Sewickley Speaking Winter 2017 by Sewickley Academy

SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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WINTER 2017

The Magazine of Sewickley Academy

Natalie Wei ’17, Janie Weber ’17, Grace Guerin ’17, Ciara Donohue ’17, Caroline Becker ’17, and Julia Nash ’17 stand on a bridge in Spain’s Square, located in the Parque Maria Luisa, in Seville, Spain, in 2013. SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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WINTER 2017

Features

Dear Readers, ¡Bienvenido! Welkom! Selamat datang! Welcome to the “International Issue!” Thank you for your continued feedback on Sewickley Speaking. The “Hollywood Issue” was a smashing success thanks to the motivation, dedication, and passion of our broad alumni network in the industry. One of the best parts of my job is learning about your journey beyond our campus. In this issue, you’ll read about alumni who have taken the road less traveled. They have lived and worked in cities all over the world, defending our country, researching wildlife, designing prominent buildings, developing professional partnerships, and even falling in love. From the Middle East to South America, former Panthers are relating to and learning about cultures other than their own, continuously expanding the ever-present Sewickley Academy network to the global front. Current students and faculty are also venturing abroad, finding ways to positively impact lessdeveloped, under-resourced countries. The Academy’s Global Studies Certificate Program is thriving, providing students with the skills they need to make globally-informed decisions. Traveling and exploring the world allows one to gain a new perspective, a new way of seeing things, and it exposes you to a different way of life. When the opportunity arises, get out there and see the world, it will likely have a profound impact on your life by altering your perception. And if you come to a fork in the proverbial road, I urge you all to follow the dirt path instead of the smooth, paved route – you never know where it may lead you. Explore. Dream. Discover. Travel. Enjoy!

Kaitlin Busch Director of Communications

04 08 12 16 20 24 28 36

Planting Hope in Nicaragua: Darryl (Ferguson ’61) Bloom Architecture: The Gateway to the World: Greg Etter ’72 Fueling the Adventure Abroad: Carly (Koval ’02) Reilly Animal Hospital: Practicing Conservation Medicine in Latin America: Nikki Becich ’09 Dr. Ron Kinser Partners with Duke University on “World Health” Class Answering the Call to Serve: Janie Weber ’17 Global Studies Certificate Program Finds Success at Sewickley Academy SA Librarian Travels to Tanzania on Sculley Sabbatical

Contents Early Childhood Goes Global

Sewickley Academy: A Home Away from Home

Where Are They Now?

Anna Singer ’76 as Julia Child

From Africa to the Academy: Ali Mganga ’18

Reunion Weekend Rewind

Beth Gutcheon Inducted into Distinguished Hall of Fame

Student Athletes Sign with Elite Colleges

Events Center Dedication Ceremony

Alumni Holiday Party

Class Notes

Ground Control to Major Thompson: Alison Thompson ’95

An International Love Story: Alicia (Koval ’03) Chalmers

The Danger Zone: Tony Innamorato ’03

In Memoriam

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

DESIGN

Kaitlin Busch

Third Planet Global Creative www.333planet.com

Director of Communications

CONTRIBUTORS

Julie Banks

Win Palmer

Tim Banks

Jerilyn (Carter ’86) Scott, Ph.D.

Kaitlin Busch

Susan (Ratcliffe ’55) Sour, Ph.D.

Susan Crawford

Judy Stewart

Director of Annual Giving Tim Banks Design Director of Communications Director of Alumni Relations

Nataliya Di Domenico

Global Studies Certificate Program Coordinator

Karen DiMaio

Early Childhood Teacher

Annie Gensheimer

Annie Gensheimer Photography

Ruthie Neely

Hansen Librarian

Athletic Director Grade 4 Teacher

Alumni Associate

Global Studies Program Coordinator

Patti Coyne Stine Director of Auction and Special Events

Brittnea Turner

Director of Public Relations

Sarah Walters

Director of Admission

Michael Williams

MichaelWill Photography

Kolia O’Connor Head of School

THE 63RD ANNUAL CLOTHESLINE SALE RAISES OVER $90,000 FOR SA! This past September, the Home and School Association held its 63rd Annual Clothesline and Used Book Sale. The fundraising event brought in $91,790. Special thanks to Clothesline Chair Laura (Aufman ’88) Jenkins and her devoted committee: Debbie Capito, Mari Hertzberg, Elsie Spry, and Kristene Smith.

Thank you to everyone who was a part of this event and to the many parent, faculty, student, and past parent volunteers and generous donors who help keep this sale a successful annual tradition!

SEWICKLEY ACADEMY WINS GOLD IN THE 2016 BRILLIANCE AWARDS

Visit us at www.sewickley.org facebook.com/sewickleyacademy twitter.com/sewickley instagram.com/sewickleyacademy pinterest.com/sewickley1838 blog.sewickley.org youtube.com/sewickley Access the digital issue at www.sewickley.org/ss

InspirED School Marketers named Sewickley Academy the Gold Winner in its first Brilliance Awards. In the Annual Fund Appeal category, the Academy’s “Let’s Talk About the Annual Fund” video was selected by a panel of 10 judges from creative agencies and independent schools across the country. InspirED School Marketers is a free online professional development resource for private school marketing and communications administrators. The Brilliance Awards recognize marketing and communications excellence for PK-12 private schools exclusively. The video was produced by Director of Annual Giving Julie Banks and Michael Savisky from Make Roots Marketing.

Watch the video now at www.sewickley.org/givenow. 2

C O

Dear Readers of Sewickley Speaking, From our Global Studies program, which has become a model for other schools around the country, to our latest collaboration with Duke University in offering the “Global Issues: World Health” class, which involves students traveling to Belize as part of their studies, Sewickley Academy has a robust and dynamic international footprint. But our commitment to reaching across borders and ensuring a world-view for our students is not a recent phenomenon. Our oldest formal international exchange, established in the mid-1970s by legendary teacher Larry Hall, involved our relationship with the Erasmus-Grasser Gymnasium in Munich, Germany. Even prior to that, students and their families appreciated the importance of understanding the world beyond our campus. More recently, we have sought to bring more international students to our campus. While in the past, we have hosted students from Germany, England, Spain, China, Australia, and France on a short-term basis, currently we have five students from China whom we have enrolled as diploma-seeking students. These young people are fully immersed in the life of the school, singing in the chorus, participating on sports teams and in clubs, and contributing in classes. One student, who is in his second year with us, was even elected vice president of this year’s Senior School Student Council. We are still in the evaluation stage of this program and want to be sure that our school retains its essential character even as we open our doors just a bit wider. So far, however, it is clear that both our exchange and our local students are benefitting from this arrangement. In this issue of Sewickley Speaking, you will learn more about how current students and alumni are engaging with the world beyond our shores and how we have reached out to bring the world to Sewickley. At a time when there is so much tumult and strife in the world, and sectarian conflicts seem to be proliferating at an alarming rate, it becomes ever more important to remain engaged so that we can deepen our knowledge and understanding of the issues we face with our planet’s fellow residents. Sewickley Academy has historically done an excellent job in preparing graduates to go forth and thrive in an ever-changing world. Our efforts today build on the work of those who came before us and seek to ensure that today’s graduates will be as well prepared as their predecessors to be change-agents and leaders in a world that needs the positive, constructive, and culturally competent contributions that caring and thoughtful individuals can make. Sincerely,

Kolia O’Connor Head of School SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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PLANTING HOPE IN NICARAGUA By Kaitlin Busch At a young age Darryl (Ferguson ’61) Bloom became conscious of privilege, and as an adolescent decided she wanted a very different life from the one she knew growing up. Teachers at the Academy nurtured her capacity to be compassionate, a character trait central to her life’s work, and encouraged her to be an advocate for education. “In the 1950s, the social world appeared to me to be fairly narrow. I saw others who were outside the most valued core, and as a young person my thinking was that there are only two binary choices – either you were in or you were out,” Darryl recalled. “Although I was in no way suffering or miserable, I was conscious of being in and out. Growing up in privilege, I became very aware of the challenges and extreme unfairness of some people having privilege and others who did not. I was aware I was getting a really good education at Sewickley Academy, but I don’t know that I was aware that people who were not in private school weren’t getting as good of an education.” Darryl reflected on the “visual snapshots” she has of her time at the Academy, recalling how she often thought she was being a bit rebellious breaking the social norm by wearing straight skirts or knee socks and sweaters that didn’t match. She also has strong memories of being in former Head of School Mr. Cliff Nichols’ house, as she was good friends with his daughter Sandra (Nichols ’61) Slaminko, as well as the sense of nonconformity school dances provided. “Rock ‘n’ roll was in the early stages in the 50s, and it was very different from the music we listened to while taking dancing lessons at the Edgeworth Club or in ballet class with Mr. Mario Melodia,” Darryl said. “We were having so much fun just dancing and it felt like forbidden freedom.”

1. Darryl plays Twister with students at Escuela Amistad, Escuela Especial para Ninos con Descapacidades in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. 2. All children have equal rights and responsibilites at Escuela Amistad. 3. Occupational therapy practicum students from the University of New Mexico work and play with children in Los Pitos, Matagalpa.

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Darryl left the Academy after Grade 8 and graduated from The Ellis School, as the Senior School didn’t yet exist. She matriculated to Antioch College, a liberal arts school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and graduated from Connecticut College in 1970, the first year the women’s school started accepting men, with a degree in early childhood education. “I had the ‘kids like me’ gene. I babysat while growing up, and worked with the Head Start program in New Haven. I liked the idea of working with young children,” she said of her career choice. Shortly after college, Darryl married Barney Bloom. The two joined the Peace Corps in 1973, which took them to Bogota, Colombia, in South America, where Darryl worked at the National University of Colombia in the Education Department in a program for students who were preparing to teach in the countryside, and Barney worked as a cataloger for the National Agricultural Library. “The Peace Corps school library program was meant to help the student teachers expand their ideas of how to use and develop libraries. Unfortunately, in the country schools the resources were rarely there; they didn’t have text books let alone libraries at their schools,” she explained. “I also did a lot of work with lab school students on how to use a library as a general resource more than just to look up information.” After the Peace Corps, Darryl and Barney lived in Washington, D.C. for five years, where their two daughters were born. The Blooms moved to Montpelier, Vermont, in 1983, and in 1985 she enrolled herself in graduate school at the University of Vermont to become a school counselor. “I taught preschool when I first got here, and I thought I wanted to do more work with families in counseling or development. While I was in grad school, I realized I wanted to help schools be therapeutic in their approach to and understanding of children’s general mental health more than practice psychiatry or family counseling,” she said. “Once I was working as an elementary school counselor, I became more and more involved in diversity awareness and education within the school.” Between raising young children, going to school, and working, Darryl did not have much free time for herself, and she greatly missed traveling. An act of happenstance occurred in the summer of 2004, when she was walking by the local library. The founder of Planting Hope, Beth Merrill, was promoting the nonprofit on the library lawn. Darryl had been thinking she was ready to travel again and immediately knew she wanted to get involved in the organization, citing the timing as “serendipitous.” Planting Hope’s mission is to enhance educational opportunities, support grassroots initiatives, and foster cultural exchange in Nicaragua and the United States. Founded in 2001, the organization established and constructed a much needed library and community center in a barrio of Matagalpa, the “Biblioteca La Chispa.” In the spring of 2005, Planting Hope arranged its second delegation of Vermonters, who traveled to Nicaragua and took part in service and cultural exchange activities, a delegation Darryl was a part of. “We were the first big group to come visit since the library opened,” she said. “We were there for 10 days, and then we came back to Vermont and worked hard to raise money to expand the library. The funds were used to essentially build the second floor.” In addition to serving as a library, community center, and cyber café, Biblioteca La Chispa offers English, computer, art, dance, and baking classes. It also provides various additional programs to increase employable skills in the community.

After the trip to Nicaragua, Darryl joined the volunteer board of directors to help oversee the strategic development and general operation of the organization. She served from 2005-2013 and spent a year as the secretary and seven years as the chair of the board. Darryl was one of many people who worked on developing meaningful activities from one year to the next, emphasizing play and experiential education such as STEM-related topics. She went on many trips and was active in facilitating and preparing high school students to go to Nicaragua. “The trips create a great opportunity for friendship and exchange between youth and young adults in both countries,” she said of the ongoing experience. “We created art exchanges using books that included individual art and photographs showing daily and school life in Montpelier, Vermont, and San Ramon, Nicaragua. The American high school students also translated children’s books and then read the stories in the Nicaraguan schools and donated translated books for students to read and enjoy.” Through its growth, Planting Hope expanded to other communities, mostly in and around the municipal town of San Ramon. Darryl reflected on how life is different in San Ramon from Montpelier and discussed a typical day in the life of a Planting Hope volunteer with a host family. “All night long, more or less, you will hear dogs barking or roosters crowing. In the morning, you will have a very simple breakfast; a traditional meal is fresh juice, refried beans, tortillas, and cheese. Then you go to the Planting Hope office and participate in the day’s adventure, which could be visiting a school in the countryside, shadowing one of your host family’s students at their school for the day, or taking a trip to the library, which is in the city, participating in program activities with kids who come to the library, including numeracy and literacy activities in Spanish with young children, and supporting English learning with older students,” she said. “A day of fun would be a hike to a river and going for a swim, visiting a weaving studio, or learning how to make seed jewelry from local crafts people. Most days are split – half of it consists of formal programming, while the other half is culture-based.” The U.S. students adore their host siblings and parents, who provide a wonderful, loving home during their stay. Darryl said the students often come back to the U.S. and question why we have so much stuff, like why do we need so many different types of breakfast cereal, so many different detergents, etc. “One of things I love most about Planting Hope is that the local high school kids (from central Vermont) who participate in our exchanges have an opportunity to go to a very poor country and have home stays with the ‘middle class’ in Nicaragua. These families are not at the poverty level but have far simpler lives with fewer resources. And yet, the Nicaraguan culture is warm, open, and friendly, welcoming the students into their families with loving spirits. The kids come back saying, ‘Oh my gosh. Those people hardly have anything, and yet they were so loving. I never knew it was possible to live so well with so little.’ Their eyes are opened in a loving way,” she reflected. “I think that when high school students have a welcoming and loving experience in a very different part of the world it helps them learn compassion. It helps them become individuals who know how to use their lives and resources to take care of themselves, their families and communities, and people in the rest of the world; it helps them become compassionate global citizens.”

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H O P E

Darryl and the OT practicum group, which collaborates with Planting Hope, take an opportunity to relax and reflect on their experience in Nicaragua.

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The Planting Hope bookmobile, when not taking books, STEM, and art activities to schools in the countryside, helps transport people and materials for various projects.

During her time on the board, Planting Hope established a relationship with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (now Keurig) and Brewing a Better World. Both organizations are generous supporters of Planting Hope’s programs, most notably the Coffee Camps (started in 2010), a project for the children of migrant coffee pickers that provides day care, educational activities, healthy meals, and medical and dental checks to young children previously left behind to care for themselves when their parents picked coffee all day during the harvest season. In 2012, with leadership from a Davis Projects for Peace grant, Planting Hope purchased a bus to run a mobile library, which brings books to rural communities and their schools. As a program volunteer Darryl was on the road with the “bookmobile,” visiting schools for four days and planning and developing materials one day each week. The bus would travel from school to school, arriving with boxes of books, music, and arts activities, serving as an educational project for teachers and an arts project for the children. In the 11 years Darryl partnered with Planting Hope, she traveled to Nicaragua about seven or eight times, staying for 10 days to four weeks. Darryl left the board in 2013 and embarked on a new phase of volunteer work with her daughter, Hannah, shortly thereafter. Hannah, an occupational therapist (OT) and graduate of the University of New Mexico, and her mom hatched a dream of establishing a pediatric practicum opportunity for the students in the University of New Mexico’s Occupational Therapy Graduate Program. “We had the conversation while she was in school. She did her pediatric practicum in Mexico, and we said why not Nicaragua,” Darryl stated. It took a while to get started, but the University of New Mexico now offers an annual pediatric practicum in Nicaragua in collaboration with Planting Hope. The OT students visit a school for children with disabilities (La Amistad) and physical therapy centers. They consult with families, therapists, and teachers in the city and in the countryside. “It is an opportunity for grad students to work with teachers in the local schools who serve children with disabilities and help them incorporate

Local girls relax and read books they picked up from the Planting Hope bookmobile.

OT awareness into their programming,” Darryl said. “The students lead workshops on sensory integration with preschool teachers and gain a ton of experience working with cultures different from their own.” Because of her experience with Planting Hope, Darryl was particularly sensitive to certain challenges when launching the exchange program. “The organization has the complexity of being a foreign nonprofit in a host country. The social and power dynamics are tricky. We are the people who have tons of material resources in a country and an educational system with fewer material resources, and it’s a challenge to be aware of the effect this has on your work and your relationships,” she explained. “It takes a lot of self-awareness on everyone’s part not to be kidnapped by those power dynamics. The people with the material resources aren’t supposed to be making all the decisions. Cultural differences and attitudes come into play, that’s part of the deal.” Darryl’s older daughter, Deborah, is also drawn to social change, as she served in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria and continues to engage in diversity work in her workplace. “It’s very satisfying to have children, who have grown up with the values that my husband and I share, maintain those values in their own lives,” Darryl said proudly. When she’s not traveling between the United States and Nicaragua, Darryl remains active in diversity awareness, combatting racism and advocating for social justice. She participates in the Vermont chapters of Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) and her synagogue’s Social Justice action group. She also worked on the Obama Campaign in Dayton, Ohio, in 2008 and 2012. In her free time, she likes to knit and read and thoroughly enjoys being a grandmother. She doesn’t have any new projects planned in the foreseeable future. “I’m very happy taking life as it comes, and I’m open to opportunities but am enjoying the day by day,” she said. “I do dream of taking my grandchildren to Nicaragua though.”

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ARCHITECTURE:

Greg stands in the forecourt of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.

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THE GATEWAY TO THE WORLD By Kaitlin Busch For more than a quarter century, well-respected architect Gregory Etter ’72 has been involved in construction projects across a broad arc of the globe. During many of those years, he designed and developed buildings in the Middle East and North Africa, all during a period of intense turbulence for that region. Working and traveling in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria, he’s been an observant witness to the beauty and hardship of a fractured part of the world in the process of remaking itself. Along with his keen interest in language, Greg’s career as an architect continues to allow him to pursue his quest for lifelong learning, a passion he first acquired at Sewickley Academy. Greg arrived at the Academy in 1968 through a unique scholarship program offered by a well-known local institution, the Scripps-Howard Foundation. An early morning paper courier for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Greg was invited to attend Sewickley Academy in Grade 9, his education funded through their generous support. Raised in a working-class household in nearby Emsworth, and with the encouragement of his parents and six siblings, Greg immediately recognized the value of such an offer. “It’s fairly certain my life would have followed a much different trajectory if I hadn’t attended the Academy. Growing up in close proximity to the steel mills of Pittsburgh with all of its industrial might, the son of a very practical mother and hard-working father, I likely would have pursued a more mechanically-oriented path,” he reflected. “The Academy’s focus on academic achievement revealed to me the joys to be found in intellectual exploration. This small inflection affected my life enormously, opening up new opportunities, and stoking my hunger for the unknown larger world out there still to be explored.” Greg recalls a number of influential teachers at the Academy who were instrumental in his intellectual development. Senior School librarian Mrs. Margaret “Judy” Lackner made it her daily mission to introduce him to new authors not always found on course reading lists; history teacher and lacrosse coach Mr. Richard “Dick” Webster encouraged him to understand and embrace his philosophical principles well enough to rigorously defend them; and his first French teacher, Mr. Gil Levesque, taught him how to communicate through unfamiliar sounds. “Mr. Levesque believed the best path to becoming conversational involved uninhibited experimentation, similar to children learning to communicate by foraging within their memories for previously heard sounds and grammatical structures,” he said. “This simple understanding of how languages develop encouraged me to recognize familiar roots in what I’d read and heard and to be unafraid of playing around with them.” Founding Head of Senior School Mr. Jim Cavalier, who grew up in a social environment similar to his own, also had a profound impact on Greg’s life. “Mr. Cavalier understood my situation, that I came to my studies with a background much different from that of many Academy students and classmates, but I didn’t want that difference to be all that I was to become,” he revealed. “I wanted to be a person in my own right, to fail and succeed on my own merits, and he helped me to navigate that transition.”

Matriculating to Williams College in Massachusetts, Greg majored in English literature and chemistry as a pre-med student, but after a year spent “shadowing” an Academy classmate’s physician father in surgery, his tendency to faint in the operating theater eventually persuaded him that medicine might not be his proper calling. After college, he embraced a more innate talent for drawing and, believing he might become a better architect than lab scientist, traveled (overseas, for the first time in his life) to Paris for a couple of years. “I knew some basic carpentry, and a friend offered me an apartment and a job renovating the inside of an art gallery on the Left Bank,” Greg recalled fondly. In his free time, he walked the city streets and drew and returned to the States with enough sketches to talk his way into the model shop of Benjamin Thompson & Associates, a busy architectural office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He honed his skills while at the firm and earned a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1990, where during his final year he spent a research summer in Sicily. A post-graduate fellowship took him to Jerusalem just as the first Gulf War broke out. During the job searches of his early career, he continually put out word that he was looking to work in this part of the world. In 2006, Greg received a call from Jung Brannen, a Boston architectural office, asking him to represent the firm as their Middle East regional manager in Dubai. Due to the immense power of oil money held in sovereign wealth funds, many countries in the Middle East were rapidly modernizing at that time but without having done enough of the conceptual planning that typically precedes growth in the West. “Over the course of eight years in the region, I witnessed the construction of far too many buildings entirely unsuited to their geographical locations. Numerous examples can be found in the UAE alone, where long boulevards of mostly empty skyscrapers appear more like store displays of multicolored perfume bottles than office space or habitation,” he vividly described. “The internal heat loads produced by an ever-present sun on all that glass means these structures are much less suited to the Arabian Desert than to the temperate climates of Manhattan or London. And even this doesn’t begin to assess the effect of wind-driven sand on those glass facades, rendering them less visually transparent with every passing year.” While overseeing development of a large coastal resort in Oman from 2007-2009, Greg lived in the city of Dubai, his work requiring a 10-hour round trip drive across the rocky desert every other weekend to liaise with local architects and government authorities in Muscat. “It was a rather ambitious project that should have never been undertaken, completely overwhelming a small fishing village on the edge of coastal bird sanctuaries,” he explained. “When the economic meltdown of 2008 took hold, financial backers deserted the premises and the project fell, leaving behind nothing but cleared land and graveled roadways in its place.”

