, Joan 64

endorsed the incumbent. President Theodore Roosevelt’s granddaughter, Paulina Longworth ’42, endorsed challenger Wendell Wilkie (whose son would marry Rody Heffelfinger ’46). Paulina was the daughter of “Princess Alice” Roosevelt and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nicholas Longworth.

Barbara Keyser, another Vassar history graduate, was inspired by the election of John Kennedy in 1960 to create the Co-Curriculum program after she became Headmistress in 1965. It not only sent juniors to Capitol Hill but many girls into political campaigns. In 1968, 16 girls were working to elect Richard Nixon; Democrats were divided among Hubert Humphrey (9), Ted Kennedy (2) and Eugene McCarthy (8). This year Madeira girls volunteered in the offices and campaigns of Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama. Interestingly, an informal poll of alumnae who graduated between 1938 and 1958, conducted at reunions in April, found ardent support for Senator Clinton, paralleling national polling of her support among older white women.

Records of student straw votes are sparse. We know that for at least twenty years, Madeira girls have voted Democratic. In November 2000, the straw vote was organized by the Advanced Placement Government and Politics class, taught by Larry Pratt, now chair of the History Department. The class required the citizens of Greenway to register in advance. Al Gore won both the student and faculty popular vote but the Vice President lost the electoral college vote in the “senior day” district.

The election of 2008 has already been historic as well as dramatic. In anticipation of November, Madeira girls voted in campus “primaries.” From the first, Senator Obama maintained a narrow lead over Senator Clinton and won Madeira’s mock Iowa primary, while Senator McCain tied with Mayor Guiliani.

As of February 2008, Madeira students identified themselves as 26 percent Republican, 61 percent Democratic, and 13 percent Independent, compared to faculty members who listed their affiliations as 21 percent Republican, 62 percent Democratic, and 17 percent Independent.

Like Miss Madeira and Miss Keyser, I am a women’s college graduate, a history major, an historian, and a political maven. I met my husband at a political rally and succeeded Hillary Rodham as President of the College Young Republicans. I campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment as an officer of the National Women’s Political Caucus and raised money for women candidates as co-chair of the Board of the Women’s Campaign Fund.

I am equally interested in who leads and how a person leads. What are the essential characteristics of effective leaders? Integrity and intelligence top my list, but communication skills are also key. In classrooms, Co-Curriculum, in extracurriculars and sports, Madeira strives to educate girls for service, citizenship, and leadership. Like Miss Madeira, we expect her girls to contribute to their communities, as elected or unelected leaders. •

A NN UAL R E PO R T TO THE BOA RD J ULY 2 009

Madeira’s Board of Directors on Service Day, September 2006

Headmistress’ Annual Report to The Board

T

he Annual Reports prepared by ATeam members, deans and program directors delineate the challenges and complexity of running a small, all girls’ boarding and day school on a large, wooded campus in the midst of a national capital’s metropolitan sprawl. While dealing with traffic congestion, woodland predators, international contagions, post 9/11 banking restrictions, veterinary bills, employee concerns, waste water treatment, and county politics, for example, we try to achieve Miss Madeira’s mission of educating girls for ethical leadership, citizenship, and service. The challenge, of course, is whether that mission remains relevant in the 21st century, whether our business model can be sustained, whether there are new ways to fulfill that mission, and whether there will be a market for our “product,” the education of girls in a single-sex high school residential setting.

Conversations about larger strategic issues were interrupted this year, as they are every year in the quotidian realities of operating a school and camp, by concerns deemed more immediate if not more important, such as: • Zoning issue/river trail: Working with politically savvy Board members, excellent legal counsel, supportive neighbors and assistant Head of School, Meredyth Cole, who also hiked the property dozens of times with politicians and staff, we eked out a “win-win” decision from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. The Board approved construction of the waste water treatment plant, a support building, and up to six small houses. No other master plan request was approved, nor were we required to build a trail along the river. The trail issue will return until it is resolved. Madeira exists as a special exception to the area’s residential zoning. Any change in land use, building size, or population cap requires County approval.

• Riding: The need to address riding as an athletic program with a substantial operating deficit reached crisis point in tight budget times. At the Board’s direction, resources were diverted to raise funds to underwrite costs of the current program and to revamp it into a sustainable business model. I have decided to make riding an auxiliary program, like Camp Greenway, so it can be organized on a single business model rather than straddle instruction and camp funding and supervision. This is a bookkeeping change, not one the girls will notice. The goal is for riding to be a safe, well-run, strong, financially viable program serving students and the wider community.

