Country Connections Spring 2017

CountryConnections celebrating education that lasts a lifetime

The Country School | Spring 2017

In this issue: 60 Years, A Campus Under Transformation, Alumni Stories

Celebrating 60: A Message from the Head of School

education that lasts a lifetime

Dear Country School Community,

Table of Contents Board of Trustees Selma Ahmed P ’21, ’22, ’25 Sandy Broadus P ’19, ’22 Katherine Connolly ’77 P ’21 John W. Cropp P ’14, ’18 Felicia Cuomo P ’16, ’18, ’23 Deirdre Devaney P ’18, ’23 Mary Didiuk P ’22, ’24 Ryan Duques P ’22, ’24 John Fixx, Head of School Mischa Frusztajer P ’22, ’24 Travis Gulick ’02 Bonnie Hiatt P ’22, ’22 Jennifer Jackson P ’11 Casey McGuane P ’17, ’22 Laura Miller-Cozean P ’16 Mauricio Salgar P ’14, ’16, ’18 Anne “Toby” Scott P ’78 Charles Sinclair P ’24 Randy Taylor P ’19, ’21 Jason Wainio P ’18 Alumni Association Co-Chairs Eric Fabricant ’99 Marina Sachs ’07 Editor Liz Lightfoot ’77 P ’05, ’07, ’08, ’12 Designer Georgiana Goodwin P ’07 Contributors Head of School John Fixx Marina Sachs ’07 Liz Lightfoot ’77 P ’05, ’07, ’08, ’12

1 Celebrating 60: A Message from the Head of School 2 What’s New? A Campus and Campaign Update 5 Signature Programs: A Uniquely Country School Experience Elmore Leadership, STEAM, Public Speaking, Outdoor Education 8 60th Celebrations 10 Taking Stock: Exploring “Student Outcomes” Do What You Love and You’ll Find the Right Path: Brian Parri ’84 Confident, Poised, and Owning a Great Command of the Issues: Tara Maloney ’13 Sharing A Love for History: Peter Burdge ’09 Making Every Human Life Count: Ari Mannan ’03 The Gift of Rejection: Filmmaker Sophia Harvey ’07 Living the Tech Dream: Billy Irwin ’07 Learning and Teaching Independence: Bobbie Semple ’09 Fighting Stress and Burnout: Olivia Jorgensen ’06 Exercising her “Inalienable Right to be Completely and Utterly Wrong”: Alexandra Wagner ’11 Once a “Lifer,” Always a Lifer: Eric Fabricant ’99 Lessons from The Country School: Marina Sachs ’07 Balancing Social Justice and Immigration Law: Nate Roy ‘06 Empowering Others to Share Their Stories: Kate McNally ’09 Lessons from MacLane: John Burt ’71 Selflessly Serving Others: Christopher Arrandale ’14 Bringing a Problem Into the Light: Filmmaker Matt Siretta ’04 Classmates from the Beginning: CC Cunningham and Tess Cianciolo ’09 An Interest in Culture (and Viticulture): Matt Murphy ’98 A Woman of Many Talents and Interests: Zaynah Abid ’02 A Call to Teach: Daniel Hartsoe ’05 Fulfilling a Prediction and a Promise: Micah Stahl ’01

Welcome to Volume 1 of the 2017 edition of Country Connections, a magazine for Country School alumni, families, and friends. This edition looks back at our past and ahead to the months, years, and decades to come as — just as we have for the last 60 years — The Country School empowers young people to “reach their highest, not only in school but also in life.” This issue of Country Connections also contemplates the initial vision of our school’s founders, the parents who came together to imagine a new kind of school on the Connecticut shoreline. Are we fulfilling their dream?

As we look both backward and forward, we also take stock of where we are right now (see What’s New: A Campus and Campaign Update). I’m happy to say the view from here looks pretty promising. Our 60th anniversary was a banner year for The Country School. The community came out in droves to celebrate our six-decade milestone and to support the 60th Anniversary Shaping the Future campaign, an endeavor that has already dramatically transformed The Country School campus, with much more still to come. By the time it is finished, Shaping the Future promises to change not only our physical campus, but student experiences for decades to come.