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Greg (far left) with construction colleagues during the installation of the Great Seal of the United States at the U.S. Embassy Den Haag Netherlands.

Greg surveys ruins of Qala’at Samaan (also known as the Basilica of Saint Simeon), north of Aleppo, Syria.

Greg described living and working in Dubai as “fast, shiny, and hot.” The world’s tallest building was being built directly across from his long-term hotel suite and overlooked fantastical palm-shaped islands being engineered just offshore. “At one point, over a quarter of the world’s construction cranes were in operation somewhere between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Then the global market upheaval of October 2008 occurred, and within a few months most of them were idle, while high-end sports cars were left at the airport with keys in the ignition, testimony to shattered finances and broken dreams,” he recalled in wonderment. “The Emirati developer with whom my U.S. firm worked suddenly dropped from 600 to 60 people overnight, lights went dark, and bags were quickly packed. A week later, I drove my (rented) Audi to the airport and flew home.”

After the bank project was fully developed and under way in late 2010, Greg returned home to work on a short-term project located outside of Riyadh for Koetter Kim Associates, a Boston architectural firm. This was quickly followed by a call from Vanir Construction, a design management office out of Sacramento, California, offering him a position flying between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, managing an enormous hospital complex funded by the royal family. But after years of struggle in the heat and dust, this project was ultimately shelved and construction never even begun, leaving Greg to wonder about the “meaning and purpose of all this flying around.” Thumbing through his passport, he also began to wonder whether all those entry stamps into countries now enflamed in the wake of the “Arab Spring” would draw the attention of someone at the Department of Homeland Security. He returned to the U.S. in time to spend the winter holiday with his daughter, then in her senior year of high school and making preparations for college. And just as he was settling into domestic life that spring, a liaison with the U.S. State Department called and offered him an experience in Central Africa, far different from any he had in the Middle East.

A few months after returning to the United States in early 2009, Greg received a call from The Associated Engineering Partnership (TAEP), a Palestinian/Kuwaiti firm, offering him a position as design director in Kuwait City. There he would be overseeing a team of regional architects and engineers and helping the office develop its own design studio capabilities. The job description turned out to be only partially accurate, and Greg served not only as design director but also project architect and design manager, director of human resources, international/ cultural dispute resolution specialist, and even the guy who repaired the A/C thermostat. “I managed a very talented but desperately understaffed team of 50 architects, engineers, and draftsmen speaking 12 different languages, and within 20 months we developed concept design sketches into construction drawings for several projects, including the Kuwait National Bank Headquarters,” Greg recalled. He also oversaw work on the Kuwait National Library, the Amiri Terminal at Kuwait International Airport, and the National Sports Stadium. “I was the one person in the office who had put a building together soup-to-nuts, which unfortunately also meant that far too much of the design process went through me,” he explained. “I coordinated all architectural design with the disciplines of structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering and even directed the research of local fire, safety, and building codes, supervising the preparation of submissions for approval to Kuwaiti authorities. It was exciting, rewarding, and ultimately exhausting.”

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During the summer of 2013, Greg served as the project manager during construction and renovation of The American School of Kinshasa (TASOK) in Kinshasa, République Democratique du Congo (DRC), a project partially overseen by the State Department. Sheltered from the rain and heat under a corrugated roof, he supervised construction of several classroom buildings, following designs that encourage passive air convection and natural ventilation, thereby minimizing operational costs. Greg was particularly intrigued by the inventiveness of local tradesmen, who fabricated many building components entirely by hand. “I slept under mosquito netting at night, sweat a lot in the humid heat, and swallowed malaria meds every day,” he reminisced soberly. “I wanted to explore, but it was never clear how far I’d be able to travel into the countryside, since the project demanded close attention during the very short dry season available for construction. With only 300 miles of paved roads in a country the size of Western Europe, rain, which was often torrential, also turned dirt tracks into valleys of mud.”

Greg with two friends (and two camels) at the archeological site of Petra, Jordan.

Greg visits the Tempietto of San Pietro in Rome with his daughter, Lila.

Greg was invited to join the State Department, and following an extensive battery of medical tests and security background evaluations, relocated in early 2014 to Den Haag (The Hague), Netherlands, where he now serves as site architect at the new U.S. Embassy. His current role is part of a government initiative to increase embassy security while enhancing diplomatic openness. During years of increasing security measures, chanceries had begun to seem less like diplomatic posts and more like urban bunkers. “Integrating esthetic design with diplomatic security is a very interesting process just for the complexity of its many moving parts, although muscle-bound security protocols sometimes feel overwhelming. I now have more passwords than pencils or paperclips, and I spend time at the end of every day feeding all my paperwork into a shredder,” he described with mild bemusement. “I have no real complaints, however. I return home every day feeling I’ve been a diplomat for architecture among rough men (and women) in hard hats…and we’ve carried the field.” This current project is expected to be completed in the summer of 2017, after which Greg will be reassigned to Athens, where a new embassy is under design.

first develops neighborhood friendships and connections, so that if anything does go sideways he knows where the exits are located. And although he’s refined his instincts for evaluating risk, he also knows that not every possibly harmful situation can be foreseen. “While traveling in Yemen, I had prearranged with my small hotel in Sana’a for a return to the airport at the end of my stay. However, on the morning of departure an unfamiliar car appeared, much different from the white SUV that had dropped me on arrival five days before. Aware that protesting too long would mean a missed flight, and because the hotel proprietor insisted everything was OK, I resigned myself and got in,” he admitted with a wince. “The driver took me a few miles down the road, then pulled over and appeared to renegotiate my trip with another driver, into whose badly maintained vehicle my baggage and I were then transferred. After four successively worse trades, my final ride was in a shot up Fiat pick-up truck, the seats almost entirely duct-taped together and the windshield fractured into splinters of glass. I began to suspect that maybe I’d been careless,” he laughed in embarrassment. “As we approached the airport perimeter along an unpaved road, I heard shouting to my left just as a nervous guard fired a clip of automatic rounds into the dirt a few feet ahead of us. We came full stop, the driver keeping both hands visible on the wheel while mine were planted firmly on the dashboard. Several extremely wary members of the local government militia then gathered around the pick-up and, after skeptically reviewing my passport, told me to walk the final 500 yards to the terminal, while the truck turned around and sped off into the dust.”

Although he claims to be only truly fluent in French (and very possibly English), Greg makes a point of learning some of the language of any country he enters. “Travel and work overseas has always reinforced for me the value of knowing at least one language besides my own,” he said. “Although English has become the lingua franca of the business world, I’ve never met anyone in a foreign country who didn’t appreciate an earnest attempt to at least introduce myself in familiar words.” Living and working abroad, while intellectually rewarding, is also uniquely challenging. “Travel takes a toll on your body and your life. A seasoned business traveler never fully recovers from jet lag and lost sleep, and the fatigue accumulates,” he articulated. Greg is also frank in his assessment of how such travel contributed to the breakdown of his marriage. “In the end, there is only so much love one can convey during a Skype video call across nine time zones,” he said with regret. Working abroad also involves certain physical risks, and sometimes being accidentally placed in danger. When entering a new city for the first time, Greg

Greg’s years of working overseas have provided him with tolerance and patience and only seem to increase his curiosity about foreign countries and unfamiliar cultures. “Time is extremely elastic, and each culture moves at its own pace. In order to interact well while traveling, you accept this from the start,” he explained. “It also helps to understand the hum or beat or rhythm at which a culture moves, in order to be involved in its work. How time progresses is not a concept one can, or should, impose on anyone else. We are all living our lives, each by a different clock,” he concluded. “And I’m sometimes amazed that this great world keeps spinning.”

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FUELING THE ADVENTURE ABROAD By Kaitlin Busch

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Carly (Koval ’02) Reilly never planned on going into the family business, as math and science wasn’t really her thing. She loved history, English, and sports, as she played on Sewickley Academy’s soccer and lacrosse teams (she was the captain her senior year) and fondly remembers the year the Panthers competed in the soccer PIAA Championship in Hershey. Yet somehow she ended up as an engineer for ExxonMobil, spending most of her adult life living and working abroad in Africa, Asia, Europe, and parts of the Middle East. A lifer at the Academy, Carly enjoyed the entire school being on one campus and the small class sizes. “Being such a small school fostered this sense of togetherness and inclusion,” she reflected. “Everyone knew each other, and all the teachers knew your name.” She also liked being challenged by many of her teachers, including Mrs. Vicki Polinko, Dr. Joan (Reteshka) Cucinotta, and Mr. Larry Connolly. She said the courses they taught were really outside of the box, as they did not have to follow the generic state-wide curriculum required in public schools. Although difficult, the framework laid in the Academy’s classes ultimately benefitted her throughout her life.

During her last semester in college in 2007, Carly took courses at the National University of Singapore as part of her general education requirements. Her study abroad experience lasted six months, and she spent a lot of time traveling through Southeast Asia. Living abroad allowed Carly to get a feel for the depth of Singapore. “Every interaction you have with someone of a different background, you learn something. That type of learning, from a personal perspective, appeals to me,” she explained. “It’s exciting and fun to try different foods, activities, and the like.” Upon graduating from Penn State, Carly started working with ExxonMobil, the largest publicly traded international oil and gas company with headquarters in Houston, Texas. She took the job due to the company’s global breadth and depth. “ExxonMobil is a very large company and provides a lot of opportunities. The biggest draw for me was that I could do anything and try a lot of different things – I could live and work abroad, or stay in one place, and work different types of jobs,” she stated. “People move all around within the company, and having a career with a company that gives me those types of opportunities is a big driver.”

“I think Sewickley lays a great foundation for college, and it can’t be underestimated. When you aren’t struggling so much academically and you have the maturity and the academic base to be able to handle a college course load, you are able to do things like join a sorority, study abroad, or take advantage of other opportunities,” Carly said of the value of an Academy education. “To me, that has been the biggest impact in my life. Being able to live and work internationally, the ground work for that was laid in college when I was able to take advantage of study abroad. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the work load of an engineering major and business minor if it hadn’t been for the Academy.”

She started as a project planning engineer, which required her to handle major capital projects. She would plan and execute the building of large new facilities in the U.S. and abroad. After a few years in that role, she became an internal review coordinator, preparing projects for funding and running the teams who conduct the internal reviews. She did about 12 reviews a year worldwide. “They were short trips, but it was pretty cool to go and see how the company worked in different parts of the world,” she said. “ExxonMobil does a good job of employing local personnel at locations worldwide. The people I worked with on these trips gave me an interesting cultural opportunity.”

Carly matriculated to The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) to study petroleum and natural gas engineering with a minor in global business strategies. Carly’s father, Charles Koval, started Atlas Energy Group, an oil and gas exploration and production company based in Western Pennsylvania, and all of her older halfsiblings also studied petroleum engineering to follow in their father’s footsteps. “Petroleum engineering was kind of a family business and it fell into my lap, but I didn’t set out to go into it,” she said of her chosen career path. “When I started working in the oil and gas industry, I discovered early on that it provided an opportunity to travel and live in different parts of the world.” As an undergrad, Carly interned for different oil and gas companies like ChevronTexaco and Newfield and worked all over the United States, including California, Louisiana, and Texas. These experiences became the foundation for her career, exposing her to the large world of oil and gas and the influence those types of companies have. She realized this career path would give her the chance to work on impactful major projects that have a direct effect on developing nations and economic growth.

Carly traveled to Russia, Qatar, Monaco, Angola, and Hong Kong without too much difficulty but found navigating Japan as a foreigner more challenging. The country is very well developed, but there is not a strong English presence, and there is very little signage in English. “Our group was about a dozen middle-aged American men plus myself on the trip, and the thing to do in Japan is to take the subway; you don’t just get in a car. I’m trying to navigate the subway system with all those guys in tow with their laptop bags and big briefcases, and we’re starting to cause a bit of a scene,” she winced as she rehashed the memory. “We stood in the subway station for a good 20 minutes while I called our local contact to figure out how to buy tickets and what train to get on. That first day it took us 40 minutes for a 10-minute trip. But, we got better and better throughout the trip.”

While at Penn State, Carly met a lovely British gent named Matt Reilly, who would eventually become her husband. “He would talk about how exciting and interesting central Pennsylvania was and how much he loved American football. I thought, ‘This is so basic, we’re in the middle of a cow field at Penn State,’” she laughed, reflecting on their first encounters. “An everyday occurrence for someone somewhere else in the world is really exciting if you’ve never experienced it before; it’s childlike in that way when you experience something new. It fosters a sense of exploration, and that’s appealing to me.”

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Even during the rough patches, Carly still loved immersing herself in another culture. When the opportunity arose for a project in Dubai in 2010, she jumped at it and moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). For six months, she worked with an affiliate of ExxonMobil to move gas platforms constructed in a fabrication yard in Dubai to offshore North Field Qatar. Carly lived out of a “serviced apartment” for that period of time, and living there full time really taught Carly a lot about the local culture. “The major holidays are centered on the month of Ramadan, so I learned the ins and outs and etiquette around it. I interacted with locals, took desert tours, rode a camel, and tried my best to assimilate to the daily life of an Emirati,” she said. “UAE is a young country, and it’s seen more rapid growth than anywhere else I’ve been. The people there are experiencing their own culture shock, as they are trying to keep one foot in history and the other in progress and development. It’s interesting to see how people are straddling that line.” SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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Carly and Matt pose for a scenic picture in Mongolia.

Upon returning to the States, Carly was called to work on the Marine Well Containment System Project, a result of, and the industry’s response to, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (or BP oil disaster) in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. Eleven people died in the incident, considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, and the U.S. government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 million barrels. After the accident, several leading companies in the industry banded together to come up with an emergency response plan to mitigate environmental impacts should such an event ever happen again. ExxonMobil, along with other founding companies, formed the Marine Well Containment Company (www.marinewellcontainment.com) with the goal of providing standby emergency response plans and facilities for marine oil spills in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. ExxonMobil had the lead in design and fabrication of the marine facilities and equipment, which could be deployed in such an event. The design for this system is a significant engineering challenge, as the facilities and equipment need to have the capability to address a broad range of potential issues in order to meet the goal of making deepwater drilling a safer enterprise. Matt and Carly continued dating when Matt moved to Houston after he graduated from Penn State with his master’s in 2008. They married in March 2012 in Park City, Utah. In November of the same year, Matt’s job (he’s a geologist for Hess Corporation) assigned him to a project in Malaysia, and Carly requested to work in ExxonMobil’s Malaysia office, as she wanted to keep her job. “It is hard to mobilize expatriates to the Malaysian office because the local workforce is talented and there are limited spots for expats to come in, but my company was able to 14

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orchestrate the move and my husband and I both were able to keep our jobs and work and live abroad together,” she expressed appreciatively. For four years, Carly worked on the planning of new facilities and the execution of integrity and reliability upgrades to upstream facilities that produce oil and gas offshore, while Matt identified drilling targets and planned production wells for a large offshore gas development. The newlyweds completely uprooted their lives in America, moving even their furniture to a rented apartment near Kuala Lumpur’s city center, where they lived for the first two years. Both of their offices were within walking distance, so they never had to drive to work (or sit in traffic like in America). The initial culture shock, however, was immediate. “The various cultures that coexist in Malaysia were striking for us when we first moved there. There are three major ethnic groups – Malay (historically from Malaysia and the majority are Muslims), Chinese (Buddhist or Christian), and Indian (Hindu). The cultures coexist but also keep cultural elements of each of their backgrounds intact,” she reflected. “There is a really great mix of food, religion, and art from three major regions. There are significant differences among them, but yet they live there together and are relatively peaceful. That was a culture shock to me; I expected it to be more homogenous.” Social norms are different in Malaysia, and it took Carly a while to adjust to the unspoken rules. “As a woman, you do not stick your hand out to shake, some men will refuse. It’s not considered rude, but their religious and cultural norms are simply different than in the western world. It can make for a few awkward

moments!” she exclaimed. The couple shared a car and would drive on weekends to various destinations within Malaysia or make trips down to Singapore a few hours south of Kuala Lumpur. “Driving is bizarre – there are very few rules. If there is space, you can drive there. Some drivers act like there are no lanes!” After two years, the pair ended up renting a house for more space, when they adopted a Great Dane named Lady. “The culture there is not dog-friendly, and most people in Malaysia haven’t ever seen a dog that big. We were the talk of the town! My tall ginger husband walking a massive dog raised quite a few eyebrows, and a few people just turned and ran,” she laughed. Carly and Matt took advantage of their time in Malaysia and traveled frequently around the region; from exploring the jungles of Borneo and the mountains of Bhutan, to scuba diving and fishing in Komodo Indonesia, to white water rafting in Mongolia, they experienced the great outdoors and all it had to offer. In 2015, Hess extended Matt’s offer for another year, and ExxonMobil accepted Carly’s proposal to stay. “They told me as long as [Matt] needed to be there, I could be there, within reason. Honestly, it’s a huge deal for a company to do that. They have their own internal cost to move me,” she explained proudly. “I think I provided valuable contributions to our affiliate in Malaysia. The company didn’t have to move me there, and I feel very lucky to have had that opportunity. The work I was doing was impactful and valuable to me and to the company.”

Carly hangs out with an elephant in Thailand.

The Reillys moved back to the States this past October, which turned out to be the biggest adjustment the two have had to make in a while. “It actually feels like culture shock trying to adapt back to American culture,” Carly guffawed. Company policy gave the couple temporary accommodations for 90 days (complete with rental furniture), so they have some time to find a place to live. Carly was home in April 2016 for her sister Alicia’s ’03 wedding, and started looking for a house in Houston then. They didn’t find the housing market appealing and made the decision to build their own home. “We have temporary accommodations until April, so all our stuff is in a shipping container in Malaysia. It will get packed and put on a boat to bring over to America, and then it will be put in storage here until we are able to move into our house,” Carly said. “It feels like we are back in college, as our lives are in a bit of upheaval for the next few months.” Although they plan to stay in Houston for a few years, as the price of oil is down and the opportunity to go abroad is not as prevalent, they are definitely not done living and working overseas. For the time being though, she is excited to be relatively close to family after living abroad for so long. Her parents moved to Lake Livingston, which is two hours north of Houston, and Alicia and her husband Rory live only a few minutes away. Carly and Matt visit ancient ruins in Cambodia.

Isla Grace Reilly To add to the fun, the Reillys welcomed their newest addition, a little girl named Isla Grace, who was born in January. Carly plans to return to ExxonMobil after maternity leave, and is hopeful the industry will take an upturn soon, to fuel the next adventure abroad. SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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This photo is of Oña, with the mountain Condor Danzana, in the southern Andean Mountain range of Ecuador. It is a nesting site for two Andean condor pairs, and Bioparque Amaru Zoo’s and the National Aviary’s primary research site for wild Andean condor monitoring.

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ANIMAL HOSPITAL

PRACTICING CONSERVATION MEDICINE IN LATIN AMERICA By Kaitlin Busch Nikki Becich ’09 is pursuing a career that combines her love for birds, passion for international travel, and interest in medicine. A third-year student at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, Nikki is preparing to embark on a career in conservation medicine in Latin America. Nikki credits Sewickley Academy, specifically former Director of College Guidance Mr. Trevor Rusert, with helping her realize her true passion. “Mr. Rusert gave such great college advice. Without him, I wouldn’t have gone to Pomona [College],” she said. “He ultimately helped link me with the mentors who helped me get into veterinary school.” The Academy was a huge factor in connecting Nikki with Ecuador, as were Senior School teachers Ms. Tracy Wazenegger (chemistry) and Mr. John Basinger (mathematics). “Ms. Waz taught an AP environmental science course I took my junior year, and it was the first ecology I had outside a general biology setting. She and Mr. Basinger put together the Ecuador trip that connected me with people I met in 2007 and I’m still working with today, nine years later,” Nikki said. “I am grateful for the experience and for that trip. It led me to realize there is a huge need for both wildlife veterinarians and people to train them in places where illegal exploitation of tropical rainforests and animals is rampant.” “Nikki was always an exceptional student – passionate, engaged, and proactive. Her enthusiasm for knowledge has allowed her to take risks and experience learning in many different ways and many different places,” Ms. Wazenegger said. “Traveling to Ecuador together was amazing; a life-changing trip for both of us, I think! Nikki took in everything while we were there, kept in contact with our guide (who is also a naturalist), and then created her own opportunities for continued growth and learning with naturalists in Ecuador. Her love of learning and her dedication to positive action for animals and the environment continue to inspire me to this day.” Mr. Basinger echoed Ms. Wazenegger’s comments. “We all had such a great time in Ecuador, but she was truly in her element. She was always super excited about identifying and learning about all the different birds and creatures we saw while we were there.” Nikki also spoke highly of her Grade 9 biology teacher Mrs. Lisa Bowman and English teacher Mr. Larry Connolly. “Mrs. Bowman was so pro women in science. She let me take care of her birds over the summer and gave me a copy of Darwin’s travels. She was really influential,” Nikki remembered. “Mr. Connolly introduced me to the Paris Review, and I’ve had a subscription since 2008. I loved English, and I really enjoyed his input.”

