Parents’ Post A Newsletter for Parents and Friends of The Thacher School
Early Fall 2000
Dear Parents, Grandparents, and Friends: Head of School Michael Mulligan concluded his New Year’s Banquet speech on September 11 with a reference to something Wendell Berry wrote in his recent Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition. “Good artists,” Berry contends, “are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families, communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make.” Berry gets it right—and makes, for me, an apt launch pad for the first Post of the year, a time when choice begins anew. What Sherman Day Thacher gathered together well over a century ago—students, horses, orange and avocado groves, dedicated and scholarly faculty—still coheres, still endures, still bestows health upon those of us whose good fortune has brought us to this place. Once joined, we then take our individual parts in the perpetuation of the piece of art that is the Thacher community: we overtly and actively value honor, fairness, kindness, and truth by keeping those four essentials in the center of on-going discussions, in our daily words and deeds. And though we may not always choose the best color from our palette, or locate just the right word for the poem, we consciously try and try again, knowing that making our community well is, if occasionally slightly beyond our reach, ultimately within our collective grasp.
YOU CHOOSE Whatever starting point you use—the first suitcase unpacked, the first step on a W Sierra trail, the singing of our traditional grace Domine at the start of the New Year’s Banquet, or the Head’s annual reading of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Chambered Nautilus on the first day of classes—school has begun with all the energy, eagerness, and enthusiasm that can be packed into—and then released by—243 teenagers and five dozen teachers, advisors, and coaches. New students number 68: a 9th grade class of 50, 16 boys and girls joining the Class of 2003, and two new juniors—all of whom bring vigor and a wide variety of accomplishments and talents to our hillside community. Other compelling stats: a quarter of our students receive financial aid; 21% of the student body are students of color, and 49% are related to another student in the School or to a graduate of CdeP. You could cover the soccer field with the number of state and foreign flags flown by the members of the student body: in addition to California, these young women and men have traveled from 26 states, from A (Alaska) to W (Wyoming) and eight foreign countries, to be a part of the 112th Thacher School,“ the only [one],” in the words of Michael Mulligan, “we will ever have.” Made well, it will, we expect, stay stuck.