CONTI N UES

• Co-Curriculum: The economic tsunami of September 2008 overwhelmed Capitol Hill offices. The trickle-down (actually torrential) impact froze intern hiring, which in turn created great unrest among juniors and their parents. Changes made purposely to the sophomore program proved too big to be

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20 09 A N NUAL REP ORT TO T HE B OARD CON TI NUE D

absorbed and further undermined confidence in this signature program. Leisa Clark, Dean of Global Programs and Co-Curriculum, working closely with an ad hoc group of parents designated by Parents’ Association President Katherine Armstrong, made necessary changes and improvements. Leisa’s resignation to pursue a dream job in the sciences and hiring an entirely new three-person staff means attention will remain on insuring a stable program this year. In the future, we need to assess the viability of this 40-year-old program in terms of its delivery and impact on academic priorities.

• Diversity: Creating and maintaining a safe, multicultural, and diverse community does not happen by chance. Madeira’s is the result of years of work by committed faculty, staff, and Board members, all responding to the expressed needs of girls and parents. (In a recent parent survey, 85 percent urged us to hire more diverse teachers.) We need to think about how to “institutionalize” some of our programs, remain both proactive and responsive to new initiatives, and designate (and fund) a leader for this School-wide responsibility.

• Health issues: While we had no cases of H1N1 (swine) flu in the 2008 – 2009 school year, we did discuss possible responses. A boarding school is exactly the setting in which an outbreak could spread, so it is likely this will be an issue in the new school year.

Finances These major concerns along with mundane management issues may have kept the entire governance team from focusing closely on school finances, not only in the current budget but into the future. Anyone who has reviewed CFO Braughn Taylor’s ten-year financial forecast understands that Madeira as we operate today is not a financially viable model. Every projected source of revenue in the FY10 budget — tuition income, annual fund, endowment earnings, auxiliary programs, even interest income — is or will be lower than anticipated.

Our tuition is viewed by many as too high, our salaries too low, our maintenance reserve fund inadequate, and alumnae participation in the annual fund shrinking.

Without more financial aid funds, we cannot achieve economic diversity. Without changing one or more of the “levers” in our financial forecast — size of school, nature of the program — Madeira cannot sustain itself.

I would add to this list a need to understand our “market:” adolescent girls (how they learn, how they interact socially) and their parents, who are achievement oriented and aspirational. Have we positioned ourselves to meet those needs? Can our faculty teach these students without further training, not only in content areas but also in classroom dynamics and the psychology and biology of female brains?

VAIS An accomplishment of the 2008 – 2009 school year, not to be underestimated, was the successful completion of the Virginia Association of Independent School’s accreditation process. In concluding our assessment, visiting team chair Jack Lewis, Head of School at Cape Henry Collegiate School in Virginia Beach, reiterated his concern about Madeira’s strategic planning. He was less concerned about our strategic planning than our strategic thinking. The VAIS expects a follow-up report in April 2010.

We cannot wait to explore alternative scenarios for programs and funding. I’m pleased that the Board has begun to explore some options in the initial steps taken by the Tactical Analysis Group. Addressing these challenges will require focus, collaboration, time and work by the Board and the ATeam, at the same time the School will be choosing new leadership.

In 20-plus years of delivering “State of the School” reports in writing or in person, I always end on a note of appreciation for the honor of serving as Madeira’s steward. For years I have been identified as an unorthodox choice and a change agent. In retrospect, perhaps the only change was the Board’s decision to pick someone with less traditional independent school experience and more board governance experience than typical applicants.

Most of the changes I instituted were not radical departures but rather conservative returns to past practices: seated meals, required breakfast, study hall, bedtime, house adults, advisory programs, evaluation and accountability, a sense of community, a revival of some traditions (and the abandonment of others). Together we enhanced spaces, increased endowment, added new tools and toys, learned more about adolescent girls, and enhanced Madeira’s reputation.