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A self-described adventurous traveler, Nikki knew she wanted to go west after high school. She matriculated to Pomona College in Claremont, California, to study biology on the pre-med track. At school, Nikki was working in a lab, raising chickens, and working on the student farm when professor Nina Karnossky stepped in. “We went to lunch and she asked me, ‘Why are you in the basement of a building working on a computer when you should be working in my ecology lab?’ And that was it, she convinced me to work for her lab over the summer,” Nikki recalled. “I applied to the Oakland Zoo and International Bird Rescue Center, and it was there I was first exposed to veterinary conservation medicine. And from that point forward, I haven’t looked back.” The year after her internship at the Oakland Zoo and International Bird Rescue Center, Nikki studied abroad in Costa Rica. There, she had her first taste of field biology and neotropical ecology. Professors Johel Chavez and Alan Masters, through the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), helped her study the bare-shanked screech owl, which turned into a much bigger project then she originally thought. She found 31 of these birds in a habitat they were unknown to be. She was enthralled and inspired by the project and tried to publish her work numerous times. Ultimately, the Journal of Raptor Research and Neotropical Ornithology Journal ruled that the project data wasn’t thorough enough, and more intensive methods were needed to confirm her findings. The project is ongoing. After graduating from Pomona, Nikki worked as a veterinary and field project intern with the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Learning from and speaking with mentors Dr. Pilar Fish, Dr. Steven Latta, and Dr. Robert Mulvihill over that summer led her to her “dream job” the following year: she was named the National Aviary’s first field associate and would travel abroad in the name of the Aviary to make conservation connections for the zoo. She moved to Ecuador in the summer of 2013 to work for the same place that she had visited with her Sewickley peers and teachers seven years prior, Yarina Ecolodge on the Napo River in the Amazon

Rainforest. “That first month was full of adjustments and surprises,” Nikki recalled. She had kept in contact with a tour guide that had been with her Sewickley group, but to her surprise, the guide who had assured her she had a place at Yarina was no longer with the company when she arrived. “I had planned a 3-month internship at minimum with him, but the heads of the company didn’t know I was coming. I found out I was working with 26 men who spoke a language I didn’t understand, Quechua, and their Spanish was limited. They had very different ideas towards women,” she recollected. “The conservation work I wanted to be involved in – trail maintenance, wildlife care, and guiding ecological tours – were not considered women’s work. I had to prove myself. I started in the kitchen, carried bags of rice, and served visitors meals until they realized I knew a lot about birds. Slowly, and thanks to speaking with them, I was able to improve my language to the point where I could befriend and teach them common bird names in English, like the tourists spoke. It was an amazing experience the whole way through, but there was definitely a month of really uncomfortable interaction with my male coworkers.” After her inaugural experience at Yarina, she went on to visit over 40 more wildlife rehabilitation centers and zoos across Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. She worked with confiscated wildlife, grassroots environmental organizations, and biologists researching everything from new species of miniature orchids to the way clearing roads for oil drilling can have large-scale effects on overall rainforest ecology. “It’s transformed the way I see the world and seriously shaped how I’m pursuing my education. I wouldn’t trade that year for anything,” she said of the experience. From the inspiration she received and the need she saw in these centers across Latin America, Nikki decided to pursue veterinary school and applied to Tufts University and the University of California at Davis. She was accepted at Tufts and began her doctorate work in the fall of 2014. While in school, she has helped to fund international training programs for veterinarians that work for the environmental ministry and Ecuador’s wildlife rescue centers. She raised $11,000 in 2013 while she was abroad to build a veterinary clinic for a zoo in the Andes Mountains (Cuenca, Ecuador), and an additional $3,000 this past fall to fund a training opportunity for veterinarians in Andean countries. “The clinic we built still needs more equipment, and the veterinarians need a better education,” she explained. “The level of care and specialization offered there isn’t the same as in the States, and there are not enough residency and internship programs or certified zoos to give a thorough education in complex medicine.” Nikki continues to fundraise for Amaru Zoológico Bioparque in Cuenca, Ecuador. For the past three summers, she has worked at the zoo while working on projects for the National Aviary, especially fostering the collaboration between the Aviary and Amaru as they lead efforts in conservation of Ecuador’s national bird, the Andean condor. The Aviary supports the zoo and sends students to Ecuador. The Aviary has started a breeding program with two mating pairs of Andean condors in Pittsburgh in hopes of creating viable offspring and releasing them into the wild to add to the endangered and dwindling population of condors in Ecuador.

This Galapagos Tortoise was confiscated from illegal trafficking and now has a second chance at life in a naturalistic setting at Bioparque Amaru.

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Nikki and her boss, Ernesto Arbelaez, the director of Bioparque Amaru Zoo in Cuenca, Ecuador, watch Andean condors cliffside at the research site.

Although she was not involved in the Global Studies program at Sewickley Academy, Nikki was passionate about language. She was part of the French and Italian clubs at SA and became fluent in Italian and Spanish in college. “I’ve continued with language studies throughout my life, and it has opened a lot of doors for me and others I’ve been able to connect with. I speak Spanish every day with my colleagues in Ecuador, and thanks to them I have been able to teach medical Spanish to veterinarian students in my class,” she said. “If it were up to me, Spanish and English would be mandatory in every primary school curriculum from Argentina to Canada.” In March, Nikki will take her veterinary oath and partake in the traditional white coat ceremony at Tufts before spending the next 14 months in clinical practicum, where she will do various rotations through vet specializations such as cardiology, wildlife, and zoo medicine. Nikki is expected to graduate with her doctorate in veterinary medicine in 2018. She has an externship in place with Fort Worth Zoo in Texas, where she will get to speak Spanish the entire six weeks. Dr. Carlo Sanchez, the zoo’s veterinarian, has a lot of connections between Latin America and North America, a relationship Nikki hopes to benefit from. “I want to be an educator, as

it makes the biggest impact. Ideally, I want to help improve the standards of veterinary zoo and wildlife education in Latin America,” she said of her post-graduate goals. She is particularly interested in continuing to work in Ecuador. “Ecuador is in such an interesting and volatile political state right now for conservation work, with oil prices dropping, and the country having to shift away from the oil industry. One of the president’s supposed goals is to shift to an ecotourism-based economy like Costa Rica,” she said. “Ecuador has the Galapagos, which is an amazing biodiversity treasure. It is a great country for conservation work, especially with the affinity I have for birds. It is home to 1,976 species of birds. To put that in perspective, there are only 10,000 species of birds in the world, and Ecuador is only twice the size of West Virginia, so it’s a big draw for me.” In her free time, Nikki likes to get outside and birdwatch. She currently has an in-home zoo, as she and her roommate have three cockatiels, a chocolate Lab, a blind bearded dragon, a tarantula, and a whip scorpion – most of which, she made sure to note, are adopted. “The arachnids are actually from a classmate of mine,” she said, as if it were a casual fact to share.

To read about Nikki’s experience firsthand, or see how you can support her efforts abroad, visit her blog at onehealth47.blogspot.com. SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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DR. RON KINSER PILOTS PARTNERSHIP WITH DUKE UNIVERSITY AND

EMPOWERS STUDENTS TO IMPROVE

GLOBAL HEALTH

By: Jerilyn (Carter ’86) Scott, Ph.D. When an opportunity arose to collaborate with a Duke University bioengineering professor in bringing a Global Health course to Sewickley Academy students, the first challenge was to find a teacher willing to take on such an ambitious project. It had to be someone equipped to teach a cross-disciplinary course involving science, medicine, engineering, and world cultures; someone dynamic and engaging enough to attract students to a very challenging, brand new course offering; someone willing to take on the extra work of creating a college-level course; and most importantly, someone who was excited to get down and dirty doing medical assessments in rural villages in Belize with Sewickley Academy students over spring break. One such person came immediately to mind — Dr. Ron Kinser, Senior School biology teacher. The idea was pitched to him gently, with the understanding that it was a lot to ask, but Ron jumped at the opportunity. “I was in love with the idea from the start,” he said.

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Dr. Kinser’s “Global Issues: World Health” class will travel to Belize over spring break to turn their classroom knowledge into real-world experience.

The notion originated with Global Studies Program Coordinator Judy Stewart, who was attending a professional conference when she heard a presentation by Dr. Robert Malkin, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University and the founder of Global Public Service Academies for Health (GPSA). He described GPSA, which allows well-trained high school students to visit underserved Mayan communities in Central America, providing basic health services and education to the local population. Judy knew that it would be a perfect fit for Sewickley Academy students, many of whom have a high degree of interest in global issues, medical and biomedical fields, and community service. “It dovetails perfectly with SA’s Global Studies vision to build positive partnerships while equipping creative leaders and constructive citizens,” Judy said. After extensive discussions with Dr. Malkin to explore whether Sewickley Academy could meet the requirements of his program, as well as whether Duke University’s course could be adapted to meet the Academy’s needs, the first “Global Issues: World Health” course was launched this past fall. The class is based on an undergraduate course offered at Duke. “It’s the same content, the same reading materials, the same pace,” Ron said. “But we ‘Sewickleyfied’ it a bit, adding more discussion and student-friendly technology like video productions, to really make it our own and make it engaging for the kids.” There was room in the course for 18 students, 15 of whom would be able

to travel to Belize in the spring to put their learning into action. Over twice that many students registered for the course in its first offering. The discussion-based classes are led by two students each week, based on the assigned reading. “I just sit back and watch,” Ron joked. “They really take the ball and run with it. The discussions follow their interests.” During the trimester, the students studied topics such as global healthcare systems, interpreting health data, clinical trials and FDA approval, vaccines, and diseases. The discussions focused on issues faced by developing countries, using more familiar countries and systems as a framework. The students also made video productions highlighting topics of special interest to them. “The way that Dr. Kinser taught the course allowed me to learn much more than I have in any other course I have taken,” senior Hailey Fox said. “It taught me so much that I have even been inspired to major in biomedical engineering.” One of Professor Malkin’s professional interests is in the effectiveness of donating medical equipment to developing countries. His research has led him to believe that in many situations, countries are actually being burdened by receiving loads of equipment that is non-functional, requires consumable resources that are unavailable, or that is unusable due to lack of training or infrastructure. The “World Health” students have read his work and debated his theory in class. In addition to studying global health issues and learning the hands-on medical skills that they SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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Juniors Will Nocito and Antoinette Heil take Grade 4 student Brooke Busatto’s vitals during the health fair.

Sophomore Sydney Larsen checks Grade 4 student Julius Ascher’s hands to see if he washed them properly to kill all the germs.

will use in Belize, each student chose a biomedical device to study in depth. They created video presentations to share their work with other students. “I love this course because it’s so different from the lab courses that I usually do,” explained Ron. “It’s just so student-centered. It’s a good model for service learning in the context of curriculum that students will actually use, both now and in the future.”

we’ll need.” Once in Belize, Ron, physics teacher Mary-Jo Shine, and the students will stay with families in a Mayan village while conducting health screenings and interventions under the supervision of the GPSA fellows. In the meantime, they practiced their medical skills by holding a health fair at school. Students and teachers from all over campus came to have their blood pressure taken, heart rate calculated, and height, weight, and temperature recorded. Fourth grade visitors to the fair were fascinated by a handwashing clinic the “World Health” students conducted, using handheld ultraviolet lights and a black lamp to show where germs had been missed after an inadequate washing. The children were also a willing audience for lessons on nutrition and healthy food choices. These skills will be put to use bringing basic medical care and education to villages that otherwise might not be served at all.

Ron is the perfect teacher for this course because the excitement of introducing students to science in tangible, hands-on ways is what led him to teaching in the first place. He was finishing his doctoral work at Dartmouth College, on track to become a molecular biologist who would spend his career in a lab, when he became involved in an outreach program to a high-needs rural high school. He discovered by accident that he loved teaching. “We were doing a project on mercury in the local water. The kids loved it, and it just hooked me,” Ron said. “I got them excited about doing science, and they got me excited about teaching.” Having found his true passion, he never made it to that research lab. Sewickley Academy offered him his first teaching job. “I loved biology - I figured that would be my guide. I sort of just dove right in,” Ron said. Five years later, he is even more passionate about sharing science with his students. His lab is full of projects in progress, including vials of fruit flies and trays of lace-winged ant larvae in various types of soil. “I use the different soils to teach about variables. These guys are so cool! You have to see this!” ... and he’s off, running outside to gather ants from a strategically placed goldfish cracker just outside the Oliver Science Building. “People find this a little strange,” he laughs, dropping the newly gathered prey into the trays of larvae, showing off the larvae’s hunting techniques with the same contagious energy that he brings to the classroom every day. “But I love getting the kids excited about this. Isn’t it amazing?” All of this energy and enthusiasm is now bringing the “Global Issues: World Health” course to life. “We’ve skyped three times so far with the medical fellows we’ll be working with in Belize,” he said. “And we’re learning the medical skills

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Ron’s willingness to tackle the challenges of such a unique course and the partnership with GPSA has made it a smashing success. “Dr. Kinser’s class has been my favorite class that I have taken in all of my Sewickley Academy academic career,” junior Antoinette Heil said. “This class is different from a typical high school class in difficulty and in content. It has taught me real life skills related to the medical field.” Ron agrees that the students have risen to the challenge, as he knew they would. “This is why our students do so well in college - they’re basically in college now,” Ron said. “Experiences you’re lucky to get at the undergraduate level, they’re getting in high school.” That will never be more true than it will be in March, when Ron’s students spend their vacation working one on one with patients in rural Belize, putting their learning to work in the service of others. Thanks to Ron’s passion and vision, they will truly be putting their hearts, minds, and hands to work in amazing ways.

Sewickley Academy’s Early Childhood Goes Global By: Karen DiMaio This past fall, a large map was placed on the wall in the Early Childhood building. It is a place where children and families stop to learn, inquire, and build relationships and is surrounded by photos of students and crisscrossed with red and black yarn. The purpose of the map is to inspire children to begin thinking globally and build meaningful relationships between families by prompting discussions around common ancestry and places of birth. In early December, we invited Early Childhood families to record information about their child’s place of birth and country or countries of ancestry on a large world map. Parents worked with their child to string black yarn from the child’s photo to the city of their birth, and red yarn from the child’s photo to a place representing their ancestry. Black and red were chosen because they are Sewickley Academy’s school colors. Recognizing that a child is part of a community, and that our families have sometimes traveled far to land in the spot where they live today, is essential to his or her development. Additionally, the project supports an overarching focus of learning the context of social situations and relationship building. In order to develop those relationships, it is critical to cultivate a supportive community of friendly learners. To this end, we craft and participate in many activities, which allow us to get to know one another in ways that are both meaningful and easy for young learners to understand. Children routinely share information and photos of their family, and parents lead cooking experiences, help with science experiments, and chaperone field trips. The process of stringing yarn on our map generates conversations between parents and children that strengthen their relationships. Many children enjoy comparing their ancestry and places of birth and noticed features of the world map that led to further investigations about countries and cultures.

The map project fosters the natural curiosity young children have about cultures and countries different from their own. Recently, the Kindergarten students investigated Canada, Mexico, Ghana, and Pakistan. They were interested in discovering the food, clothing, transportation, and traditions of these countries. Three families – one with ties to Ghana, one with ties to Pakistan, and one with ties to Italy – shared the culture of these countries with the students. The Kindergarteners were delighted to learn about their friends’ cultural ties and were inspired to research these countries through Google Earth, maps, globes, books, and folklore. Young children love to learn about themselves. They slowly extend their view of the world to include families, their class, their school, the wider community, and, finally, the world. The map project highlights the developmental thinking process that characterizes children’s progressive awareness of self. It brings their egocentric view of themselves and their family to the larger global community in a concrete, interactive, and visual way. It helps children make meaning of their world. In our ever-changing global environment, connections between countries, cultures, families, and children become more important each day. PreKindergarten and Kindergarten students wonder about the world and their counterparts in different countries. These “wonderings” provide powerful opportunities to strengthen the relationships that support learning and develop globally aware, informed, and caring students.

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Workers rebuild the Shikharapur School in Nepal after the devastating earthquakes in 2015. The Rumkini Foundation helped to fund this project.

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ANSWERING

THE CALL TO SERVE By Kaitlin Busch Janie Weber ’17 has always been attracted to international work and service, passions she developed through watching her older sisters, Sarah ’12 and Margaret ’14. All three Global Studies Certificate students, the Weber women have dedicated a part of their lives to empowering women and communities in impoverished parts of the world. “Global Studies: A Call to Action,” taught by Ms. Vanessa Villalobos and Mrs. Jessica Peluso, and “Half the Sky,” written by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, shattered Janie’s view of the world. “I knew women in third world countries are oppressed in education, health care, and jobs, but the class taught me the magnitude at which education can help families out of poverty,” Janie reflected. The class watched a video called The Girl Effect, which goes through the series of events that girls go through in many developing countries. Impoverished girls with no education are likely to marry and have children by the age of 14, and in order to support their families, they may have to sell their bodies and, thus, contract HIV. The video then goes on to suggest a solution to this problem: putting these girls into educational systems that protect them. “The Girl Effect helped me to understand the power of education that many Americans take for granted. I wanted to shed light on this issue because without this class, I would not have realized what a need there is for advocacy of these women.” Janie got involved with the Rukmini Foundation, whose mission is to improve the lives of underprivileged girls in Nepal by empowering them through a holistic program of quality education, supportive mentoring services, and a physical well-being program, the spring of her sophomore year. She learned about the foundation and its cause through Margaret and Senior School history teacher Ms. Michael-Ann Cerniglia. “I helped my sister host a Chipotle fundraiser dinner back in 2014 at Sewickley Academy, and from there, I decided I wanted to be involved with the organization,” Janie said. She started running the foundation’s Instagram account that summer, and hosted a fundraiser dinner and talk from Bibhuti Aryal, the Rukmini Foundation’s founder, at the Sewickley Presbyterian Church in October 2015, where she raised over $1,000 to help fund the earthquake relief efforts in Nepal.

Janie volunteers as a teacher’s assistant for Summerbridge Pittsburgh’s summer program. Janie visits with Rosana in the Dominican Republic. The two became friends when Janie traveled to the Dominican Republic in January 2016. A worker carves Sewickely Presbyterian Church into the Rukmini Wall of the Shikharapur School in Nepal as a thank you. The Rukmini Floor of Shikharapur School in Nepal is a constant visual thank you to all those who donated to rebuilding the school.

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The money raised helped to rebuild the Shikharapur School in Nepal after the devastating earthquakes. As a “token of appreciation,” her name was carved into the Rukmini Wall on the Rukmini Floor of the school, which was completed this fall. “Words cannot even describe how honored I am to be represented on the Rukmini Wall, especially because I feel that I owe them the thanks instead of the other way around,” Janie expressed. Bibhuti wrote Janie a personal email to thank her for her support and sent her pictures of the etching of her name. He wrote, “I wanted to send you our most heartfelt thanks for your support in 2015. After the earthquakes, we were able to provide immediate relief supplies that allowed the hardest hit families to get back on their feet. While the immediate relief was critical, so was the need to rebuild one of our partner schools, Shikharapur – a key educational institution in the area, which was totally devastated by the earthquakes. Luckily for us and the community, we have supporters like yourself that came to our aid when we needed it the most.” Janie also hosted an event on campus last spring to raise awareness about girls’ education. She organized a speaker series with the intention of bringing this issue to light to as many of her Sewickley Academy peers as possible. One of the guest speakers was Bibhuti Aryal from the Rukmini Foundation that she had worked with previously. “I wanted to help the Rukmini Foundation in a kind of different way. I wanted to target students and education versus fundraising because I believe that can be a more powerful way to spark change,” Janie said. Janie also brought in speakers from Living in Liberty, an organization that offers a secure safe house for victims of human sex trafficking, and Girls Hope, a foundation that serves at-risk girls between the ages of 10 - 18 in Pittsburgh. Forty-five of Janie’s peers came to school on a Saturday morning to listen to each organization’s cause, including five of her guy friends. “It was cool to see guys supporting girls’ education, as I see it as a human rights issue, not a women’s issue,” Janie said. Although Janie did not get to travel to Nepal (she hopes to one day), she was able to realize how much she can help without physically traveling to a specific area of impact. “There is so much we can do in Pittsburgh to help in Nepal and other countries around the world, and I think that is a very important message,” Janie said. “My primary goal is to teach younger students the importance of the work of the Rukmini Foundation. I hope that the Rukmini Foundation continues a relationship with Sewickley Academy.” “Janie’s passion for raising awareness about girls’ education is not only remarkable, but inspiring,” Vanessa said. “The confidence with which she conducted herself during the speaker series demonstrated her capacity to be an incredible role model for girls and women, young and old.” Janie served children in the Dominican Republic through a mission trip with the Sewickley Presbyterian Church in January 2016. The group stayed at a compound called Meeting God in Mission and worked in children ministries, leading Vacation Bible School (VBS) in the villages. Because of Janie’s education in the Spanish language, she was able to translate Bible lessons from English to Spanish alongside Maddie Braksick ’16. “We had the locals spell check our work and help us with grammar so we could give a mini-sermon to the kids,” Janie recalled excitedly. “I never thought I’d get this experience, and it was so cool to talk to the kids without a language barrier.” 26

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The experience was very eye-opening, as Janie had met a 15-year-old girl who had a one-year-old son and was pregnant with her second child – both conceived from rape. “Hearing her story was surreal because I was 16 when I was there. I tried to imagine what my life would be like in her position,” Janie said. “Much of her situation is due to the cultural acceptance of this act in the Batay in the Dominican Republic that she was from. This made me realize just how much your origin can impact your situation.” The culture shock started immediately upon landing in the country. The two-hour drive from Punta Cana airport to Meeting God in Mission made New York drivers look tame. “There are no barriers on the road, and the trip was scary. There is immense poverty over there, and the people are willing to do whatever for money, which was sad for me to see,” she reflected. “The compound is fenced in for safety reasons, but that does not stop the Dominicans on the other side aggressively shaking friendship bracelets for us to buy. Children get one meal a day, if that, and the lack of sanitation was shocking. We had to brush our teeth with a big Gatorade bottle filled with filtered water – we couldn’t get the shower or sink water in our mouths.” Janie returned to the Dominican Republic this January with her parents and sister, Margaret. Janie and her mother continued their work with children ministries, while her father worked on construction, and her sister dedicated her time to medicine. Since her freshman year, Janie has volunteered her time to Summerbridge Pittsburgh, a tuition-free, academic enrichment program committed to supporting high-potential, academically-motivated, under-resourced students to enter and succeed in college-preparatory high school programs and attend a fouryear college. She has served as a teacher’s assistant and administrative support for the Super Saturday program as well as an office manager for its summer program. “I have such a greater appreciation for teachers now. It’s really hard to get your lesson plans together and engage and challenge students without being too challenging,” she said of the experience. “Janie has been a steadfast and enthusiastic volunteer for Summerbridge throughout her high school career. Always with a smile and can-do spirit to share, Janie has taken on myriad duties for us: greeting families on interview days, assistant teaching for Super Saturdays, and co-managing logistics for our summer program, to name just a few,” Executive Director of Summerbridge Pittsburgh Rebecca Kurtz said. “We are so grateful for her demonstrated commitment to Summerbridge!” Janie has answered the call to serve since her early teenage years, rendering her as a global citizen. Her exposure to global issues through Sewickley Academy’s Global Studies Certificate Program, her family, and her church has taught her to embrace the saying, “Live globally. Act locally.” Janie credits discovering her purpose not only to her family but also to the Academy. “Without the help of Ms. Cerniglia, Mrs. Peluso, Ms. Villalobos, and my sister Margaret, I would not have realized my passion for gender equality and humanitarian problems in developing countries.”