We took the occasion of our 60th anniversary to reflect on our school’s programs, taking time to examine, refine, expand, and better articulate what we do and how and why we do it. Specifically, we explored some of the offerings we feel make The Country School experience unique. Now identified in our literature and highlighted on our new, responsive website (another 60th anniversary endeavor) as our Signature Programs, these separators include: Elmore Leadership, STEAM, Outdoor Education, and Public Speaking. Learn more in Signature Programs: A Uniquely Country School Experience.

We also invested time and effort to reconnect with our alumni. As you will see in the section Taking Stock: Exploring Student Outcomes, we learned a great deal about our former students over the course of the last 12 months. In fact, we learned so much — and had such positive feedback from those to whom we spoke — that we will be issuing a second volume of Country Connections 2017 in the coming months. If we had to synthesize our learning into one overarching summary, I think it would be this: Country School alumni are inspiring and inspired, talented, energetic, and purposeful.

They work in fields that genuinely interest them, and they care about giving back. What is more, they are grateful to The Country School for providing a firm foundation — or as one alumnus said, TCS provided “the fertile ground for all that I have done and the paths that I took.” As Head of School, those kinds of comments are music to my ears.

Coming off our spectacular 60th Anniversary year, I am pleased to say that the current school year has brought equally beautiful “music,” starting with some exciting statistics at the outset. This past September, The Country School opened its doors with a 66 percent increase in the number of new students, marking the largest one-year percentage increase in more than a decade, and the numbers for next year are looking similarly positive. Whether the increased interest in our school from prospective families is due to growing excitement about the physical changes on campus, the dynamism of our program, heightened awareness as we invite the broader community to participate in activities on campus, or some other factor, it is heartening to know that, at 60, our school is thriving and continuing to provide a growing number of students an education that lasts a lifetime.

32 Alumni in the News 35 Alumni Statistics

If you haven’t visited recently, please return to Opening Hill Road and see our community in action. You will find a beautiful campus with some sparkling new features. At the same time, I think you will recognize a place that hasn’t changed much at all. We remain, as ever, a happy, vibrant community filled with inspirational, impassioned teachers and curious, eager, engaged students. I feel confident that our founders would approve.

36 What Could be More Important? Ode to Teachers 38 A Salute to Parents 40 Class Notes 49 In Memoriam

With best wishes from campus,

52 Staying Connected The Country School 341 Opening Hill Road Madison, Connecticut 06443 (203) 421-3113

John D. Fixx Head of School

Phase 2, started last July, moved vehicular traffic and parking to the periphery of campus, creating an iconic, pedestrian village for learning at the center. The new campus footprint has the obvious benefit of making the traffic pattern safer and simpler for all, but it also creates a welcoming and attractive grass, oval-shaped pedestrian courtyard where there once was a stream of entering and exiting vehicles.

The new courtyard provided a brilliant route for the annual Halloween parade.

It’s also a perfect spot for a picnic lunch, outdoor classes on a sunny spring afternoon, and pickup soccer games after school.

In the words of Chad Floyd, partner at Centerbrook and the architect behind the plan’s development and now its implementation, the new campus layout, with the grass courtyard front and center, creates a “strong sense of place” for The Country School, differentiating our school from all others in our region. From Chad: I think it creates an identity for the school that really brings it right into the first rank of small independent schools. What’s missing in so many of these small schools is a strong sense of place, because they’re, first-off, all small and, second, they often grew in a slightly haphazard way. Here, by making the oval and responding to the pre-existing layout of the academic buildings, we’re making a big gesture of community that is going to be very memorable and visible from the road. The Country School is small, but it now also has grandeur, it has scale, it has a memorable, strong statement of community.

I think that’s a separator for The Country School.

Fittingly, the community will soon come together to dedicate the new, oval green to the Burt Family — to Jeff ’61, Allee, Taylor ’00, and Hilary ‘03, along with their extended family — in recognition of their longstanding support of The Country School and their commitment to making ours a welcoming, embracing community.

What’s New?

A Campus and Campaign Update During the first year of our Shaping the Future campaign, more than 300 members of the community came together to donate nearly $2 million to support the school’s campus transformation project and other 60th Anniversary initiatives, including increased scholarship support and programmatic enhancements. This marked the largest-ever single year of giving at The Country School, and the momentum has continued during the second year of our campaign, with additional generous donations helping us climb toward our overall $3.75 million goal for the three-year campaign.