But we did not challenge or change Miss Madeira’s model. After the hoopla of a centennial celebration, we need to confront the reality that “doing school” as we have always done school may no longer be a viable option. Whether we use Harvard Business School rhetoric or Jim Collins’ metaphors, Madeira needs to be creative and disciplined to adapt or we will not celebrate our bicentennial. •

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PA R E NTS’ WE EK EN D ALL SCHOOL M EETIN G OC TO BER 1 2 , 2 00 9

Smart Girls Like Nancy Drew

‘‘

Sweet, Smart and Sassy” was the theme of last night’s senior dinner, which prompted moms to decorate with urns of gumdrops and jelly beans and platters of cupcakes and cookies.

Drew books were written by Carolyn Keene, a pseudonym for several generations of authors. That early, adventurous Nancy was widely appealing to girls who were smart or shy, white or black.

Some of us are still enjoying a sugar high. I appreciate alliterative adjectives, so I might have added strong and self-confident to smart in describing seniors.

Smart women are my topic this morning. But I also want to investigate what prompts girls to risk being smart in societies that might value other female attributes more, like submissiveness or sexuality. I think allowing oneself to be ambitious, to achieve one’s personal best, depends on opportunities and family support, but women and girls lacking those will still succeed if they have role models. As Sally Ride’s mom said when her daughter, the first female American astronaut returned from space, “Thank God for Gloria Steinem!” I recently learned that women were originally excluded from the space program because they menstruated. The men in charge of the program worried about how women would manage in space.

Last summer, President Obama nominated a wise Latina woman, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, to become the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court. I hope in your lifetimes this becomes such a common occurrence that we lose count. In her confirmation hearings, Judge Sotomayor responded to a question about her background by identifying the fictional girl detective Nancy Drew as a model of “boldness and intelligence.” Her reference resonated with thousands of women and girls.

These women are my age. They recall the original Nancy Drew, who first appeared in 1930. All Nancy

There has not been a parallel teenage African American heroine to become an icon of popular culture. The closest is Addy in the American Girl series.

Eleanor Taylor Bland wrote a mystery series featuring an African American female homicide detective, Marti MacAlister. Precious Ramotswe, the Number One Lady Detective in Botswana, is the creation of Scotsman Alexander McCall Smith. Mystery writer Walter Mosley has not developed an ongoing female character and neither have many white male mystery writers. Sara Paretsksy, Sue Grafton, and other women have females as leading players, but these are all books for adults. When I researched this topic with colleagues at Madeira, I may have inspired Dr. White, who is teaching a senior elective on images of black

CONT IN UE S

Former First Lady Laura Bush, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, O magazine publisher Gayle King and ABC anchor Diane Sawyer have all identified Nancy Drew as a role model. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is proud to share her name. Indeed, between 1935 and 1960, Nancy was annually ranked among the top 15 names for girls.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, outspoken member of the Dutch parliament who wrote the controversial screenplay for the film “Submission,” which delineates the mistreatment of women in Islam, also claims Nancy Drew as her inspiration.

Functioning in disaster and finishing in style in red rain gear during April 2006 Centennial Reunion Weekend.

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SMA RT GIR LS L IK E NANCY DR EW CON TI NUE D

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women in literature, to create a smart African American girl detective with lots of moxie.

The 1930s version of Nancy Drew was the 16-year-old, blond-bobbed, blue-eyed, blueblooded daughter of lawyer Carson Drew.

Like lots of girls in fiction, her mother had died. (This is a disturbing trend. Let’s hope Dr. White’s heroine will have two parents encouraging her.) Nancy grew up in River Heights, a vaguely Midwestern town, with her housekeeper Hannah and her three chums: the pleasingly plump Bess, the tomboy George, who is a girl, and Ned Nickerson, her harmless, hapless boyfriend.

after she reported the incident, the man was linked to a series of assaults on jogging paths, arrested and convicted.

Nancy Drew books have never gone out of print. The books were developed in 1930 by Edward Stratemeyer, who had previously syndicated the Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twins series. He died and left the franchise to his daughter Harriet Adams. Adams hired ghostwriter Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote 23 of the original titles, under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The identities of these women and the conflicts between them were not wide-

With their help, a flashlight and her blue roadster, Nancy outsmarts cops and robbers. In the course of 64 books she is beaten, choked, kidnapped, tossed in car trunks, locked in a

ly known for years. Now they are the topic of

freezer, run off the road, held hostage, and confronted with spiders and snakes. Throughout these travails, Nancy Drew is plucky and purposeful. She is capable of picking out the perfect outfit for a tea party and escaping “dastardly” villains on the same afternoon.