“There is so much we can do in Pittsburgh to help in Nepal and other countries around the world, and I think that is a very important message.”

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Global Studies Certificate Program Finds Success at Sewickley Academy By: Nataliya Di Domenico and Judy Stewart Today’s young people live in a world that is vastly different from the one in which their parents and teachers grew up. Rapid economic, technological, and social changes are connecting us across the globe as never before. To be successful in this global era, young people need a new set of educational experiences that help them expand horizons from their neighborhood to the world. Global literacy – knowledge about the world, skills to collaborate across boundaries, and values of respect and understanding – is now our new reality. Educators nationwide are increasingly interested in how their programs can help young people grow up globally literate and prepared for these changing times. Sewickley Academy was one of the first schools to recognize the need for a global education and one of the first in the Pittsburgh region to launch a Global Studies Certificate Program in 2011. Since 2011, students have had the opportunity to participate in the Certificate Program and, after successful completion, receive a certificate of recognition, in addition to a graduation diploma, from the Academy. The program incorporates academic and experiential learning components and aims at developing global competence and other 21st century skills. Thus far, 51 students have graduated with a Global Studies Certificate. Two years after the program launched, the Global Studies team evaluated the certificate program’s strengths and weaknesses. The thorough review resulted in the development of a new points-based framework in 2013, which emphasizes four learning domains and creates flexible pathways for students to meet the requirements of each domain while charting a path that allows them to pursue their unique interests. Meaningful work in each of these domains, coupled with reflective practice that speaks to the way students are holistically integrating their work in each of these domains, is at the heart of the four-year Global Studies experience. The four domains are: Global Issues Study, Cultural Engagement, Language Study, and Global Action. Each domain provides a focus for a student’s path to the Global Studies Certificate, two of which are academic and two experiential. While there are minimum levels of accomplishment required in each domain (200 points), students have the ability, once the minimums are satisfied, to delve more deeply into any particular domain as 28 22

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guided by their personal interests. With various possibilities to collect points and complete requirements, students are encouraged to be creative in imagining for themselves a pathway that will be most meaningful and personally enriching. The program’s flexible and accessible nature enables every student in the Senior School to enroll and try the Global Studies field; no particular experience or minimum GPA are required for participation. “Sewickley students don’t only benefit from their own personal travel experiences, but from those of others as well. Every time a student takes part in a global experience, the whole school ultimately benefits,” certificate holder Lilian Traviato ’16 said. “To be surrounded by people who are invested in the world, who have a unique and informed experience to share, is priceless.” Typically, students who join the program exhibit a desire to learn about people, cultures, and countries and demonstrate an ability to handle a range of academic and extracurricular demands. They are viewed as the architects of their experiences rather than passive consumers of experiences designed by others. This means that curiosity, imagination, and a willingness to take personal risks to stretch oneself even to the point of discomfort are qualities that distinguish Global Studies Certificate Program enrollees. These qualities directly align with the concepts of global competence and global awareness. Elements of gamification (points) combined with in-house developed coursework are unique features of the new framework. Two of the Global Studies Certificate domains are academic and provide areas of study, while the other two domains focus on experiential learning outside of the classroom. Global Issues Study offers courses such as “Global Issues: Call to Action,”“Global Issues: World Health,” and “Global Issues: World of Data” that were designed by Sewickley Academy faculty to reinforce the idea that a global citizen has an understanding of how the world works economically, politically, socially, culturally, technologically, and environmentally. These core courses, together with additional offerings in various departments, provide opportunities for students to develop a globally-informed personal identity.

“’Global Issues’ taught me about the importance of not just studying issues but acting to try and solve them,” Matthew Teitelbaum ’16 said. “My work in the class turned me into a doer, allowing me to yield some important results that I am proud of. It also helped me develop a desire for a career in international development, arming me with a unique approach to helping improve developing areas.” Cultural Engagement includes experiences that have a bearing on one’s ability to formulate a globally-informed personal identity but are not classroom experiences. In keeping with the Academy’s mission, these “hearts”-related activities range from semester-long home stays in another country to attending and reflecting on a South-African band concert in Pittsburgh. The intention of this domain is for the student to engage in mutually enriching cultural interactions, both locally and internationally, that will ultimately lead to building positive cross-cultural partnerships. The Global Studies Department offers a wide range of school-sponsored travel opportunities every year. Destinations have included Ireland, India, Russia, Peru, England, and Cuba. Language Study includes any relevant academic experience students undertake as part of a world language curriculum at Sewickley Academy. The intention of this domain is to achieve proficiency in a language other than English to help formulate a globally-informed personal identity. The World Language Program includes four modern languages: Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Italian. Each of the courses qualify as a Global Studies Certificate credit.

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Global Action includes any globally-informed relevant activity that students engage in outside the classroom. These activities speak explicitly to the part of Sewickley Academy’s mission that calls on students to engage their “hands” in the service of a greater good. This domain calls on students to exercise their ingenuity and commitment to the betterment of humanity by creating a selfdirected service learning project. The Global Action domain is unique among the four domains, as it expects the student to integrate not only the other three Global Studies domains but also the three core principles of Sewickley Academy’s mission. Global Action is “hands,” another component of the school’s mission, in action, inspired by “hearts” and informed by “minds.” Students aspiring to build rich, nuanced global identities are encouraged in this domain to determine ways in which their engagement with other cultures can inspire them to give back in ways that they couldn’t even imagine if they were not a Global Studies student. In the spirit of the new Global Studies Certificate Program, it is up to the students and their creativity on how they will engage the Global Action domain. For example, a student who is studying Spanish and taking a literature class in Spanish and a history course about Latin America might be moved to engage in a service learning project in a country in Latin America. Perhaps they have made a connection to a student at a school in Costa Rica through an Academy teacher. The SA student, building a relationship with students at that school, might learn of a particular need the school has. The SA student might then formulate a response to that need with the partnership of the Costa Rican student and propose that response as a Global Action project. Global Studies advisors are available to help students formulate their Global Action projects.

The Sewickley Academy Global Studies Certificate Program is a powerful resource for global literacy and competency, and as such it helps to accomplish the following goals: • Expose young people to in-depth content about global issues as well as cultures, countries, and languages • Provide students with opportunities to develop and use media literacy and technology skills to conduct research and communicate effectively on global topics • Enable social and emotional development critical to cross-cultural communication, understanding, and collaboration • Develop leadership and civic participation by empowering young people to take action on issues of both local and global relevance • Engage students in learning about international possibilities in college and future careers “We need more people in the world who make this continuous effort to practice empathy and mutual understanding. This is why it is so important to expose ourselves to all that is different than us from an early start,” Lilian stated. “Global Studies has allowed me to develop these qualities, to look at the world critically with the grounding knowledge that my perspective of the world is not the only one and to reflect on the evolution of my global awareness through the course of my journey with the program.” All young people deserve the opportunity to learn about world regions and global issues to be able to communicate across cultures and in other languages. This knowledge will make them more competitive in the job market and will prepare them to be successful citizens and leaders in the 21st century.

Expanding SA’s borders A new social studies curriculum was introduced to Grades 4-6 this year with the main goal of shifting the emphasis from content to skills. Using the National Geographic Global Issues materials, units on topics such as migration, energy and water resources, and human rights form the framework for developing skills in communication, literacy, and research. Each topic features case studies which are taken from different countries and are supplemented by historical case studies. For example, the unit on migration includes case studies of internal migration within Mexico and migrant workers in the U.S. as well as a historic case study taken from the transatlantic slave trade era. A significant advantage to this curriculum is its flexibility – as the student population changes each year, the curriculum allows the teacher to choose case studies which will personally resonate and support student identities.

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Sewickley Academy:

A Home Away from Home By: Sarah Walters and Judy Stewart In the fall of 2016, Sewickley Academy began a partnership with Ivy International Group and Holy Family International to serve international boarding students from China. Now in its second year, Sewickley Academy has welcomed five international students from China who are happily calling Holy Family (and the Academy) their home. Holy Family International College Preparatory Program (HFICPP), which began in 2011, is a co-educational high school boarding and academic support program designed for international students who are attending local area high schools. According to Program Director Debbie Gooden, 50 students are currently enrolled in one of seven private high schools, all located within minutes of campus, including: Bishop Canevin, Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic, Quigley Catholic, Seton LaSalle Catholic, Sewickley Academy, St. Joseph, and Vincentian Academy. The students are therefore able to develop friendships with students who attend schools throughout the local community. Â

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Two of Sewickley Academy’s international students get ready to take a Ducky Tour of downtown Pittsburgh.

Holy Family International provides a warm family-style living and learning environment that supports the academic, social, cultural, physical, and emotional needs of the students. “A supportive academic culture is fostered through structured, daily supervised study time with a diverse college-educated staff and supplemented by student tutors from local colleges,” Ms. Gooden explained. “Holy Family International works closely with students in the college application process, helping them develop their personal statements, reviewing college choices, and keeping the students on task to take college entrance exams and meet the application deadlines.” A goal of the program is to “build bridges” between the students’ Chinese culture and American culture. A rich variety of cultural activities are coordinated for the students, including tours of Pittsburgh, visits to local universities and museums, and opportunities to attend musical performances and sporting events. The students also have an opportunity to share their culture by coordinating an annual Chinese New Year celebration which includes traditional food and student musical performances. The event is well attended by students from the various high schools. Community service is required by the students’ schools, and Holy Family International coordinates opportunities for community service that offer an enriching and fulfilling experience for the students. In addition to developing an appreciation of serving others and giving back to the community, the community service program provides opportunities for the international students to learn about the Pittsburgh area.

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Sewickley Academy’s partnership with Holy Family International has enabled students like Kaiyuan (Vincent) Wu, a current SA junior, to experience the breadth of opportunities that often come with studying abroad. One of Vincent’s favorite experiences is his research work with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and graduate students from the University of Pittsburgh on hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer). He acts as their part-time assistant, a position that has propelled his desire to pursue medicine in college. Sewickley Academy’s Director of Equity, Inclusion, and Service Learning LaVern Burton worked with Dr. Dulabh Monga, the father of sophomore Jayvir Monga, to secure the internship for Vincent, an opportunity he is grateful and thankful for. “Through this precious opportunity and wonderful experience, I’ve become familiar with basic medical terms as well as procedures which sort of paves my way to becoming a doctor, a path I know is long and tough, yet eventually rewarding,” he said. Vincent has contributed so much to the Academy community during his time here. In his first year at SA, Vincent ran for Student Council and was elected vice president of the student body. “Sewickley Academy is the place where I’ve discovered my versatility,” he said. “I participate in a variety of school activities, and have enjoyed singing in the chorus, hanging out with my friends, joining different clubs, and most importantly, serving on Student Council.” Senior School Dean of Students Mr. Ken Goleski praised Vincent for being a remarkable student. “He brings a fresh and colorful dynamic to student government, and he takes his role very seriously. Vincent is a confident and mature voice for the students he represents, and he works hard to be a positive role model for the younger students.”

Student Council President Ryan Brown ’17 agrees as he has worked side-by-side with Vincent throughout the year. “Vincent brings endless amounts of enthusiasm and determination to student leadership as a critical problem solver. He approaches every task with a positive mindset and particular care that reflects his consideration for his classmates and the greater Sewickley Academy community.” Vincent has also enjoyed sharing his culture and ethnic background with other Academy students, faculty, and staff, and in particular his presentation to Lower School students during one of the after-school clubs, “Around the World with Friends.” “The kids seemed to be interested in anything exotic – they were so enthusiastic and eager to burrow into my background, my city, and my culture,” Vincent said of the experience. Those students learned a few common Mandarin words (along with their characters), practiced using chopsticks, and listened to Vincent talk about a few of his favorite Chinese landmarks (a panda climbing up the side of a building), dishes (twice-cooked pork and green-peppered chicken), and cultural traditions. “I still vividly remember one of the things I taught them: how to write ‘Vincent’ in Chinese,” he recalled. “They each earnestly copied it on a piece of paper which they handed to me after they finished, waiting for my feedback with utmost excitement.”

Short-term exchanges with schools in England (The Perse School), China (Oingzhuhu Middle School and First High School of Changsha), Australia (Central Coast Grammar School), Spain (John Talabot School) and Germany (ErasmusGrasser Gymnasium) enrich the diversity of the school by bringing international perspectives into the classroom. Traditionally, exchanges have come out of the World Language Program, with the goal of providing an immersive experience for students to practice their language skills in a real-life, school situation. Recently, however, the Global Studies Department has intentionally expanded the scope of the exchanges to make them more of a cultural exchange in countries with languages no longer offered by the Academy, like German, or to add a service component, such as a visit to the Panda Bear Reserve in China. While Sewickley Academy’s short-term exchanges and global trips have been running for years, the relationship with HFICPP is only beginning. In the coming years, the Academy hopes to expand the relationship to include students from many different countries to help our students “live” our core value of community and help them foster a deep understanding and appreciation of our connections with one another and those beyond our borders.

In his free time, Vincent likes to relax, watch movies and television shows, and complete homework assignments. “Generally speaking, I do have some, if not a lot, of free time,” Vincent said. “I like reading books (I have a predilection for romance) – they are, essentially, my spiritual nourishments, playing tennis (there is a court near my dorm), and shopping, either at Giant Eagle or Ross Park Mall.” He loves visiting Pittsburgh staples like Kennywood and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and exploring the town of Sewickley. The transition to America was a welcome one for Vincent as he relished the idea of exposing himself to a new culture with its own set of customs. “I was extremely excited prior to my departure from China, and I looked forward to making many cool friends and learning new things I had never dreamt of,” he reflected. “When I applied to Sewickley Academy, I was told (repeatedly) that it is such an excellent school with a 100 percent graduation rate. I think it is the best school in Pittsburgh, with strong academics and programs, unique visions and values, and a vibrant and diverse community. Therefore, it is not hard for people to imagine my elation when I received my acceptance letter.” Although he has adjusted to life in Pittsburgh, Vincent does miss aspects of his homeland, especially the food. He acknowledges all the opportunities HFICPP has provided him with a grateful heart, including community service and extracurricular activities, but still finds it challenging to find a balance among school work, social life, and relaxation. When he needs to connect and communicate with family and friends back home, he does so via QQ, a social tool widely used in China. The international flavor of Sewickley Academy is also enhanced by the presence of short-term exchange students. This fall, the Arbelaez family hosted Kat Lovegrove, a junior from Central Coast Grammar School in New South Wales, Australia. Kat observed that while culturally there is much common ground between the U.S. and Australia, the classroom environment here is “less lecture-based and more student-led than at home.” Kat said she appreciated learning about American life through the perspective of her immigrant host family. SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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Where Are They Now? Karen Coleman

Larry Hall

Dr. Karen Coleman came to the Academy in 1970 to teach French and for many years led the Language Department as it grew from offering French and Latin to include German, Spanish, and Italian. Her years here also included the establishment of a language lab and several foreign exchange programs which became a staple of the Academy’s curriculum. She retired to Fort Myers, Florida, to care for her mother, who has since passed away. An active volunteer, Karen is a deacon in her church, participating in and even leading certain worship programs. She also continues as a volunteer docent in the lab at the Edison-Ford Winter Estates. After her mother’s death, she took a part-time job at a supermarket bakery. The store is located close to Sanibel Island, and the many foreign tourists afford her the opportunity to speak French.

Larry Hall spends much of his time keeping up with former faculty and students on Facebook, over 1,000 in all. He wishes them happy birthday and delights in their family photos, experiences, and opinions. Because of mobility issues, he is not able to travel to places he’s enjoyed in the past but loves to share the memories of German exchanges, which he initiated in 1978, and student antics from his years as Senior School Dean of Students. Former students come to visit periodically, including a group from the Class of 1995 this past October. Larry still lives on the Mexican War Streets in Pittsburgh where he has had a beautiful row house for many years, filled with memorabilia from his travels. His beagle Polly is great company, and they enjoy his city garden together. Few people may be aware that for years Larry rode every roller coaster he had the opportunity to all over the United States, “collecting” those thrills everywhere he went.

Karen sends warm wishes to past Academy students and friends. “My very best wishes and thanks to all of my past ‘chers enfants’ and to my wonderful colleagues. As a French proverb puts it: ‘Gratitude is the heart’s memory.’”

Larry sends greetings to all and reminds us of the quote that helped him keep his sanity when he was dean, “They’ll get over it...”

THE ALUMNI NETWORK IS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Stay connected to SA wherever you are! • • • • • •

Use the interactive map to connect with local alumni Search for alumni by class year, company, or profession Keep your personal and professional information current Sync with your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts Stay informed with SA news and social media updates Support SA with simple and secure mobile giving

Search Sewickley Alumni Connect in the App Store or Google Play and start connecting today! Questions? Contact Alumni Relations at alumni@sewickley.org.

Anna Singer ’76

Anna Singer ‘76 puts on a one-woman show at Sewickley Academy in the Gregg Family Theater.

Wows as Julia Child The critics said, and the audience agreed, “Anna Singer ’76 was born to play the role of Julia Child!” On Friday, November 11, 2016, in Sewickley Academy’s Gregg Family Theater, Anna sang her way through baking a cake in full view of the crowd, including whipping her egg whites to a frothy mass that luckily clung to the copper bowl she upended over her head. It was a hilarious evening, remarkably presented, to the complicated operatic score written by Lee Hoiby. Well known for her splendid voice in operatic roles, Anna once again delighted the audience with her humor and versatility. Her one-woman performance of Bon Appetit was a special donation to the Mario Melodia Performing Arts Scholarship initiated by Henry Shenk ’74.

Donate today to support the ongoing goal of raising $50,000 for the fund at www.sewickley.org/givenow.

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SA LIBRARIAN TRAVELS TO

Tanzania ON SCULLEY SABBATICAL By: Ruthie Neely

Ruthie encounters napping lions on a safari game drive.

We arrive at our campsite around three in the afternoon. The problem is, at that point in the day, the sun in the Serengeti is so scorching that it is simply too hot to set up camp or start preparing for the evening meal. To fill the time, I read, I observe, I write. I stay as far away as possible from two things: the blue and black flags, which are strung up in an attempt to lure the tsetse flies, and the garbage bin, which doubles as a playground for local monkeys. Finally, it is time to set up camp. I’m sharing sleeping space with a lovely woman from Dublin who is practically a stranger. We eat, use the restroom, and crawl into our tent for the night. The pre-sleeping bag restroom trip is key; if I were to leave my tent in the middle of the night, there’s a good chance I would see two bright eyes shining back at me (beware, a red glare is a predator). It is best to go while it’s still light out. Despite the foreign nature of my situation, I am cozy in my trusty sleeping bag. Perched on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater overlooking the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, I am lulled to sleep listening to the sounds of the blue wildebeest not too far away.

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Ruthie takes a selfie with new friends from Kenya and Switzerland.