Based on a Master Campus Plan developed by world-renowned Centerbrook Architects and Planners working with a broad base of community members, The Country School transformation is being developed in phases. Phase 1, completed last summer, resulted in our magnificent, new outdoor recreational facility, featuring two full-sized, side-by-side athletic fields, the Mizhen and Salgar fields; a baseball and softball diamond; the four-court Rothberg Tennis Center; the Redding Outdoor Basketball Court; new playgrounds; a reconfigured ropes course; an enhanced cross country course; and more. These new and expanded facilities have not only dramatically changed our students’ experiences, but they have allowed our neighbors and local organizations to benefit, as our campus becomes a year-round hub of activity for many in our town and region.

Madison Racquet & Swim Club uses our new facilities to run a summer sports program and hold USTA matches. Meanwhile, students have been able to play tennis during gym, in after-school practices and matches, and even at recess.

Families enjoy our courts in the off hours.

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What’s Next?

This summer, we hope to finalize surface work on the roadways and parking lots, adding outdoor lighting across campus as well as additional pedestrian pathways, and completing other cosmetic enhancements. When funding allows, we plan to add a clock tower on DeFancis Gymnasium, which will serve as a focal point for the gentle arc of academic buildings arranged along the oval.

“When we were thinking about The Country School and came up with our master plan design, we thought about the school as a community, as a New England village, and as a really fine academic institution,” Chad explained. The clock tower will bring to campus “the kind of important marker that you would find in any good New England village,” he said.

Future plans call for additional cosmetic upgrades to existing buildings and, ultimately, when and as funding allows, new buildings dedicated to specific activities, such as an arts barn, a field house, a student activities center, and a Middle School building.

We are fortunate to have Chad and his colleague Ted Tolis, principal at Centerbrook, as the chief architects guiding this project. Both past Country School parents, they know our campus and our community inside out, and they bring their experience at Centerbrook working with major universities, from Dartmouth to Yale, UConn to the University of Michigan; top independent schools, such as Choate, Exeter, Andover, and Hotchkiss; and leading cultural institutions such as Mystic Seaport, the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, the Palmer Events Center in Austin, TX, and the Florence Griswold Museum.

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When The Country School community gathered this spring in the magnificent new Centerbrook-designed Thompson Exhibition Building at Mystic Seaport for the annual auction and gala, the excitement was palpable. As one long-time Country School community member said, “Can you imagine having a building like this at TCS?”

Signature Programs: Our Uniquely Country School Experience

Inside the classroom, and outside it too, The Country School continues to do what it has always done: make learning fun, active, impactful, and lasting.

We are committed to a challenging and vigorous academic curriculum — one that prepares our students to thrive alongside the top scientists, historians, mathematicians, writers, artists, and thinkers anywhere. (Visit Taking Stock: Exploring Student Outcomes to see how our program is working.) But we also believe that to be truly valuable, truly lasting, an education must also foster social and emotional growth.

To address this affective, or social and emotional, aspect of our curriculum, we have developed four mission-driven signature programs: Elmore Leadership, STEAM, Public Speaking, and Outdoor Education. Starting with our youngest students, everyone in our school engages in a series of activities and experiences designed to teach collaboration and communication, critical thinking, and creativity. Students learn what it means to be kind, to empathize, and to really listen to others. They learn the value of cooperation and teamwork and what it’s like to persevere through challenges. In short, they learn the skills that will be necessary for them to thrive in a complex, changing, interconnected world.

Elmore Leadership Our Elmore Leadership program, named for longtime Country School trustee Bill Elmore, helps develop students into civic-minded citizens who will become tomorrow’s leaders, practicing our school’s core values of kindness, respect, and responsibility. Assessments, self-reflection, and feedback are important components of the leadership learning process, taking place in an atmosphere that allows for mistakes, growth, and resilience. Because children learn by example, we invite outside speakers to campus to share their experiences with students. In turn, our students ask questions and grapple with some of the big issues they may face in the future.

The Country School is small, but it now also has grandeur, it has scale, it has a memorable, strong statement of community.

– Chad Floyd, Architect

Ari Mannan ’03 was an Elmore Leadership Speaker this spring. He spoke to students about his startup, bosWell, through which he is helping our nation’s most vulnerable individuals while also helping healthcare providers reduce their costs.

Learn more about the Shaping the Future Campaign and Campus Master Plan at thecountryschool.org/giving/shaping-the-future.