She thinks for herself and thinks logically.

On occasion, she breaks rules and defies authority. Nancy Drew solves problems.

The stories are now graphic novels and computer games and the books have been “updated” twice, with mixed results. The 1959 rewrite turned Nancy into a Barbie girl detective with a “Titian-haired flip” and two years added to her age, old enough for a driver’s and pilot’s license. Less bossy, less independent, more respectful, she let Ned change her tires instead of tackling the job herself.

I had a friend who thought she was being stalked while jogging. A sense of alarm prompted her to ask, “What would Nancy Drew do?” She stopped suddenly to pretend to tie her shoe lace, taking the occasion to identify the man, who slowed down but passed her.

Suspicious, she reversed direction and ran faster. He chased her, so she ran toward a road where people would help her. He ran away, but

In 2004, Nancy underwent an extreme makeover, getting a cell phone, a computer and a new car, a blue electric hybrid. Running boards and racial stereotypes have been eliminated. Nancy enrolls in college and dumps Ned, who has never been kissed. She begins to speak in her own voice, first person, like Jo in Little Women, allowing for more humor and humanity. She assists a black mayor, a Native

academic papers and conferences, including a 1993 week-long symposium at the University of Iowa, Benton’s alma mater.

American librarian and a gay neighbor to solve crimes, but her world seems untouched by war, poverty, drugs, or women’s liberation.

That’s a problem.

For centuries, books for girls have been “prescriptive.” Like medicine, they provided doses of proper behavior and samples of moral deportment. These publications and ladies’ magazines contributed to the “sex-role socialization” of girls, just as magazines, videos, song lyrics, and celebrity lifestyles do today, for good or ill. The Nancy Drew books present a bolder heroine in the earlier versions, and then limited her sphere of action in response to current events and changes in attitudes about women’s roles.

The original Nancy was a product of 1920s, the first decade women voted nationally, had greater access to education, earned the largest number of Ph.D.s prior to the present, were widely employed, used birth control, and had more premarital sex. Women cheered Amelia Earhart and enjoyed the Harlem Renaissance, prohibition and the Charleston. The “Roaring Twenties” represented social change and recall images of flappers with short hair, short skirts, flat-chests; they were boyish, but sexy.

Women in trousers played sports like golf and tennis. Fashion finally allowed women to be active. While Nancy Drew was usually attired in pretty frocks and a hat, she too was physically active.

The roadster was a symbol of independence, not only for Nancy but for her generation.

Back seats provided a venue away from parents. Driving liberated women and generated lots of sexist jokes. Eleanor Roosevelt driving herself and one state trooper around New York State when FDR ran for governor in 1928 was headline news.

Nancy was watered down in response to historic events. During the Depression, women lost their jobs and married women were fired.

During World War II, women were drafted into factories as Rosie the Riveter and then dismissed to make room for returning vets. During the 1950s, society needed women to be domestic and reproductive. In response to historic events, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams toned down Mildred Benton’s books to match each era.

While the 1930s Nancy Drew was less politically correct than the modern version, the original Nancy was spunkier and more selfconfident, more authentic, and adventurous.

Maybe the heroine of Dr. White’s mystery series will be a Madeira girl, a member of

Susie Read Cronin ’71 as a Super Madeira Girl

I can easily imagine a new cultural icon, the new fictional heroine/role model who is a Madeira girl … our engineering team or a theater techie, a multilingual math whiz who loves history.

How do we produce the 21st century version of independent problem-solvers, of future Supreme Court Justices, journalists, Secretaries of State, Senators, of world leaders and social movement agitators and neighborhood activists? We believe we are doing that at Madeira. We offer girls structured opportunities to be collaborative and creative, to practice cross-cultural communication skills and critical thinking, to be entrepreneurial. To do this, they need to apply the classic academic skills of research, analysis, writing, and reasoning in real world settings. They need to be fluent in languages, in technology, in the arts, and media.

I can easily imagine a new cultural icon, the new fictional heroine/role model who is a Madeira girl, with an extensive wardrobe ranging from sweat suits to dress suits and an even larger friendship circle, who drives a red electric car with a vanity plate reading “Festina lente.” She’s smart, sassy, self-confident, and strong. She’s your daughter.