I was fortunate enough to find myself in this position thanks to the Sculley Sabbatical, a fund awarded annually to one member of the Sewickley Academy faculty, begun by David and Paula Sculley in 1996. The Sculley family had a serious commitment to the belief that faculty should get out, engage with the world, and be able to bring global experiences back to their students. The objective of the Sabbatical is as open ended as it is precise: to understand other cultures and the problems of our globe through first-hand personal experience via enriching, idiosyncratic travel. I entered the application process focusing particularly on the word idiosyncratic. Sure, I could have applied to go to the great Library of Alexandria in Egypt to secure an obvious connection to my profession, but that wasn’t quite the idiosyncratic trip that was called for. Instead, I found myself pondering more deeply the value I have and the role I play as a librarian at Sewickley Academy. Librarians, essentially, help to access and evaluate information. To do so effectively – to come up with search terms, help with research, offer the right book suggestion – librarians must know a little bit about a lot of things. Awareness of the world in which we live is crucial. I strive to arm students 38

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Locals show their craft in a workspace known for beautiful woodwork.

with the 21st century skills that will benefit them as they leave the Academy, including collaboration, resilience, adaptability, and intercultural competency. I considered what kind of travel would best sharpen and deepen those skills in myself and realized that I wanted to go to a developing country. In order to expand my repertoire of “a lot of things I know a little about,” I chose the developing area I knew least about. Thus, my application to travel to East Africa was born. Keeping in mind the skills I sought to cultivate, I signed on with a group in which I would travel with complete strangers from all over the world. We would partake in “collaborative camping,” participating in rotating groups to do chores, cooking, and camp set-up each day. Meeting in Nairobi, we would set out with a Kenyan driver and guide going south, crossing into Tanzania. Once there, we would camp our way across the Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater, then travel through the foothills of Kilimanjaro, camp in the Usambara Mountains and visit remote villages. Our trip would continue with camping on the beaches outside Dar Es Salaam and the last leg of the journey would take us by boat to Zanzibar to explore beautiful beaches, spice plantations, and the influences of Islam. If sleeping

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in a tent with a stranger from another country in predominantly Muslim areas as a solo female traveler wasn’t going to teach me collaboration, resilience, adaptability, and intercultural skills, then I wasn’t sure what would. We hike through banana and soy fields for hours to reach remote villages where some people are lucky enough to earn $2 a month. On one journey, children from the village opposite the valley of our path saw us and yelled for extended periods of time, “Mzungu! Jambo!” (which translates from Swahili to “Person of European Descent! Hello!”) They call to us out of what seems like sheer joy to welcome guests, different people, and something as foreign as pale skin. Once in the village, we are offered a feast of lentils, beef, potatoes, beans, and ugali (imagine a polenta-like dish). The matriarch asks us to indulge her by participating in the after-meal custom of her village. I am quick to oblige but surprised when she moves out of the hut, gesturing for us to follow. She and two other women sit in the village common area with five-gallon buckets. As they began to rhythmically drum out a beat and open their voices in beautiful song, the rest of the village pours out of the surrounding huts to join in dance. I try at first to stay on the sidelines, to be an anthropologist, but I

am quickly snatched up. Someone ties a piece of cloth around my hips, and I join the circle parading around the musicians. Although I am uncomfortable with my western dance skills next to these women, and I want to shy away, I draw from them the inspiration to dance. These women, me now among them, dance in the beauty of the fact that despite so few tangible possessions, through the power of community, there has been a full meal and enough joy and love to start a mid-afternoon dance party. I don’t think I’ve ever danced with my neighbors at home.

This photo captures the stunning view from the Usambara Mountains.

Traveling is growing your knowledge base, learning things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. Some of it is factual: I learned about animals in the Serengeti, tribal social structures, how to dress on a Muslim beach, and histories of spice plantations. Some of the learning is cultural: in an embarrassing exchange with our driver, Rama, I learned that he wasn’t being cute and making a Lion King reference when asking if I wanted to go see Simba but that simba is Swahili for lion. More than anything, traveling reinforces the critical idea that there is no one right way. And as we teach students who are increasingly more connected to people outside of their immediate cultural group, socioeconomic status, and education level, we must continue to emphasize this: there is no one way. There is no wrong way. There is no better way. There are just different ways. The resourcefulness, adaptability, and resilience I saw demonstrated through my travels should be what our students aspire to.

A local artist from a village known for painting shows off his work of art.

One of the reasons I became a librarian was for the breadth of knowledge I’d be exposed to on a daily basis. In hopes of satisfying my intellectual curiosity, I interact with nearly everyone and every discipline on campus. Intercultural competency is a necessity in a diverse role like mine, from making sure all groups are represented in our literary collection to working well with different personality types and understanding cultural norms and sensitivities. I was honored to be a recipient of the Sculley Sabbatical. It enriched me as a person, helped me to understand others, and exposed me to cultures of which I was sincerely unaware. I believe this rare opportunity made me a more diverse person, a more globally aware teacher, a more knowledgeable librarian, and an overall better resource for Sewickley Academy. I am sincerely grateful.

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FLAT PANTHER

SNIP IT, SNAP IT, & SUBMIT IT Cut out Flat Panther and take him along with you as you travel around the globe, taking pictures of you as you go to show your Sewickley Academy pride. Submit your pictures via email to Alumni Relations at alumni@sewickley.org. Follow the Panther as he travels around with alumni, students, parents, and friends of the Academy on the Alumni Facebook page.

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Hansen Cup Recap The 11th Annual Hansen Cup Memorial Golf Outing took place on Monday, September 12, 2016, at Allegheny Country Club on one of the most beautiful days of the season. The committee raised more than $51,000 this year, which directly benefits a current student by awarding him or her the W. Gregg Hansen Memorial Scholarship. Seventy-two golfers enjoyed lunch on the terrace and had the chance to purchase raffle tickets for the silent auction. The 18 foursomes teed off with a shotgun start at 1:00 p.m. After an exciting round of golf, guests enjoyed a buffet dinner and cocktails on the patio. Head of School Kolia O’Connor opened the evening with remarks in regards to the importance of this fundraising event for students. He turned the floor over to Jeff Lenchner ’77, who originally founded the golf outing with Gregg Hansen prior to his passing. Jeff spoke about his ties with the Hansen family and thanked everyone for their participation. He then announced the 2016 Hansen Cup Champions.

Jim, Jonathan ’95, and Jeff D’Antonio and Todd Edmunds take home the Hansen Cup, winning the tournament with a score of -16!

Congratulations to the 2016 Hansen Cup Champions Jonathan D’Antonio ’95, Jim D’Antonio, Jeff D’Antonio, and Todd Edmunds with a score of -16! Second Place Winners were Chris McCrady ’90, Paul O’Neill, Blake Ruttenberg, and Lance Ruttenberg. Third Place Winners with a scorecard playoff were Ben Rovee, Rich Morrison, Nick Domachowski, and Aaron Thomas. A special round of applause goes out to the Hansen Cup committee – Jeff Lenchner ’77, Mike Riordan, Sharmon Beech, Bill and Melissa Marks, Tim Hastings ’77, and Win Palmer – as well as our wonderful sponsors! Seniors Declan Hickton, Jason Li, Ryan Gex, Joey Straka, Natalie Wei, junior Brianna Milo and sophomore Tatum McKelvey represent the Sewickley Academy golf teams at the Hansen Cup.

Sewickley Academy’s 12th Annual Hansen Cup Memorial Golf Tournament

u s fo n io

September 11, 2017 | Allegheny Country Club

To register or for more information visit: www.sewickley.org/sahansencup SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA â&#x20AC;¦

SUMMERBRIDGE TO SEWICKLEY ACADEMY By: Brittnea Turner

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Imagine the first time you stepped foot in a vehicle of any kind, that vehicle is transporting you to another mode of transportation you have never been on, an airplane, which will ultimately take you away from almost everything you’re familiar with. After boarding a plane in Kenya and making several stops along the way, you cross the Atlantic Ocean, ending up thousands of miles away from your homeland in a foreign country. That journey wasn’t just a figment of imagination, it was the beginning of one Sewickley Academy student’s voyage to America. Ali Mganga ’18, a native Somalian born in Kakuma, a refugee camp right outside the borders of Sudan and Kenya, came to America at the age of six and a half. In 1998, Ali left Somalia with his family, including his parents, brothers, and sisters. In an attempt to find safety, many of his relatives left as well, fleeing to the nearest safe place. They were all separated en route to Kakuma. Fortunately, he reunited with many of his relatives at the refugee camp, although a few were never seen again because his parents didn’t know where their journey ultimately took them. His family, part of the Somali Bantu group, didn’t have a choice but to flee the country as they were being chased out of their homes due to the ongoing Somali civil war and the persecution of the Somali Bantu community. The Mgangas fled during a time when the Somali Bantu people were persecuted for not being people of true Somali content and culture. “The group [afflicting the Somali Bantu people] would be considered true Somalians,” Ali elaborated. [Historically,] our people were captured from mostly Northeast Africa and then later sold into the slave trade in Somalia and other countries, such as Asia, during the Arab slave trade.” After several years in Kakuma, the Mgangas were relocated to holding areas which prepared refugees to be transferred abroad to adjust to the American lifestyle and understand day-to-day technology, like learning how to use the kitchen, operate lights, etc. Ali and his family came to America in 2004. “The process of coming here was a bit long and time consuming,” he recalled. “We were placed in a specific living area right outside the refugee camp for disease testing, medical testing, and the like just to make sure we were fine to travel and come to the United States.” The family’s transition to the States was very hard and tedious. Ali and his family knew minimal English, and the only thing they knew about America was that it was supposed to be a better place – a place of freedom and opportunity, a place of safety. They had a liaison named Nancy who was a part of a very strong support system, including tutors and groups such as the Catholic Charities, here in America that helped them with basic things like applying for citizenship and dialing 9-1-1 for emergencies. These factions helped the family get accustomed to their new life, which made their acclimation a bit easier and placed Ali’s parents in classes to learn English. “The only thing we could say in English was what we were taught to say in the camps which included how to say, spell, and write our names, birthdays, and place of origin because these were the [answers to the] questions that we were asked almost everywhere we went, like when we wanted to apply for tutoring.”

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When asked how he would describe American culture and his concept of it, Ali said, “Unlike the African culture where everything is always set, laid back, and expected to be very traditional, I think the American culture is a lot more free. In Africa, kids were always expected to work in the field in which their parents worked. For example, since my dad was a farmer I would also be expected to be a farmer and run the many acres we owned. The normal age to start helping out was around seven. Girls would normally do chores, take care of the younger children, and help out during harvest season,” Ali explained. “For the most part, Americans can choose their occupations based on their own desires and aspirations, and children don’t have to follow in their parents’ footsteps.” “In Africa, we saw the American culture and life as the common aspiration, but I think this changed after spending a couple years in America, ” Ali admitted. “For my family and our Somali Bantu community here in America, I think we struggle to keep our culture alive and to not be influenced by the American culture to the point where kids forget where they are coming from.” At times, embracing their culture while living here has been complicated due to terrorist attacks and national headlines. “We came here just a little bit after 9/11. When we learned about the event, our parents became scared of what the general population would think about us, considering the fact that we were Muslims,” Ali disclosed. “[Initially] we were welcomed here, and we felt that it was bad enough we were kicked out of our home country. [After 9/11] we did not feel very welcomed here, but overall we were still happy that we were in America because the danger in Somalia was far greater.” At the time, Ali was a young child and said he didn’t think too much about the attack on American soil as he went to a very respectful school and his parents kept him very close. “I didn’t know much about America, but I knew a lot about the horror from where we came from.” He said the females in his family found it harder to adjust in public. “Their head-scarfs (hijab) and attire made them stand out, and my sisters always came home complaining about how other kids were talking bad about how they talked and dressed.” One of the things that surprised the Mgangas the most in America was technology. “Nowadays things such as computers and even cell phones are simple, easily attainable devices, but besides my dad, the rest of the family knew nothing about the technology prior to moving here. We didn’t even know what a computer was,” Ali said. He also had never seen a vacuum. In Africa, Ali was accustomed to using a broom. “When we learned that there was a tool that could pick up messes around the house, we were very shocked by its existence and its efficiency.” Ali said the education system in Somalia is limited to those who are most fortunate. “I believe that education is not as valued in Somalia as it is in many other countries in and outside of Africa. This is mostly because at the time, education was the least of our worries. None of my parents or descendants had gone to school or pursued an education until reaching Kakuma.”

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Juniors Ali Mganga and Jarrod Frost work on an assignment together in class.

Flashback to Summerbridge 2012: Ali is pictured with his math teacher Ellen Murray.

The first school Ali attended was Snowdrop Science Academy, a private parochial school in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, from kindergarten through fifth grade. He attended the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA) for a very brief two weeks before transferring to Arsenal Middle School, a Pittsburgh Public School, for three years. “The transition from Snowdrop to CAPA to Arsenal was very weird because of my surroundings and the people. The people were very different and came from all types of backgrounds and financial living styles,” Ali remembered. “At first, I had a hard time fitting in because I was already accustomed to the social environment of Snowdrop. The school work at CAPA and Arsenal was actually a lot easier to me compared to what I was learning back in Snowdrop, so my educational transition [to Sewickley Academy] was not a concern at all.”

“I remember when Ali interviewed to join Summerbridge. He impressed us all with his single-minded determination to succeed academically,” Executive Director of Summerbridge Pittsburgh Rebecca Kurtz recalled. “But he also made an immediate connection to Sewickley Academy. Roaming the halls of the Middle School on interview day, he was in awe of the space – clearly indicating the bounty of resources available to students here. He made it clear that day that not only did he want to join Summerbridge but he for certain wanted to go to Sewickley Academy.”

Ali forged a relationship with Sewickley Academy through Summerbridge Pittsburgh. Summerbridge Pittsburgh is a tuition-free, academic enrichment program committed to supporting high-potential, academically-motivated, under-resourced students to enter and succeed in college-preparatory high school programs and attend a four-year college. The program also inspires the next generation of educators by encouraging talented high school and college students to pursue careers in education or youth-service. Summerbridge Pittsburgh has been a program of Sewickley Academy since 1993.

Although Ali is glad to be here, he has faced several obstacles. Adjusting to the Academy’s eight-day PANTHERS cycle and class schedule, finding a group of people with commonalities to befriend, and code switching – alternating languages and/or modifying behavior, appearance, etc. to adapt to cultural and social norms – has been challenging.

He heard about Summerbridge through his sixth grade math teacher at Arsenal and the Pittsburgh Scholars Program, of which he was a part. He successfully applied and enrolled in the program that summer. “Summerbridge means a lot to me mostly because it became the first support system for me in my transition from a Pittsburgh Public School to a private one. So, in a way, it’s my second mother,” Ali said. “Ever since my first year at Summerbridge, I felt like the program prepared me for the next upcoming school year; whether it was understanding Algebra II, improving my reading and writing skills, or taking a fun English elective.”

The program has helped prepare Ali for high school and propelled him on his journey to college. In 2014, thanks to his Summerbridge connection and academic pursuits, he joined the Sewickley Academy student body in Grade 9.

In spite of these challenges, Ali has found a group of friends at the Academy that he truly feels comfortable with and has embraced getting a Sewickley Academy education, which means hope for Ali. “Hope that I one day can become someone. Someone who has been educated and who has been living proof that a Somali Bantu kid can grow up to be more than just a fisher or a farmer,” Ali stated. “For both me and my family, a Sewickley Academy education [means] overcoming being more than just a Muslim-African living in America, but rather one who has done something with his life. I am very fortunate to be here.” One of Ali’s favorite things about the Academy is the community, staff, and teachers. “I think they are what makes Sewickley Academy a great school and unique community,” he said. School Counselor Lynn Sanborne has had the pleasure of watching Ali navigate his way through the Academy since she makes it a point to connect with Summerbridge students. “Ali has been brilliant about availing himself of

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resources during his time here. He struggled a bit with Spanish because, while he speaks several African languages and learned English through English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction over the years, it was challenging to take on another language. But he utilized his advisor, who happens to be a Spanish teacher, worked with a peer tutor, and has made phenomenal strides. This is just one example of his dedication and work ethic,” Lynn noted. “I’ve also been so impressed by how he manages to balance all of the demands of his academic work with athletic engagement in soccer and track in addition to his commitment to his local Somali Bantu community. Ali is the ‘go to’ guy in his community for all things computer and spends up to 20 hours a week helping folks out with their computer issues.” Ali and his academic advisor, Mrs. Eva Kidwai, an immigrant herself from Cuba, often share stories about their initiation into American life. “Although our native cultures are far apart, we share many similarities as immigrants – from being surprised about the intensity of celebration for a birthday, to the high level of importance given to sports both in American high schools and colleges,” she said. “We have found many tidbits of life to talk about, many of which involve the amount of dependence that immigrant parents have on their children. Children learn the language and the culture much more quickly due to their exposure in school.” As Lynn shared, Ali has navigated through immigration documents, home rental forms, job applications, as well as banking issues that arise, among many others. His evenings and weekends are spent very differently from the way the American student population spends theirs. On the academic front, Eva has watched Ali grow and become acclimated to the Academy’s culture quite well. “He will graduate fitting the profile of a Sewickley Academy graduate. He has had his struggles, but his greatest strength as a student is that he takes ownership of his learning and has no hesitation in taking the steps necessary for improvement,” she said. “He is committed to doing his best and dedicating the time necessary to maximize his learning. These are qualities that Sewickley Academy helps students hone and that Ali has embraced as a natural part of his work ethic.” Since making a home in America, Ali hasn’t been back to Somalia or Kenya, but he hopes to go along with his dad someday. (His father hasn’t been back

to Somalia yet, but has visited Kenya and Eastern Africa.) He and his family still feel connected to Africa. He’s been working with people and organizations that support Kenyan and Somali Bantu communities both here and in Africa. The Somali Bantu families in Pittsburgh have formed their own community, as they live very close to one another and are able to continue their cultural practices and feel as if, in a small way, they are still back home. Ali currently lives in Brighton Heights, one of the northern communities in the City of Pittsburgh. “We have adapted to the American culture, but we also keep our traditional weddings alive, as well as rituals. For example, much like the Hispanic Quinceañera, we have our own celebratory ritual which females undergo around the ages of 14 and 15,” Ali explained. “We also have community meetings, which are gatherings for both children and parents, and they [discuss] many different topics such as how to improve education for upcoming refugee families. I feel like I have assimilated very well, but there are many things I still do not know about America, and every day I learn something new. My family is also very comfortable with the American society, and I think my mom might be the only person that struggles a bit due to the differing cultural expectations of women, but she improved a lot from when we first got here.” Looking ahead to Ali’s senior year at Sewickley Academy, similar to most of his classmates, he is nervous and scared about entering another new territory or phase of life, but he is prepared to approach both situations with open arms and with a positive mindset. He would like to study biotechnology and nuclear engineering, ultimately entering into the career field of science and technology as an engineer. If that doesn’t work out, he’d like to pursue medical school. Ali has come a long way during his journey from Africa to America and from Summerbridge Pittsburgh to Sewickley Academy. Yet he doesn’t feel qualified to give advice to other immigrants because people come from all different backgrounds and have different experiences and reasons for immigrating. Ali did however offer a small note of encouragement for those going through a similar situation. “A person who immigrates here should know that they should not stress about fitting in because in time it will come naturally as America is a place filled with diversity and acceptance. Instead, they should focus on something that matters to them and take advantage of the education system provided here.” Ali, Sewickley Academy and Summerbridge wish you well in all of your future endeavors!

Mogadishu

Somalia is located on the far east corner of Africa (on the map it is shaped like a horn). The people that live in Somalia are Somalians, the majority of who are Sunni Muslims. The languages spoken in Somalia include Somali, Somali Bantu, and Arabic. Somalia has a president and prime minister; it is governedby a federal republic government. Somalia’s capital is Mogadishu.

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1. The Class of 1971 celebrates its 45th reunion. Pictured: Tom Forrest, Virginia (Booth) Morrow, and Paul Kappel. 2. Fuller Ross, Mimi Ross ‘81, and Charlie Ross ‘76 are all smiles at the Oktoberfestthemed gala. 3. The Class of 1976 celebrates its 40th reunion. First row: Liza Thornton, James Nicotero, Suzanne (Genter) Friday. Second row: Patty (Cook) McCarthy, Charlie Ross, Debbie (Scioscia) Schloesser. Third row: Mary Odom, Graham Sullivan, Caroline (Roberts) Wentling. 4. The Class of 1981 celebrates their 35th reunion. First row: Mimi Ross, Chris Nard. Second row: Patty (Feldmeier) Heppenstall, Suzanne Masri. Third row: Molly HaysJette, Nancy (Kennerdell) Lawrence, Frances (Moyles) Fisher. Fourth row: Diana Ring, Don Spalding, Jenny (Smith) Findley, Fifth row: Karin “DeeDee” (Swenson) Simpson, Judi (Snow) Keim, Leslie Lewis, Carolee Bull. Sixth row: Jay Baldwin, Greg Nicotero, Bill Stevenson. Seventh row: John Harrison, Christina Sheil, Meghan (Toth) Strubel, Tom Doyle. Eighth row: Andy Falk, Tom Benzing, Mary Jean (Foy) Bretton, Bob Hensley, Tina (Mucci) Robakiewicz.

5. David Oliver and Malinda (Whalen ’86) Newman catch up over cocktails. 6. Frances (Moyles ’81) Fisher, Matthew Fisher, and Karen Nard reminisce over years past. 7. Matt Bartlett ’81, Tom Doyle ’81, Chris Nard ’81, Greg Nicotero ’81, and Don Spalding ’81 enjoy a few laughs from the good old days at SA. 8. The Class of 1986 celebrates its 30th reunion. Front row: Jeff Smith, Christine (Scioscia) McLean, Malinda (Whalen) Newman. Second row: Trish (Elliott) Marcrum, Bobby Gordon.

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REUNION WEEKEND

REWIND SEPTEMBER 30 – OCTOBER 1, 2016

3 Reunion weekend kicked off with the induction of Beth (Richardson ’60) Clements, better known as the author Beth Gutcheon, into the Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame on Friday, September 30, 2016. Returning alumni from the classes ending in “1” and “6” gathered in the Hansen Library for a festive Oktoberfest-themed gala with craft beers and seasonal fare. Cheers to the class of 1981 which had the best turn out. During tours of the new Events Center, alumni were amazed by the impressive new facilities available to current students.

Saturday morning brought alums to campus for additional campus tours and a very intriguing panel presentation by two invited guests, Dr. Carolee T. Bull ’81 and Dr. Jeffrey Smith ’86. Dr. Bull, a world leader in research on organic and sustainable crop production, bacterial taxonomy, biological control of plant pathogens, and phyto-bacteriology, talked of the essential work she has done through the years in the “salad bowl” of the Salinas Valley, California, particularly with diseases involving lettuces and greens. She is currently head of the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology at Penn State University. Dr. Smith, founder and president of Brighteyes Design & Manufacturing and assistant professor at Diablo Valley College, described the innovative curriculum he developed for high school and college students that integrates hands-on instruction in skills from the building trades with textbook mathematics and science principles. Dr. Smith was recently hired through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop a new industrial design program within Diablo Valley College’s Engineering Department, where he has also fostered strategic “design challenge” partnerships with Brita Water and Specialized Bicycle Company. The day concluded with individual class parties that were informal and warmly received by all. Special thanks go to the organizers and hosts for their hard work in making these gatherings such happy occasions.

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9. The Class of 1996 celebrates its 20th reunion. Pictured: Samantha Musher and Tom Brown. 10. Caroline (Roberts ’76) Wentling and Jim Nicotero ’76 happily reunite at the event. 11. The Class of 2006 celebrates its 10th reunion. Pictured: David Bevevino, Jacquelyn Gibbons, Allison Quinn, and Paul Kappel. 12. Members from the class of 1981 pose for a picture during dinner. 13. Jean-Philippe Fillettaz and Carolee T. Bull ‘81 are happy to be in the presence of her old Academy friends. 14. This year’s party favors included a Sewickley Academy beer stein and a school-spirited chocolate covered pretzel.

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Save The Date! Reunion Weekend: October 6-7, 2017

Celebrating Class Years Ending in ’2 and ’7

The weekend will include: • Athletic Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony • Reunion Celebration for all classes • Individual Class Parties …and much more! For a full schedule of events and to register, visit www.sewickley.org/reunion. Questions? Contact Director of Alumni Relations Susan Crawford at scrawford@sewickley.org or 412-741-2231. 44

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Author Beth Gutcheon is Inducted into the Distinguished Hall of Fame By: Kaitlin Busch Beth (Richardson ’60) Clements, better known as the author Beth Gutcheon, was inducted into the Sewickley Academy Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame on Friday, September 30, 2016, in Rea Auditorium. The ceremony opened with the singing of “America the Beautiful,” followed by the Senior School chorus’ rendition of “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods. Dr. Susan (Ratcliffe ’55) Sour provided a captivating history of the Academy on Founder’s Day, taking the audience on a journey from 1838 to present day. Head of School Kolia O’Connor then welcomed Beth back to her alma mater and presented her with a plaque, symbolizing her induction into the Hall of Fame, an honor she graciously accepted. “I wish I could tell you how deeply unlikely this morning would have seemed, to me or anybody who knew me, when I was in fifth grade,” Beth said during her remarks to an audience full of friends and former classmates, as well as current students, faculty, and staff. “It’s an honor to be here, although a seriously daunting one. Work changes you, and novelists spend almost their entire working lives alone in silent rooms, which makes an occasion like this feel sort of like attending a party while facing a firing squad.” Born and raised in Sewickley, Beth attended the Academy through Grade 9 and graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Her passion for writing, however, started in the fourth grade when her homeroom teacher Mr. Alden Sector took the whole class into town on the bus to see the movie Ulysses, based on Homer’s “Odyssey.” “I remember being particularly excited to see how the filmmakers were going to handle the part when the Sirens sing to Ulysses,” Beth said, reflecting on the pivotal moment when she learned what screenwriters actually do. “The Sirens don’t sing [in the movie]; they call to Ulysses in the voices of his wife and children whom he hadn’t seen in 10 years, and Kirk Douglas goes mad, yelling for the sailors to cut him loose so he can throw himself overboard. I learned that day, and remembered, that what screenwriters do is not so much write as solve narrative problems, which looked like fun.”

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Movies sparked her interest, but she didn’t have the desire to write them. In fact, she didn’t want to write at all; she wanted to read. “You can’t read for a living unless you also write, and I became a writer right here,” Beth stated. She talked about writing compositions every Friday in fifth and sixth grades, and although none of them were particularly of note, she said that her class slowly learned that “the more words you can use accurately, the more things you can think about with finesse, and most of all, we learned that there is a writing muscle.” Beth turned from “writer” to “novelist” in Grade 8 when Marion Hutchins started her class on Dickens, having them read “David Copperfield” and then write their own autobiographies. Beth matriculated to Harvard where she earned an honors degree in English literature. “Miss Hutchins had set the hook, so in college, when I was allowed to design a course for myself, I read all of Dickens one spring semester. The book that finally turned the light on was ‘Great Expectations.’ I found it absolutely absorbing and exhilarating but an inexplicable artifact, like watching real life except it moved faster and was much funnier,” Beth recalled vividly. “But when I came to the ending, which stunned me although it is pointed to on the first page, I suddenly saw how you do plot. You start with the ending. You have to know everything about where you’re going and what it all means before you begin. And then you have to keep readers from seeing where you’re going until you want them to see it. And this can be done by ordinary mortals who put their pants on one leg at a time.” After college, Beth worked briefly in the editorial department of a Boston publishing house before moving to New York’s SoHo district where she worked freelance in the arts throughout the 70s. She wrote her first novel, “The New Girls,” in 1978. Her second book, “Still Missing,” told the story of 7-year-old Alex Selky who lived in New York City. He kissed his mother goodbye and set off for school, a mere two blocks away, but he never made it there. The book became the critically-acclaimed film Without a Trace. Critics described the story as, “Haunting, harrowing, and highly effective … a stunning shocker of an ending … it strings out the suspense to the almost unendurable.”

Beth also produced screenplays like The Good Fight starring Christine Lahti (Chicago Hope) and Terry Quinn (Lost) and the Academy Award nominated The Children of Theatre Street, a documentary about Russian children in training for the Kirov ballet. Beth was commissioned to write screenplays with and for Paul Newman, an adaptation of “Domestic Pleasures” for Sally Field (MGM), and an adaptation of “Where or When” by Anita Shreve for Barbra Streisand (Tristar), among many other studio projects. She shared a memory of Paul with the audience during her acceptance speech.

Beth has written 10 novels to date, including “Five Fortunes,” “Saying Grace,” “More Than You Know,” “Goodbye and Amen,” and “Gossip.” Her novel “Leeway Cottage” tells one of the most stirring stories of World War II - Denmark’s courageous grass-roots rescue of virtually all 7,000 of the country’s Jews from Hitler’s regime. Her latest book, “Death at Breakfast,” is her first entry in a stylish and witty mystery series featuring a pair of unlikely investigators, set in small-town New England. It is being compared to Agatha Christie’s work for its intelligence and wit. In addition to writing books, Beth has contributed to New York Magazine, Savvy Magazine, The New York Times, The NYT Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals. “Writing is lonely and boring and anxiety-provoking when you’re nine and when you’re 70 and if you enjoy it you’re probably doing it wrong,” she said of her profession. “But the more you do it, the more it becomes a tool that you own and it will be useful no matter what you end up doing with your life.” Beth’s vibrant, witty, and inspiring speech came to a close with a few words of wisdom for current students. “In real life you don’t know at the beginning where you’re going or what it’s going to mean, but I can tell you one thing for sure, you are not waiting for your real life to begin; this is it. You’re in it,” Beth said in her final remarks. “It’s not quite true that everything I needed to know I had learned here by ninth grade, but it’s a lot closer than I would have guessed, when I was sitting where you are. I am incredibly grateful to this school, and honored to be here, and I thank you all for giving me the chance to say so.” The Distinguished Alumni Award was created by the Sewickley Academy Alumni Council in 2001 to honor alumni who have demonstrated the highest standards of achievement, leadership, and service that represent the enduring principles of Sewickley Academy.

Call for Nominations

“One day I was on a flight west with Paul Newman, a movie star I’d written a screenplay with who’d been a huge Hollywood star for decades. Easily the world’s sexiest man for about ten years running, if they’d had that designation back in the day,” she recalled. “When we got to LAX his agent met him with the keys to a new Porsche he’d just bought. The world’s sexiest man said, ‘Come on, Gutcheon, I’ll drive you to your hotel.’ So we zoom up to the entrance of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the valet parkers are falling all over themselves, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Newman. Can I take your bags, Mr. Newman?’ And Newman says, ‘No, I’m just dropping off my friend.’ And for the whole rest of my stay the hotel staff was going nuts trying to figure out who I was, that I had Paul Newman for a chauffeur. You’ve never seen such service!”

2017 SPORTS HALL OF FAME

The Sports Hall of Fame is presented to an Academy alumni athlete, coach, or athletic director who has distinguished himself/herself in athletics at Sewickley Academy and must have gone on to further distinction in college or beyond. Those achievements should include national recognition in college, including becoming an All-American or reaching significant milestones on a college team that is one of the top teams ranked nationally in their division. Eligible coaches must be from those who have served the Academy for a minimum of seven years and who have been outstanding in their commitment to the development of fine athletes to represent the school. Please submit your nominations for the prestigious honor to the Alumni Office at www.sewickley.org/hof. Tim Appleton ’73 Maury Brassert ’49 Ridge Diven ’67 Coach Kate Dresher Scott Fetterolf ’76 Sarah (Grenert ’00) Funk Maria Gaydos ’84 David Gibson ’58 Shelley (Harris ’96) McRae Tim Hastings ’77 SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

Christi Hays ’70 Tim Kaiser ’91 Gloria Lozano ’00 Hal Partenheimer ’74 Athletic Director Stan Partenheimer Steve Partenheimer ’68 Ben Powers ’89 Coach Joan Schenerlein Whitney Snyder ’79 Carol (Semple ’66) Thompson | WINTER 2017

ACADEMY ATHLETES SIGN WITH ELITE COLLEGES By: Kaitlin Busch Four Sewickley Academy seniors have committed to college athletic teams for the 2017-18 season. The Academy hosted an Athletic College Signing Ceremony for seniors Grace Guerin, Griffin Mackey, Ben Mulholland, and Luke Ross on Friday, November 11, 2016. All athletes signed a letter of intent, accompanied by his or her parents and coach, in front of the Hall of Fame in the brand new Events Center.

Grace Guerin

Griffin Mackey

Grace chose to attend Lafayette because she wanted a small campus in a college town with a rigorous, strong academic program. “The Lafayette campus is always full of life, and everyone supports the sports teams,” she said. “When I found out that I would be continuing lacrosse at Lafayette, I was so excited. It was so surreal – it took a while to realize it was actually happening.” Grace will join her older sister Kayla ’15 on the field in Easton, Pennsylvania, next year. “I’m excited to play with my sister again. We work really well on the field together, and she is a role model to me because she works so hard and is constantly improving.”

Griffin knew he wanted to go to Dartmouth after he visited the campus in Hanover, New Hampshire, his junior year. “I fell in love with Dartmouth, and my goal was to be able to run in college,” he said. “I feel very fortunate to have been recruited to run both cross country and track at an Ivy League school. Because of the small size of the school, almost 25 percent of the students are Division I athletes.”

Cheryl Lassen, Grace’s lacrosse coach at Sewickley, praised her dedication and hard work as a student-athlete. “Grace not only focuses on improving her individual skills, she also focuses on strategies to improve the team. She has always been team player – she makes sure each player feels like she is an important part of the program, whether she is a strong, experienced player or new to the sport,” Cheryl said. “Her skills, work ethic, and athletic abilities will make her a valuable contributor to the Lafayette program.” Grace will major in biology in hopes of attending medical school. 52

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Coach Derek Chimner ’04 credits a large part of the cross country team’s success to Griffin. “He has dedicated his life to become one of the best runners in the state. Through his four years on the team, he has helped build and shape our cross country program as the unquestioned leader of two WPIAL Champion and PIAA Runner-Up teams, as well as the 2015 PIAA Individual Champion,” Derek said. “I am beyond excited for him to attend Dartmouth in the fall, as it will bring him together with other like-minded individuals who will continue to push him. It is a fantastic school for him to begin a post-high school athletic career.” Griffin plans to major in history and political science.

Seniors Grace Guerin, Luke Ross, Ben Mulholland, and Griffin Mackey celebrate signing with their college of choice in front of the Athletic Hall of Fame in the new Events Center.

Ben Mulholland

Luke Ross

Ben is excited to matriculate to Washington and Lee, a small liberal arts college in Lexington, Virginia. “I wanted to be in a place that offered a strong curriculum and also had a competitive lacrosse team,” he said. Lacrosse sticks were a staple in the Mulholland household, as Ben’s dad also played lacrosse. “When Coach McCabe gave me the opportunity to continue my lacrosse career as a General, I was beyond excited,” Ben said. “I always dreamed of playing in college, and I am able to do that at an academically competitive school.”

Luke thinks Georgetown is the perfect fit for him, both academically and athletically. “The coaches and players on the team are great, as is the school’s location in Washington, D.C. It’s a great feeling to know I’m able to continue playing tennis at a higher level,” Luke said. “I have put countless hours into training and playing, and my parents have invested so much as well, so it’s great to see all that hard work pay off.”

Tim Hastings ’77, Ben’s lacrosse coach, relies on Ben to run the Panther’s offense during matches. “Ben is an outstanding leader and player, one who can take over a game. He is disciplined on the field and makes great decisions with the ball,” Tim said. “In his career, he has 85 goals and 39 assists for a total of 124 points. Plus, he has 116 ground balls, which means he isn’t just doing the scoring; he is willing to get down in the mud and do the dirty work. He is a complete, multi-dimensional player.”

“Luke is an absolute class act,” Coach Whitney Snyder ’79 said. “He’s worked extremely hard, and it’s nice to see him rewarded on a national level for all of his tremendous commitments to the game. It’s an honor to coach him.” Luke is undecided about a major but plans to follow the pre-med track to eventually become a physician.

Ben plans to study chemistry and biology, as he wants to become a pediatrician.

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FALL SPORTS

WRAP-UP By: Win Palmer The boys soccer team won its seventh WPIAL Championship this season and was the runner-up in the PIAA Championship.

The girls soccer team finished their season at 7-10-3.

The boys golf team captured the Section Championship and won its fourth straight WPIAL Championship this season.

BOYS SOCCER The boys varsity soccer team competed in Hershey for the PIAA Championship for the fifth consecutive year and captured its seventh WPIAL Championship. The Panthers finished the year with a 21-5 record, capturing a fifth consecutive Section Championship with a 12-0 record. In the playoffs, the Panthers demonstrated clutch play, winning five of the eight games by one goal before falling to Camp Hill in the PIAA Championship game 4-1. Earning honors for the season were seniors Paul Chropek, Tommy Lasorda, Ben Mulholland, and Mike Napoleone, who were selected to the All-Section Team. Tommy, Ben, and Mike were also selected to the All-WPIAL Team, and Mike was selected as Player of the Year in the Section. Tommy, Mike, Ian Deihle, and Derrick Littlefield were selected to the Roaring 20s Team by the Beaver County Times.

GIRLS SOCCER

The girls golf team finished second in the section and third at the WPIAL Championships.

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The varsity girls soccer team finished the season with a 7-10-3 record and third in the section with a 4-3-3 record. In the WPIAL playoffs, the Panthers defeated Beth Center 3-0 as sophomore Theresa Wilson posted the shut out in

goal, and senior Grace Guerin scored two goals and junior Olivia Ryder scored one. The Panthers fell to perennial power Greensburg Central Catholic 5-0 in the next round. Olivia was selected to the All-Section Team and to the Roaring 20s Team by the Beaver County Times.

BOYS GOLF The boys varsity golf team captured the Section Championship by finishing 12-0 and 18-2 overall. SA captured its fourth straight WPIAL Championship through another balanced effort that saw seniors Jason Li (74), Ryan Gex (76), and Declan Hickton (77) lead the way along with juniors Will Nocito (79) and Peter Curran (81) to establish a new WPIAL scoring record with a total of 387. In the PIAA Championships, the Panthers finished second to Lancaster Catholic despite breaking the previous state scoring record with a total of 319 led by three seniors Jason (74), Ryan (79), and Declan (79). In Individuals, Jason finished second at the WPIAL Championship and capped a brilliant career with a fourth place finish at states with a two-day total of 150. Ryan and Will also qualified for the state finals as individuals, where they finished 29th and 12th respectively.

GIRLS GOLF The girls varsity golf team finished second in the section with a record of 10-2 and 12-4 overall. The Panthers finished third at the WPIAL Championships at Cedarbrook golf course with a score of 376 led by sophomore Tatum McKelveyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s score of 83. Tatum became the first girls golfer to advance beyond the WPIAL Individual Championship as she finished second in the Western State Qualifier with a score of 76 at Tomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Run to advance to states, where she finished 11th with a two-day total of 180 on the difficult Heritage Hills golf course.

CROSS COUNTRY The boys varsity cross country team advanced to states for a third consecutive year with a third place finish at the WPIAL Championships. The Panthers were led by senior Griffin Mackey, who capped an incredible career with a fourth place finish at WPIALs and a tenth place finish at states despite missing much of the season due to injury. Fellow senior captain Ben Clouse missed the entire season due to injury. At the WPIAL Championship, the Panthers were aided by strong performances from junior Austin Duffield (18:32), junior Sam Casale (18:37), junior Jared Washington (19:05), and senior Leo Harper (19:53).

FIELD HOCKEY After playing the past few seasons shorthanded for games or even the entire season, this year witnessed a tremendous growth in the

program as 18 players formed the roster. Playing with a young roster with a large number of freshmen, the Panthers finished 3-8-1 in the section. Senior Chandler White was selected to the All-WPIAL Field Hockey Team as a goalie.

GIRLS TENNIS The varsity girls tennis team captured the Section Championship with an 8-0 record en route to an overall 13-6 record. Led by three seniors playing one, two, and three singles in Emily Ward, Caroline Becker, and McKayla Cox, the Panthers finished third in the WPIAL Tournament to once again advance to states, where SA was defeated by Villa Maria in the first round. Emily Ward captured the Section Singles Championship. The doubles team of senior Morgan Recker and sophomore Alina Mattson were Section Doubles Champions.

The cross country team took third place at states this year.

The field hockey team finished the season 3-8-1.

The girls tennis team won the Section Championship with an 8-0 record.

LEARN MORE : ABOUT THE DEDICATION OF OUR NEW EVENTS CENTER ON PAGE 60

Congratulations to all of our sports teams on a great fall season!

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AF AD

Making a

STRONGER school

When you support the Annual Fund, you are helping to build an environment rich in opportunity for all of our students. You make it possible for our school community to become stronger every day. Thank you! Give today at sewickley.org/givenow

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ALUMNI HOCKEY GAME RECAP “FANdemonium” was in full effect at the 10th Annual Alumni Hockey Game on Wednesday, November 23, 2016, at Robert Morris University Island Sports Center, where the “Young Gun” team took on the “Slightly Older” team. Many alumni and their families produced a strong turnout, thanks to event organizer Grade 4 teacher Louis Pessolano ’97. It took a while for the goals to begin to pour past Sewickley’s skilled net minders – Nick Batyko ’00, Josh Ciccone ’01, Dan Solter ’00, and Hayden Moyer ’13 – as the case in previous years. The 2-1 score at the end of the first period only hinted of more on the way. The Young Gun team had two important goals by Grady Moyer ’14 to take a commanding lead over the Slightly Older team. Grady happens to be an unlikely source for goals, as he surpassed his grand total for goals as an active varsity player during the alumni game. Deciding to switch defensive coverage after this early onslaught, the Slightly Older team went to work with goals by Ken Atwell ’08, Danny Sponseller ’11, and Ben Brozanski ’06, the younger brother of Brian Brozanski ’03 who had to miss the game due to actively serving the United States military in Asia. The much needed goals brought the score to within a goal, and with the goalie pulled, the Slightly Older team was able to tie and score a go ahead goal to win. The game-winning goal came all the way from Austria, as Jakob Hoetzl, an exchange student in 1996, in his second alumni game, was able to find a hole on goalie Hayden. After the dust settled, the Slightly Older team was able to limp away with a wellearned 10-9 victory.

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1992: 25th 1997: 20th 2002: 15th 2007: 10th 2012: 5th

Confetti cannons shoot red, black, silver, and white streamers into the crowd as the ribbon is cut and the building is officially dedicated.

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DEDICATES NEW STATE-OF-THE-ART EVENTS CENTER By: Brittnea Turner On Tuesday, November 22, 2016, the entire Sewickley Academy community – students in Grades Pre-K through 12, parents, administrators, faculty, and staff – gathered together indoors for the first time in recent history in the brand new Events Center and Means Alumni Gym. The state-of-the-art building is a LEED certified, multi-purpose space, which now serves as the centerpiece of the Academy’s commitment to building community. People entering the Events Center were greeted by the SA Panther and the Class of 2017, who passed out custom pennants designed to commemorate the occasion. The dedication festivities kicked off with music from the Academy’s Jazz Band as the community entered Means Alumni Gym. Head of School Mr. Kolia O’Connor shared opening remarks about the significance of the occasion intermixed with reflections on the season of Thanksgiving. “During this season of Thanksgiving, we as a school, have so much to be thankful for, and this new facility is certainly among those things for which it is proper that we give thanks,” he said. “Today marks the first time in the recent history of our school that we are all gathered together inside where we can celebrate our school and our community. Where in the past we have had to exclude one division or another or gather outside under the blazing sun, today and going forward, we now have a facility that allows us to come together in fellowship and celebration in comfort and safety from the elements.” Mr. O’Connor went on to thank individuals and organizations that “supported and guided our plans to create a place where we can all come together to celebrate what a remarkable, dynamic, and unique community this is.”

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John Means ’71, Nancy (Sproull ’72) Means, Thomas Hewitt, and Ryan Brown ’17 get ready to cut the ribbon as Head of School Kolia O’Connor declares the Events Center officially dedicated.

Members of Sewickley Academy’s Athletic Hall of Fame Tim Appleton ’73, Carol (Semple ’66) Thompson, Whitney Snyder ’79, Christi Hays ’70, and Tim Hastings ’77 stand for recognition during the ceremony.

Grade 7 students Olivia Park and Ashley Glabicki are all smiles next to Flat Panther.

Sewickley SAcademy’s Jazz Ensemble kicks off the dedication ceremony with familiar music as the crowd EWICKLEY SPEAKING | WINTER 2017 enters the gymnasium.

The Jazz Ensemble prepares to play the Academy’s Alma Mater to end the ceremony.