’’

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GRA D UATI O N L ET T ER APR I L 2009

Elisabeth Griffith 9115 Mill Pond Valley Drive McLean, Virginia 22102 Dear Madeira Community: Like generations of seniors, the news I’m sharing today is both exciting for me and bittersweet. After 22 years, I plan to step down as Headmistress and graduate from Madeira in June 2010. I will leave with enormous respect and admiration for teachers and staff and deep affection for the friends I’ve made among alumnae, parents, colleagues, and girls. As it does for our students, Madeira has transformed my life.

When I arrived on campus in July 1988, eager to begin my tenure as Headmistress, Ronald Reagan was president, the current senior class had not yet been born, and my son was two years old. The gum was where the library is now, the library was in the current dining room, and the dining room was in School house II. The endowment was $14 million and attrition was 22%. Neither the Beeches nor Riverview had been built and the internet had not been invented. The landscape, in so many ways, was different.

The appeal of Miss Madeira’s legacy, of educating young women for ethical leadership, citizenship, and service, drew me from a career of college teaching, writing, and political activism. Hired to be a change agent, I was an unorthodox candidate for the job. Madeira challenged me to use every skill I had and to master many more. My “freshman” year proved challenging. It will have taken me 22 years to complete all my graduation requirements.

In science I learned the biology of adolescent brains and bodies, the physics of the mass of institutional resistance to the velocity of change, and the classroom chemistry which ignites the connection between curious girls and passionate teachers. My science project tracked the workings of an aging waste water treatment plant.

Endowed chair Melby Bush taught me that I was a ‘smart cookie’ in math so I did advanced work in addition, to our enrollment and endowment.

I especially enjoyed the juxtaposition of traditional and multicultural texts in English and the opportunity to read poems on any occasion. Ms. Mahoney’s guidance as my grammar guru and editor was evident in my major project, The Employee Handbook.

History remained my favorite subject. I was able to conduct original research in the School’s archives and contribute to Madeira’s centennial history, Strong in Her Girls, as well as teach women’s history. As a practicum in government, I worked with Fairfax County and community leaders to safeguard our campus and preserve our natural resources.

In world languages I learned to say thank you in even more languages than Madeira teaches and expanded my geographical reach, as Madeira girls traveled to China, Bhutan, India, South Africa, and Peru as well as Western European sites.

I fulfilled my fine arts requirement in audience appreciation for Madrigals, chamber ensemble, plays, and musicals. I appeared briefly as a back-up singer with a boa for an Aretha Franklin look-alike but never stole the show as Miss Maynard did as Tinker Bell, when she flew across the stage in a tutu.

I’ve been involved in every Co-Curriculum activity except the zip wire, which I’ve saved for last.

In public speaking I’ve been inspired by years of notable guests — Hillary Clinton, John Lewis, Marian Edelman, Elie Wiesel, Elizabeth Dole, Colin Powell-as well as Black Student Union monologues, Korean Student Association vignettes, and alumnae Lives and Legacies panels.

I’ve been a boarder and a day girl, a senior advisor, host to innumerable freshman lunches and seated dinners, chair of the Diversity Council, and an active student government sponsor. This year we revised the student government charter but I keep losing the uniform debate.

For this pre-Title IX swimmer and half-court basketball captain, athletics proved a challenge.

I struck out in softball but saddled up for the senior gallop and cheered girls in our pool and on every court, field, course and track.

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09 I learned even more about teamwork around the board table, in ATeam meetings, and in the ad hoc committees which expanded the curriculum, improved residential life, evaluated athletics, advanced diversity, addressed student health and wellness, designed buildings, led capital campaigns, and celebrated our centennial.

I’m looking forward to my last “senior” year.

I promise not to slump. I do intend to celebrate the strength and vitality of the Madeira community.

Like many seniors, I’m ready for my next adventure.

I intend to take a “gap year” before sending out any applications.

I have been honored to be Madeira’s steward. I always tried to do my personal best. I’m looking forward to graduating with the class of 2010 and joining generations of accomplished, activist Madeira women.

Like generations of seniors, the news I’m sharing today is both exciting for me and bittersweet.

Cordially,

Elisabeth Griffith, PhD Headmistress

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The Madeira School

8328 Georgetown Pike, McLean, VA 22102

www.madeira.org