Features of the New Events Center and Means Alumni Gym: Grade 1 students Chanse Sipes, Austin Fritz, Auden Cerniglia, and Lauren Purpura are all smiles with the Panther.

• Indoor celebration venue large enough to accommodate the entire school community • NCAA regulation-sized basketball court that can be divided to accommodate two high school-sized basketball courts Seniors Ciara Donohue, Ben Mulholland, and Justin Pryor show off their school spirit with the Panther.

Sophomores Lekha Amin, Simi Shetty, Sarina Sandhu, and Alina Mattson show their Panther Pride with a giant Flat Panther.

Special recognition was given to Director of Buildings and Grounds Tim Hastings ’77 and Plant Manager Rich Bialowas. The two were critical players in working with the contractor, Mosites Construction, and Project Manager John Kearney, who skillfully managed the construction process. Mr. O’Connor thanked Jonathan Glance ’93 who was the architect on the Events Center. “[His] beautiful design rendered the dreams we had into drawings that our contractors so skillfully brought into existence,” he told the captive audience. Marty McDaniel, who recently retired as the manager of Edgeworth Borough, and his successor, John Schwend, also attended the ceremony. Thomas Hewitt, Finance Chair on the Board of Trustees, echoed Mr. O’Connor’s appreciation to all who contributed to the project and praised him for his visionary leadership. Nancy (Sproull ’72) Means shared stories of her time as a student at the Academy and, as the girls golf coach, how she’s looking forward to using the new facility with her team. Student Council President Ryan Brown ’17 tested the acoustics when he asked everyone to make some noise to see what it could sound like on game days. Students cheered and stomped their feet in thunderous excitement. As the dedication neared its end, Mr. O’Connor made closing remarks and thanked Mr. Nathan Bell, Mrs. Vanessa Candreva, Mr. Matt Griffin, Mr. Tim Heavner, Mr. Joe Jackson, Mr. Ben Spicer, and Ms. Patti Coyne Stine – the committee who put together the program. Tom Hewitt, John ’71 and Nancy Means, and Ryan Brown took their places at the ribbon and Mr. O’Connor said, “And now ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the moment you’ve been waiting for: the cutting of the ribbon.” On behalf of the Board of Trustees and the faculty, staff, and students of Sewickley Academy, he declared the Events Center and the Means Alumni Gym open. When the ribbon, which was elegantly hung across the gym floor between two basketball hoops, was cut, it triggered a set of motions forcing a basketball to drop through each hoop onto a target that set off two cannons bursting with red, black, silver, and white streamers high into the air. The assembly concluded with the audience singing the Academy’s Alma Mater.

• A space for new program offerings, such as Tai Chi and yoga • A spacious fitness center and a core training room to expand physical education offerings • Opportunity for increased team fitness workouts, stretching routines, and core body development • Multipurpose space for meetings, testing, or classes • Offices for athletic and physical education staff and coaches • Athletic trophy cases and Hall of Fame exhibit • Separate locker rooms for Middle and Senior School boys and girls; visiting team locker rooms and officials changing rooms • Training facility expansion with state-of-the-art equipment • Two team meeting rooms with video review capabilities • Indoor individualized instruction areas for baseball, softball, boys and girls lacrosse, and golf SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

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Alumni Holiday Party The Alumni Holiday Party was held at the Edgeworth Club on Friday, December 23, 2016. A record crowd of alumni, who represented seven decades, gathered to reconnect and celebrate in the beautifully decorated festive surroundings. Kudos to the Class of 2011 who had a particularly good turnout to celebrate their fifth reunion! The consensus from returnees was that the date closer to Christmas, when many were home to celebrate the holidays with family, worked really well. Families were encouraged to come together - parents and alumni - a new tradition that will hopefully grow through the years. Cheers to a happy and healthy 2017!

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1. Kaori MacWilliams, Mark MacWilliams ’70, Dr. Ram Dhawan, Mr. Jim Cavalier, and Harry Kammerer ’70 celebrate the holidays at the Edgeworth Club. 2. Brad Busatto ‘88 and daughter Kate ’16 attend their first holiday party together as alumni! 3. Willie Paul ’16, Dr. Ron Kinser, and Stephen Klemash ’16 catch up at the event. 4. Meredith Doyle ’12, Chrissy McGinn ’12, Emma Deihle ’12, and Olivia Marsh ’12 pose with Flat Panther in front of the Christmas tree.

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Alison Thompson ’95

Ground Control

to Major Thompson By: Brittnea Turner Alison Thompson ’95 has traveled abroad, oftentimes without setting foot on the ground. From high up in the air, she helped navigate planes in the United States military. Alison graduated with the Class of 1995, said farewell to Sewickley, and headed off to further her education. She began her college career at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro as an education major with the intention of teaching high school history, and then transferred to the University of Arizona as a criminal justice major with plans to attend law school someday. She ended up joining the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) – a path she (or her peers at Sewickley Academy) never foresaw. A self-described stubborn and somewhat unruly girl, the military wasn’t a natural option, but as the saying goes, love changes everything. “Honestly, I joined [ROTC] because of a guy. He was in the military already and we were going to get married. The initial classes for ROTC were about Air Force life, and a lot of spouses or fiancées take these classes because they’re kind of an intro to Air Force life, what you can expect,” she said. “It [the class] clicked with me. I really liked it. I didn’t get married, but I went in to the military.” Alison didn’t have plans to be an aviator. Her new goal was to do four years of service and use the G.I. Bill, which provides educational assistance to members of the military, to earn an advanced degree. A month before she graduated she was offered a “nav” (navigation) spot to go to Undergraduate Navigator Training and she said yes, a decision that has forever changed her life. In 2000, Alison graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in criminal justice, and that very same day she was commissioned as an officer in the Air Force. She went directly to Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for “nav” school, now called combat systems officer training, where she learned how to instruct pilots on where to navigate the planes. From there she went to Altus, Oklahoma, for KC-135 training for air refueling, and began her first official assignment at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia on September 10, 2001, one day before 9/11. “I couldn’t get back on base for three days. The day that 9/11 happened every base across the country went into lock down,” Alison recalled. Cars had to be thoroughly searched, and the

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lines to get into her base were hours long. She stayed in touch with her unit and used the time to find a place to live. The lock down lasted approximately two weeks as the military planned its response to the attacks. Shortly after 9/11, Alison deployed on her first mission overseas to the Middle East. “I had an excellent crew, and I learned a lot. I learned that sand can get in all sorts of things and places you don’t want it in,” she laughed. She completed several deployments to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Cyprus, Turkey, Spain, South America, and flyovers of Ireland, Africa, and Jamaica. She was a part of a very special deployment, the first of its kind as a member of the first allfemale combat flight crew to Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan. “It was in the middle of winter and cold. It was so cold, and we were there over Christmas,” she recollected. “I had a lot of fun with the girls. It was the first deployment I went on where there were a lot of women – normally, there were just one or two.” However, the mission almost never happened. The commander was concerned about the consequences if an allfemale crew got shot down. “We just happened to all be all females – two pilots, a boom operator, and a navigator – on the same deployment,” she said. “We begged our commander for weeks to let us do it.” The commander thought a man should accompany the women on the mission. Alison told him, “Well, that’s garbage. Honestly, I can shoot better than the guys who were with us anyways.” Even the public affairs crew, who filmed the mission, were all females. The crew finally convinced him they could do the job, and he said okay. To date, that deployment had the first and only all-female combat flight crew.

debt. She stopped flying in 2014 and is now the group executive officer for the operations group commander. Alison spoke to Sewickley Academy Lower School students during the division’s Veterans Day assembly held on November 11, 2016. She shared video clips from the all-female flight crew’s deployment as well as her other military experiences with the students. “When I came in to give the [Veterans Day] talk to the kids, it was amazing to see how much this place has changed, but the bones of it are still what I remember,” she said. Alison said the military has been a great experience for her. Her longest deployment was 120 days (four months). When asked about her experience of being a woman in the military, she said she has been fortunate. She didn’t encounter the type of sexual harassment problems that the media often reports for women working and living in a male-dominated industry. The military was very accommodating when Alison was pregnant with her son, and after he was born her job allowed steady hours, similar to a civilian’s 9-to-5 work day, so that she could be there for him. In all, Major Thompson has served in the armed forces for over 16 years; 10 years of active duty and over six years with the reserves. She has dedicated a big part of her life to serving our country, and we are all very grateful to her for her service.

In 2005, she left Robbins and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to do test flights on the KC-135. In 2010, Major Thompson left active duty and moved back to Pittsburgh, so she could raise her son, Zachary, with the help of the strong support system of her family members who still reside in the area, including her dad LeRoy ’57 and brother Ryan ’98. She joined the Air Force Reserve as a C-130 Combat Systems Officer at the 911th Air Reserve Base in Moon Township. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, she earned a master’s degree from Robert Morris University in computer information security with no school

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Carol (Byers ’53) Mitsch with her family – Bobby and Logan Cudlip and Carolina, Peter, Byers, Bing, and Barrett Carney – in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, in August.

Maury Brassert says hi to all from the Class of ’49. He is sorry to have missed so many reunions. Maury was inducted into the Academy’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2006 (he is also in the Culver Sports Hall of Fame) and enjoyed his visit to see all that is going on at SA. “I was so pleased to see the Academy doing such a fine job caring for our youth. It is much easier to build a strong child than repair a broken one,” he wrote. “Have a great year and keep up the good work.”

53 Carol (Byers) Mitsch had a wonderful family reunion with her children and their families in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where she lives seasonally.

Margot (Childs ’60) Cheel with her aerial photography printed on canvas, a triptych entitled “Cape Cod Bay Blues,” which was displayed at a recent exhibit in Chelsea, New York City. (In the background is another one of her aerial photos on canvas in the exhibit.)

Nancy (Bennett ’66) Haynes dresses as an ice skater for Halloween.

Jill (Barber ’66) Helmer and Helen (Halcomb ’66) Moriyama have their own mini-reunion during their husbands’ Williams College reunion.

Robertson “Robby” Parkman, M.D. reported, “I have moved from the University of Southern California to Stanford University, where I am presently a consulting professor of pediatrics focusing on the bone marrow transplantation program.” Robby was the second recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Consortium in 2010. He was a professor of pediatrics and microbiology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. He joined Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in 1983 as the head of the Division of Research Immunology/Bone Marrow Transplantation, a position he held until 2002.

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York City. She also introduced her second photo book, “What Do You See? Finding Shapes from the Sky,” a children’s book for all ages. Further information can be found at www.book.margotcheel. com and at the Penguin Bookstore in Sewickley.

62 Nina (Wardrop) Brooks and Frank F. Brooks proudly announce the engagement of their son Daniel Leet Brooks and Cara Rose Daniels of Portland, Connecticut. Daniel Brooks is the grandson of the late Mary Blair and Edmund D. Wardrop of Pink House Road in Sewickley. Daniel graduated from Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Michigan, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. After serving 10 years in the United States Marine Corps – Special Operations Commander with four overseas combat tours, Daniel is now attending Harvard University pursuing a master’s degree in business administration. Cara is a graduate of Mercy High School and the University of Rhode Island. After five years of neonatal nursing both in the U.S. and Africa, she is now attending Johns Hopkins University pursuing a master’s degree in public health. A July wedding is planned in Kennebunkport, Maine.

66 Nancy (Bennett) Haynes won her 2016 Halloween contest at Falcons Landing in Potomac Falls as a reincarnation of herself a half century ago as a skater. Jill (Barber) Helmer and Helen (Halcomb) Moriyama enjoyed catching up on each other’s busy lives at their husbands’ minireunion at Williams College in

October. Jill lives in Woodstock, Vermont, and Helen in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

50TH CLASS REUNION

Billie Spencer reported on her trip last summer: “Flat Panther and I vacationed in Spain and Portugal this summer. My itinerary for Spain had to be revised when I discovered that the distances in my hiking guide were as the crow flies, not as I walk in hilly country. It turned into a real adventure! The final week was an AmaWaterways cruise on the Douro River in Northern Portugal.”

69 Niland Mortimer celebrated his 65th birthday with a solo swim across Lake Tahoe, from Cave Rock, Nevada, to the head of Emerald Bay, California, swimming 11 miles in 6 hours, 51 minutes. He can be found swimming in the San Francisco Bay most mornings at dawn. Jack Wickwire is working part-time at Urban College in Boston, Massachusetts, as an English as a second language (ESL) tutor. What had started out as substituting for a tutor on sabbatical became a job for the rest of the semester. “It’s a radical change from design and illustration, but I am enjoying it and a good part of my staying on was from student support.”

71 Bill Colbert and his wife, Lilli, each recently retired and moved to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, after working 35 years in the oil and gas industry. Lilli was the land and contract manager for Merlon International, Inc., and Bill was assistant general counsel for BP. SEWICKLEY SPEAKING

Their older son, Evan, is in-house counsel for a national health and fitness company based in Denver. Their younger son, Ryan, recently graduated from law school and is pursuing career opportunities in Houston. Joanne Groshardt’s latest novel, “Holly Blossums,” takes you back to 1955 when Texas-size color-paranoia prevents a white 12-year-old girl and a black 14-year-old boy from being best friends. God makes it His business to get these two kids together again in the future, in a more kindly time and place. The book is available at amazonsmile. com in Kindle format for $2.99. For each copy sold, $1.00 will be used to buy new shoes for children. The more copies sold, the more likely it will be made into a movie. Joanne hopes the SA community will support this worthy cause.

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45TH CLASS REUNION

Mary Beth (Ribar) Matheson says hello to all! She couldn’t be at the last reunion, but has managed to have mini-reunions on occasion. Dick Stoner and his wife Jen visited her at her home in Jupiter, Florida, in March, and she had a wonderful dinner in Charleston with Beth (DeCourcy) Kitch and her husband Rusty. “We enjoyed lots of laughs!” She is planning to see Julia (Canter) Grimes in Jupiter in January. She talks to Susie (Hawk) Coy regularly. Mary Beth and her husband Ross (of 35 years!) are celebrating 29 years at their restaurant in Juno Beach, Florida, where Jill (Slater) Cummings visits every winter. Hopefully a larger group will gather at the Class of ’75’s 45th reunion! | WINTER 2017

Billie Spencer ’67 and Flat Panther pose in front of the Castel Rodrigo in Northeast Portugal on the Spanish/Portuguese frontier.

Bill Colbert ’71 and his wife Lilli enjoy retirement on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Joanne Groshardt ’71 hopes to garner support from her Sewickley Academy classmates for her latest novel, “Holly Blossums.”

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Griffin Trau, son of Peter ’75 and Debra (Snow ’77) Trau, was named to the 2016 Associated Press FCA 1st Team All-American. Griffin, a sophomore, is the kicker for the University of Richmond’s football team.

Jill (Slater) Cummings writes, “Alive and well in retirement! ‘Snow-birding’ in Florida and still loving Reno in the summer. Hoping to connect with classmates in either location.”

Dr. Jerilyn (Carter) Scott’s daughters are now both thriving in college, which makes her feel both very proud and very old. This summer she got to spend time in Ghana, Africa, visiting her older daughter Laura, who was living in Kumasi for the summer as a medical volunteer. It was especially meaningful for them to be in Ghana because her father, Scott Carter, lived there with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. Laura and Jerilyn visited the school where he taught and brought back pictures of his old house and village. “It was amazing to see his old stomping grounds and also to see Laura navigating life in Africa like she’d been there forever.”

Peter and Debra (Snow ‘77) Trau were proud parents in September when their son Griffin scored the first points of the game at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville before a huge opening day crowd when the University of Richmond defeated the University of Virginia 37-20. It was the first Spider win against the ’Hoos in 70 years (since 1946). Griffin was named 1st Team All-American.

77 82 85 Kemp Fuller ’85 prepares to shoot the championship round at the National Championship in Raton, New Mexico.

Dr. Jerilyn (Carter ’86) Scott visits her daughter Laura in Ghana, Africa.

Scott Riebling ’89 opened Stoked Wood Fired Pizza Co. in Boston. The restaurant was named the best pizza in the city last April.

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40TH CLASS REUNION 35TH CLASS REUNION

Kemp Fuller was this year’s U.S. National Master Class Full-Bore Target Rifle Champion. Competitors from across the U.S. and as far away as Australia met at the George Tubb Range in Raton, New Mexico, in September for the annual championships. Full-bore target rifle is a distinctively British and Commonwealth Nations shooting discipline that evolved from service rifle shooting in the late 1860s. Competitors fire a .308 caliber 155 grain bullet from the prone position in single shot precision using adjustable aperture “iron” sights (no magnification). The “round bull” are at distances from 300 to 1000 yards, with each shot being carefully scored and analyzed.

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30TH CLASS REUNION

Scott Riebling opened a brick and mortar Stoked Wood Fired Pizza in the Brookline area of Boston, Massachusetts. In April, Boston Magazine named them the best pizza in the city! Stoked Wood Fired Pizza was also awarded the best food truck wedding caterers.

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25TH CLASS REUNION

Dan Rudolf and his brother Doc Rudolf started Rudolf Media in 2013 as a mobile and web software development studio. Doc had been working in web development for several years, and Dan wanted to get into software development as well. They moved into their office on Baum Boulevard in East Liberty that winter.

They have been doing a mix of contract work and proprietary work for the last two and a half years, which includes visual design, system architecture, physical development, and consulting/maintenance for iOS/ Android/web applications. They developed an app for a company called Urban Delivery in late 2015 that staffs delivery drivers for restaurants in the Chicago Metro area. “The restaurant gets an order via GrubHub or phone, and they request a driver to deliver it via our app, kind of like Uber or Lyft,” he explained. The restaurant also tracks the delivery all the way to arrival. They employ about 35 drivers who delivered 40,000 orders last year with the app, and the founders then brought them on as an equity partner. Since then, they have been building a second version of the software and rebranding under the name “Deliveree” to relaunch late this year. They have also been building out a location-based food truck app called “Corner Kitchen,” where truck owners check in on maps so their customers know where they are. The app will be ready to launch early next year. Alison Thompson, Pat Brannan, Nicole (Aloe) Keane, Hetal Dhagat and other members of the Class of ’95 and friends gathered for dinner at the restaurant e2 to celebrate their 21st reunion before the East End gem closed for business.

96 Natalie (Gielata) Friel is currently living in Basel, Switzerland, and will be for the next few years, eventually returning to the U.S. Although the transition into the

Swiss lifestyle has had some growing pains, her family has been enjoying the ease of travel in Europe, as well as learning German. Natalie was sad to miss a reunion opportunity for the Class of ’96. “Take care all!”

20TH CLASS REUNION

Amy (Eger) Rice was named to the Jacksonville Business Journal’s 40 under 40 in 2016. She is the assistant vice president of commercial finance for CSX Transportation.

Dan Rudolf ’95 in the Rudolf Media Pittsburgh office.

98 Ryan Thompson and his wife, Jayme, are happily living back in Sewickley with their two sons, Alderman (3) and Hudson (a very precocious one and a half). They keep incredibly busy with family and friends and are blessed to have several family members back in the Pittsburgh area! Jayme is part of the SA family now as the Assistant Director of Admissions, and Ryan is constantly on the go with his various entrepreneurial endeavors.

The Class of 1995 and a few friends enjoy dinner at e2 in the East End of Pittsburgh. First Row: Kara (Yates ’95) Reid, Erin Mader ’95, Vijay Chattha ’95 Second Row: Kevin Park ’95, Jon D’Antonio ’95, Jen (Park ’97) D’Antonio, Marguerite (Gregg ’95) Park, Walter Fort ’95, Sean McLaughlin ’95, Manisha Patel ’95 Back Row: Ben Barnes ’95, Dan Mross ’96, Marco Gruelle ’95, Arash Danaie ’95, Rob “Alex” Alpert ’95, Aaron Smith ’95, Ben Gettleman ’95, Beau Blaser ’95

Allison (Henry) Gilpin had a mini-reunion in California last summer with classmates and their families. Allison and her husband have two daughters and live in Australia where their parents, Reg and Priscilla, now retired, also spend several months a year. Colin Champ, M.D. has written an Amazon number one new release entitled “Misguided Medicine: The Truth Behind Ill-Advised Medical Recommendations and How to Take Health Back Into Your Hands.”

Ryan Thompson ’98, his wife Jayme, and children Alderman and Hudson enjoying the tradition of the Sewickley Hunt on Thanksgiving morning.

Gaetan Pettigrew ’99, holding Ramsey O’Brien, Allison (Henry ’99) Gilpin, holding Tillie Gilpin, Sarah (Lee ’99) O’Brien, holding Lucy Gilpin, and Chris Berger enjoy an afternoon at the Henrys in California.

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Alicia (Koval ’03) Chalmers

An International Love Story By: Kaitlin Busch Alicia (Koval ’03) Chalmers fell hard and fast for travel – her love for experiencing the world first hand ignited during her time at Sewickley Academy and Pennsylvania State University. She studied abroad twice during college, spending a semester in Australia and a Semester at Sea through the University of Pittsburgh, which allowed her to see 10 different countries, including Brazil, China, India, Japan, Myanmar, and South Africa. Alicia graduated in 2008 with a degree in petroleum engineering, a minor in Spanish, a language she first learned from Mr. Ken Goleski, and a minor in global business strategies. She knew she didn’t want to stay in the States and had a plan to find work overseas. “I had the travel bug, so I signed myself up for a company that I knew had opportunities worldwide and I knew I would get to work abroad eventually,” she admitted. While in college, Alicia interned in Alaska with ConocoPhillips, an American multinational energy corporation based in the Energy Corridor of Houston, Texas. She gained a rare opportunity as one of the youngest expats sent abroad in order to gain development experience. Her journey took her to Aberdeen, Scotland, as a reservoir engineer in 2010. “I went to Aberdeen single and young and I really didn’t know anyone at all. It was a really big challenge to overcome and I feel like I came out on top of it,” she reflected. “I understood myself and the world better, and it was an amazing experience.” Alicia had some assistance with housing once in Scotland but had to live alone due to company policy. She bought her own car, a manual, which she had to learn how to drive at the same time as learning to drive on the left-hand side of the road. “At first, it was a lot all at once. I was stalling in the middle of a main street on the way to make and meet new friends,” she winced. “I’d get flustered. Every aspect of adjusting to life aboard was harder than expected and it took a while.” Alicia rarely took a lunch while working in Scotland, but on the one day she did, fate stepped in. She saw a handsome Scottish man named Rory Chalmers in the company café. She immediately inquired about him; it was love at first sight. The timing wasn’t right, and the two didn’t go on their first date until

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almost a year and a half later in November 2012. “We were set up by mutual friends and met on a cold winter’s night during the week at a pub for drinks. I almost didn’t go to meet him because it was so cold, but I’m glad I did,” she laughed. “We exchanged numbers and that was it, we were dating immediately.” The pair both knew they wanted to travel the world forever, and together. After living and working abroad a few more years, they relocated to the States in January 2014, buying a house in Houston. The consummate travelers booked a trip to the Florida Keys in May 2015 and returned engaged. The proposal, much like their romance, was anything but ordinary. “We were staying at a fancy resort in Florida, and sometimes when we travel we have an inside joke where we say it’s our anniversary in hopes of getting free stuff. When we checked in, the concierge asked if we were visiting for a special occasion and I said, ‘No,’ and Rory said, ‘Yes, it’s our anniversary.’ She told us she could probably arrange for us to have a private dinner on the beach at sunset, and later I’m scolding Rory because we didn’t agree to lie ahead of time and I thought she was on to us,” Alicia vividly recalled. “We go to dinner and it’s beautiful and I can’t believe we got this dinner setup for free! Of course, Rory had it planned all along and told the hotel ahead of time that I would try to lie and say it was our anniversary. It figures – it was the one time I wasn’t playing along!”

Scottish traditions were apparent throughout the American ceremony. The groomsmen wore traditional Scottish attire (their family kilts), a bagpipe played “Here Comes the Bride” as Alicia walked down the aisle, and thistles, the Scottish flower, were placed on the men’s lapels and in Alicia’s bouquet. During the ceremony, the couple each took a sip of whiskey from a quaich, a little cup often referred to as “the loving cup,” while a Scottish wedding poem was read. Alicia changed into a short dress later in the reception, and her and her husband taught their guests a tradition practiced at weddings in Scotland – ceilidh – a Scottish dance that mirrors country line dancing. “Rory’s aunt was on the microphone explaining the steps, and we gave the music to the DJ ahead of time,” Alicia said. “The dance went on for 45 minutes, even though the Americans didn’t know what they were doing. Some girls broke toes from people stepping on them! Everyone had a great time.” The newlyweds took a delayed honeymoon to Asia in August, sight-seeing and exploring Vietnam, Tokyo, and Bora Bora and rang in the New Year skiing in the Alps. The Chalmers plan to live and work in Houston for the next few years while starting a family and plan to live overseas again when the opportunities at work present themselves. Alicia knows she is one of the lucky ones who not only found her soulmate, but her forever travel companion in Rory.

During the private dinner, Rory talked about how their relationship had worked out so perfectly. He told Alicia he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and got down on one knee to propose. Everyone knew the proposal was coming except Alicia – even the wait staff was in on it! “Rory had it arranged perfectly. Apparently, when I went to the bathroom, the waiter came over to ask if he did it yet and if he needed any ‘liquid courage,’” she laughed. “He had our suite decorated with champagne, roses, and candles for when we returned, it was so sweet.” Alicia and Rory were married on April 2, 2016, at a museum on the lake in Austin, Texas. “The venue looked like an Italian villa, and the ceremony and reception was entirely outdoors,” Alicia said. “I wanted it to feel like the perfect combination of Europe and Texas, and it did.”

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Colleen (Minnock ‘00) Chulis, her husband Matt, and their children Luke (6), Adelle (4), and Declan (2) reside in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Colleen (Minnock) Chulis was recently promoted to vice president of sales at TransPerfect. With annual revenues of more than $540 million, TransPerfect is the world’s largest privately held provider of language services (translation, interpretation, etc.) and technology solutions. Colleen and her husband Matt (associate head men’s soccer coach at the University of Virginia) reside in Charlottesville, Virginia, with their three children Luke (6), Adelle (4), and Declan (2).

Leah (Henderson ’01) Kanner, Dave Riordan ’01, Holly Seifert ’01, Mary Volk ’05, Nick Smyth ’01, Philip McClure ’01 and his wife Celeste, Melissa (Park ’99) Brooks, Rachel Kennedy, Allie (Theis ’01) Dolan, Ariana Smyth, and Ann (Ruscitti ’01) O’Leary meet for cocktails and conversation at the Sewickley Hotel.

Leah (Henderson) Kanner, Dave Riordan, Holly Seifert, Mary Volk ’05, Nick Smyth, Philip McClure and his wife Celeste, Melissa (Park ’99) Brooks, Rachel Kennedy, Allie (Theis) Dolan, Ariana Smyth, and Ann (Ruscitti) O’Leary gathered at the Sewickley Hotel to reminisce about their Sewickley Academy days during Reunion Weekend.

15TH CLASS REUNION

Amy Aloe married her boyfriend of two years, Garrett Gorenski (University of Rhode Island, Class of 2000), in April. A few weeks after their wedding, they embarked on the 2,650 mile long Pacific Crest Trail, finishing in October. They are settling back into their home in Maine now, contemplating their next steps.

03 Amy (Aloe ’02) Gorenski and her husband Garrett stop for a picture by Crater Lake National Park along their journey across the Pacific Crest Trail.

Lanya Snyder ’04 was named the assistant curator of Florida’s Boca Raton Museum of Art’s contemporary art and photography collections in October 2016.

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Mary Grace (Mock) Holt is enjoying her first year living in London’s Notting Hill with her husband, Andy. Mary Grace has returned to the fashion industry, and is working with a UK-based brand called TOAST; Andy works for an investment firm. “We’re

loving the expat community, exploring Europe, and debating politics with the locals.”

Lanya Snyder was named assistant curator of Florida’s Boca Raton Museum of Art’s contemporary art and photography collections in October 2016. She is responsible for collaborating with the contemporary art curator and the curator of collections on the museum’s exhibition program. Lanya joined the institution in January, focusing on growing the museum’s collection of historical and contemporary photographs by establishing an annual photography forum. She said in a press release on ArtForum’s website, “I look forward to working with my colleagues to create a meaningful dialogue between the community and the global art world.”

George Raftis, Ed Stone, Keith Stone, Artie Wood, and Derek Chimner ’04 reunited on Christmas Day, as they showed their support for the Black and Gold during a tailgate for the Steelers/Ravens game at Heinz Field.

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10TH CLASS REUNION

David Bonomo was in South America from mid-July until the end of September. He came back to the U.S. for a week to attend Christina Cribari’s wedding and has been traveling around Europe since. So far he has been to Iceland, United Kingdom, France, Monaco, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czech

Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, Vatican City, Andorra, and Spain. He took a month-long Spanish course in Seville in December, and then headed to Australia to celebrate the New Year.

Jack Roberts was a team captain at St. Lawrence University in New York and earned his second consecutive All-American award from the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association (USILA). He was also a two-time Scholar All-American selection. Jack anchored the Saints defense, leading the team with 31 caused turnovers. He was a First-Team All-Liberty League selection earning a spot on the All-Liberty

League team for the third time in his career. He played in the USILA North/South All-Star game, and was an Intercollegiate Men’s Lacrosse Coaches Association (IMCLA) All-Region as well as an Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC) Metro/ Upstate New York All-Star as a First-Team selection from both organizations. He finished his career with 116 ground balls and 77 caused turnovers. Jack started all 17 games last season for the Saints after missing the 2014 season with an injury. Jack is now working for Eaton-Vance, a mutual fund company in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ed Stone ‘05, Artie Woods ‘05, George Raftis ‘05, Derek Chimner ‘04, and Keith Stone ‘05 tailgate for the Steelers/Ravens game at Heinz Field on December 25, 2016.

5TH CLASS REUNION

Turn Yourself In! Here’s your chance to submit a class note for the next issue of Sewickley Speaking. Help us share your milestones and achievements with your Sewickley Academy network!

David Bonomo ’10 visits Iguaza Falls, which is split between Brazil and Argentina, the largest waterfalls system in the world.

We love hearing about impromptu SA gatherings, serendipitous meetings in airports, and all sorts of happy, heartwarming, and hilarious alumni stories. Please submit your story today by visiting our website. If you have a digital photo you’d like to share, please send it to alumni@sewickley.org with a note identifying the people in the photo.

Jack Roberts ’11 now works at Eaton-Vance in Boston after completing an exceptional collegiate lacrosse career.

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Tony Innamorato ’03

The Danger Zone: Disarming Bombs Abroad By Kaitlin Busch “Foot patrol has found a suspicious item in Qalat.” Tony Innamorato ’03 had barely landed in the Middle East for his first combat deployment before the call came in. He went with Eric, the current team leader, a position he would soon assume, to find a cardboard box with a wire antenna next to a house. He used a robot to place a disruption tool, intending to break apart the bomb without detonating it. The bomb went off anyway, along with another one across the street, leveling several houses. Thirty seconds later, as debris was still falling and dust was everywhere, the team leader turned to Tony and said, “Welcome to Afghanistan.” After graduating from the Academy, Tony matriculated to the Naval Academy to pursue mechanical engineering, a passion he developed through Mr. Sean Lally. “We called Mr. Lally ‘Dr. Lally.’ He wasn’t a ‘doctor,’ but he looked like a professional scientist. He wouldn’t just give you the equation of momentum or inertia, he would hang a bowling ball from the ceiling using a ladder and let it go right in front of his face to prove a point – it couldn’t possibly hit him in the face,” Tony recalled. “He was personally interested in and passionate about physics, and it came through in his lessons and lectures.” Tony reflected on his decision to go into the Armed Forces. “I was a tinkerer, a wannabe gearhead, and the services had a strong engineering program. I also thought Top Gun was a really cool movie and figured being a jet pilot would be the coolest thing to do. I could go to school for free, and when I graduated I could fly a jet,” he laughed. “I obviously didn’t end up being a pilot.” Tony started basic training almost immediately upon graduation. He spent two months at boot camp where his personal identity was basically taken from him. He wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone or use the internet; he had to cut his hair a certain way and was taught to look and act like everyone else. Freshman year of college was an extension of that way of life – he had no privileges. He got 10 to 12 hours a week of freedom. “On Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., we were allowed out and didn’t have to wear a uniform. It was like that for the entire year,” Tony disclosed. At the start of junior year, the Naval Academy has students sign a contract, providing them with another two years of education and a college degree in exchange for five years of service after graduation. In November of senior year, students find out in what

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branch of the Navy they will serve. Tony was selected for special operations. Eighty people listed bomb disposal as their first choice, and only 15 spots were open – one of which Tony eventually secured after passing numerous interviews, physical screenings, and tests. “In the Navy there are not a lot of jobs that put you in direct danger and you would think people wouldn’t want that kind of job, but it is an extremely competitive field. They have intense screeners to test your physical strength and mental toughness,” Tony explained. “The Navy takes into account your entire performance during the time at the Academy. You are measured, graded, and scored on your military and academic merit and told exactly where you stood in the class overall. My class was ranked from 1 to 1,197.” Tony was a “distinguished graduate,” as he graduated in the top 10 percent of his class at number 44. Once Tony was selected for the explosive ordinance disposal subset of Navy Special Operatives, he had to go through another two years of training including dive, bomb, and jump school and tactical training. “The training I received was outstanding. I never experienced a situation that I felt like I was not prepared for,” Tony said. “Every improvised explosive device (IED) I saw, I knew how to proceed and what safety precautions to observe.” Tony finished his training in 2008 and was stationed in Sicily with Mobile Unit 8. Mobile unit assignments are performed in two-year increments. The unit spends 18 months preparing for a job, then six months doing the actual job. Tony’s team was the Afghanistan bomb disposal team. They trained to dispose of roadside IEDs all over the world in cities in the United States, Morocco, and Italy. The team deployed to Afghanistan towards the end of 2009 to replace a team that had just lost a soldier in the field. “I was pulling strings to get this deployment. I wanted to save people, I wanted to be the guy who got rid of the biggest threat our troops faced,” Tony said. “I thought I was someone who could think clearly and make decisions in a high-threat environment.” There is only one paved road in Afghanistan called Highway One, which American troops made shortly after occupying the country, and it is a prime target for enemies to bomb. Tony’s team, a total of four men and four security trucks, was responsible to patrol the highway.

When they would find a bomb, they would stop traffic to assess the situation. However, when traffic is stopped, everyone gets out of their cars to watch what is going on, heightening the seriousness of the situation. The team often found themselves in real danger. “We found a bomb that was a remote-controlled IED, so we knew one of the people watching us was the trigger man. There are hundreds of people surrounding you, and they all want to see carnage. You can’t identify the trigger man, and that’s a scary situation. As the team leader, it’s my responsibility to protect life – that of innocent bystanders as well as my own,” he said. “Other situations that are scary are fake bombs, when the enemy takes something that looks like a bomb and uses it as a decoy. When you realize it’s not a real threat, you know they placed it there purposely. As an individual, you are never a primary target, but your convoy is and you know the opposition is always watching you to see what you do.” Although Tony’s convoy vehicles were blown up many times, no one was ever injured or killed. Overall, Tony served three tours of duty, mostly in the Middle East and Africa, during which he personally disarmed 31 IEDs in Afghanistan, earning him a Bronze Star. He separated from naval active duty in 2012 and decided to continue his education, earning his MBA from The Wharton School in 2014. After traveling the world in the Navy, Tony came back home to Pittsburgh to work for McKinsey and Company, a top tier consulting firm. He changed roles in December, taking a job at Simio Simulation and Scheduling Software in Sewickley. Tony returned to his alma mater to speak to Middle and Senior School students during this year’s Veterans Day assembly on November 11, 2016. He spoke about his personal definition of service. He believes service is giving a part of yourself to someone or something else, that service is a choice and not an obligation, and that there are many types of service. He told students, faculty, staff, and community members that he believes the pursuit of service can provide enrichment in life. “There are a lot of different kinds of service. When you help somebody solve a hard problem, that is satisfying work and I believe that is good service,” he said. “It’s a change of pace from being in the field, but I’m intellectually stimulated by the work I do now.”

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IN MEMORIAM ALUMNI PATRICIA STEWART POOL ’61 died September 14, 2016, in Chatham, Massachusetts. Patti was born October 15, 1946, daughter of the late John W. and Barbara J. Pool of East Dennis, Massachusetts. She attended Sewickley Academy, Winchester Thurston School, Briarcliff College, and the Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Journalism in Philadelphia. Patti began her journalism career in 1968 as a copywriter at Chilton Publishing Company in Philadelphia and retired after 42 years as a senior editor of IAN Magazine, a top Chilton publication. Patti maintained homes in East Dennis, Massachusetts, and Wayne, Pennsylvania. Patti is survived by her cousins: Dr. Peter J. Felsburg, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; Christopher M. Felsburg, Scottsdale, Arizona; Kimberly Felsburg Brennan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; John W. Sears, Chevy Chase, Maryland; and longtime partner, George P. Hillman III, Wayne, Pennsylvania. LEAUGEAY (STEVENSON ’31) BERMAN passed away on August 23, 2016, in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the age of 100. She was born in 1915 in Pittsburgh, where she married Albert Curry in 1937 and was one of only a few women to attend medical school at the University of Pittsburgh for two years. She was hired at Mellon Institute to do chemical research. After the war, she opened a successful children’s boutique, Chez Enfants, in Sewickley. In 1954 she moved to North Carolina, where she married Michael Berman. Initially she was employed by Montaldo’s, an upscale women’s boutique, as a department head and buyer, which she enjoyed very much as she loved clothes and was very fashionable. Subsequently, as one of the first women to become a life insurance agent for Prudential Insurance Company, she was honored to be included in the President’s Citation Awards twice. Later she moved to San Diego, California, where she again was a top salesperson for Neiman Marcus at age 67. A trailblazer with an amazing spirit, her wonderful sense of humor, gregarious nature, and talent for storytelling delighted family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers endearing her to all that met her. She had one son, Frank Stevenson, who predeceased her in 1979. She is survived by daughters Leaugeay (Curry ’55) Buck and Louise Curry Gilliland; a sister, Elaine “Boots” Sapper; five grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and five great great-grandchildren.

RAPLH RICHARDS “DICK” CULBERTSON ’56 son of John D. Culbertson III and Mary Richards Culbertson, died January 5, 2017. He attended Sewickley Academy, Culver Academy, and Penn State University. Dick spent most of his career as a manufacturer’s representative, first in New Jersey and then in southern California. Dick served on the vestry of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ross, California, and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Hollister, California. He and his wife enjoyed traveling, including a safari in Kenya and cruises to Southeast Asia, the Baltics, St. Petersburg, the Greek Islands, and across the Indian Ocean. He loved to collect paintings and objets d’art wherever they traveled. Retiring to North Carolina in 2004 with his wife Martha, the couple lived in Chocowinity and then Washington. Dick was an avid golfer, Steelers fan, and trap shooter. He leaves his devoted wife, Martha Annin Culbertson; his brother, John D. Culbertson ’58, and sister Tingle (Culbertson ‘61) Barnes; five nieces and nephews; and eight grandnieces and nephews. Dick loved life, lived large, and is much missed by his family and many friends.

FAMILY OF ALUMNI THADDEUS P. APPLETON, father of Thaddeus “Tad” ’72, Timothy ’73, Todd ’78, and Troy ’81 Appleton ELIZABETH “BETTY” BLAIR, mother of George McCullough ’78 DR. DUNCAN GRANT CAMPBELL, father of Scott ’81 and the late Manson ’80 Campbell CAROLE ANN MASRI, mother of Suzanne ’81 and Aaron ‘91 Masri MARY VANN “POLLY” ODOM, mother of Marguerite (Odom ’72) Haus and Mary Odom ’76, grandmother of Sam ’05 and Hilary ’08 Brown ORESTE SCIOSCIA, father of Jack Kincaid, Mark, David, John ’77, Elizabeth ’80, and Daniel Scioscia ’83 JOSEPH VALES, father of Maria Dugan, Joseph, and Anthony Vales ’81 MARTHA HELENA (GAYDOS) VARZALY, mother of Maria ’84, Valerie ’85, Timothy ’76, and the late Dan ‘77 Gaydos ANN POWER WARDROP, mother of Alison Wardrop, Constance (Wardrop ’67) Combes, and Stacy (Wardrop ’69) Roe

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As of January 5, 2017

FRIENDS OF THE SCHOOL ANN (BOOCOCK) COBURN died peacefully at her home in Sewickley on December 6, 2016. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on January 17, 1936, to Philip Milledoler Brett Boocock and Katrina Morey Boocock, Ann spent most of her childhood in Buffalo, New York, where her father was headmaster of the Nichols School, and where she attended Buffalo Seminary. Raised in an atmosphere that valued the life of the mind, Ann continued her education at Smith College, graduating with a degree in English in 1958. She married Arthur Leslie (Tui) Coburn III of Weston, Massachusetts, in 1964, living in Boston and Lincoln, Massachusetts, before moving to Sewickley in 1979. Ann’s twin passions for learning and the outdoors spurred her to pursue extensive volunteer work in gardening, conservation, and education while raising her four sons. Highlights of her work include serving in local or national capacities on boards of the Garden Club of America, Sewickley Academy, Sweetwater Center for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, the Center for Plant Conservation, and her local Village Garden Club. Most recently, she was a member of the Steering Committee for the Secret Garden at Sewickley Academy where her primary focus was to incorporate native plants into this garden open to the community. Her work with the Little Sewickley Creek Watershed Association led her to coedit and publish the Little Sewickley Creek Nature Trail Field Manual in 1990. She also loved singing in the choir at Sewickley Presbyterian Church, competing in tennis matches and boat races, serving on the church flower committee, and painting watercolor landscapes. She loved to be outside with her grandchildren, watching them develop the same love for the natural world that she had. She is predeceased by her beloved husband, Tui; daughter-in-law, Brandi; and her sister and brother-in-law, Katrina (Tidey) and Mike Hamilton. She is survived by her brother and sister-in-law, Roger and Helen Boocock of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts; her sons and daughters-in-law, Arthur L. (Tad) ’83 and Kimberly Coburn IV of Lexington, Massachusetts, Andrew ’85 and Maureen Coburn of Greenville, South Carolina, Matthew ’87 Coburn of New Haven, Connecticut, and Philip ’89 and Elizabeth Coburn of Buffalo, New York; and 11 grandchildren.

JOHN M. HERBST, JR. 88, died April 20, 2016. He managed the automotive business founded by his father, John M. Herbst, Inc., for decades and continued working well into his 80s. He served in the navy during World War II. A longtime member of the Cochran Hose Company, he was fire chief from 1987 until mandatory retirement in 1992, and was fire marshal for the Borough of Sewickley during the 1980s. Famous for his many stories when people visited the family business, Jack especially loved to talk about the great fire that destroyed the original Sewickley Academy building on January 20, 1970. Jack was one of the first volunteers on the scene and worked through the night to extinguish the raging fire in sub-freezing temperatures. He talked of the 11 fire companies that answered the call and of the Red Cross that served coffee and sandwiches to the cold, exhausted firefighters. Jack also served as a member of the Sewickley Hospital Authority Board during its major addition construction in the 1980s. His sons Allen and Jim continue to run the family business. Sewickley Academy first graders have often visited the business through the years while learning about our community.

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Sewickley Academyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 30 th Annual Auction

April 22, 2017 Register now:

www.sewickley.org/auctionreg

Questions?

Contact Patricia Stine at pstine@sewickley.org or 412.741.2230 ext. 3067.