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STEAM Through integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math — or STEAM —students explore themes in-depth and across the curriculum. They tackle realworld problems that require them to collaborate, ask questions, and engage in problem solving and trial and error. Experts estimate that 65 percent of today’s grade school students will end up working in jobs that have not been invented yet; The Country School’s STEAM curriculum is designed to prepare them for that reality. Some recent STEAM studies on campus include: Global Language and Innovation - 7th Grade Students explored innovations in various parts of the globe and throughout history, spending time in the art studio, STEAM lab, and global language classrooms researching and then designing and engineering their own versions.

During a special STEAM presentation, they described their innovation in the appropriate language (Latin, Spanish, or French), depending on where their subject originated. Innovations included mops, newspapers, snowmobiles, ballpoint pens, and calendars.

Outdoor Education The other experience most Country School alumni will cite as being both unique and transformational is our storied Outdoor Education program. This school-wide undertaking uses the outdoors as both teacher and classroom, providing unique learning and leadership opportunities for all participants. During the course of their years at The Country School, students hike the nature trail that flanks campus and master challenges on our on-campus ropes course; they paddle canoes along the Connecticut River and Delaware Water Gap; and they climb mountains, scale rock walls, and ride river rapids in Utah. Through all of these experiences, they learn about overcoming challenges and the importance of protecting the natural world. They also learn about themselves, their peers, and teamwork — lessons our alumni say they call upon again and again.

Learn more about Country School Signature Programs at thecountryschool.org/ signature-programs

Exploring the Solar System – 3rd Grade Third Graders take a deep dive into the solar system. Topics and activities include exploration of mapping technology, moon and Mars rovers (they use LEGO robotics to program their own), and creating clay replicas of the surface of Mars based on observations. This cross-curricular exploration culminates in a Gallery of the Galaxy show in the Art Studio, featuring Moon-inspired paintings, poetry, and musical compositions.

Public Speaking Ask any Country School alumnus/a — including those who graduated in the school’s first graduating classes — about their Country School memories, and chances are they will mention the MacLane Poetry Recitation, our school’s oldest tradition. That is just one of the recurrent public speaking opportunities at The Country School, where students learn to speak out loud and clearly to adults and peers, family and strangers. Knowing and using their voices, Country School students learn that what they have to say is important and that what others have to say is worth hearing.

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60th Celebrations

Our school’s 60th anniversary brought countless opportunities to celebrate The Country School and its history. We are grateful to everyone who joined us to share in these celebrations. Here is a sampling: Diamond Jubilee Gala Some 200 friends from across the decades joined us for the Diamond Jubilee Gala, honoring our school’s history and contributing to its future and raising almost $200,000 for our school. Thank you to our auction co-chairs, Sheila Salkin P ’06, ’08, ’10, ’16 and Terese Howey P ’14, ’16, ’19, to our auctioneer Wil Bradford P ’93, ’96, ’00, to all who volunteered, and to everyone who joined us to celebrate our past and shape our future.

TEDxTheCountrySchool The Country School held its first-ever TEDx conference in April 2016. More than 200 people joined us as speakers shared talks about topics of their choice (ranging from resilience to music, procrastination to race). Organized by alumna Marina Sachs ’07, TEDxTheCountrySchool was a true celebration of our school’s mission, inviting participants to share their voices and make a difference in our world.

Partnering with Parents Series In a 60th Anniversary edition of our ongoing Partnering with Parents Series, we invited the public to a screening and panel discussion of Most Likely to Succeed, the acclaimed film about the future of education.

Following the film, Head of School John Fixx moderated a panel discussion with outside experts, including Doug Lyons, the executive director of The Connecticut Association of Independent Schools, renowned education writer Laura Pappano, and Tom Scarice, Madison’s Superintendent of Schools and education reform advocate.

Students Celebrate 60 Students explored what 60 years means in terms of their lifetimes, what has changed in the world over the course of the last six decades, and what life might have been like back when the school was founded.

Ribbon Cutting Ceremony More than 100 Country School students, parents, teachers, alumni, trustees, and friends joined us on the new athletic fields last June for a ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony, marking the completion of Phase 1 of the 60th Anniversary Shaping the Future campaign.

Celebrating 60 Years of Community at the Community Tent-In More than 100 friends from across the decades joined us on campus for the 60th Anniversary Community Tent-In on our new athletic fields. Storms threatened to cancel the overnight portion of the evening, but by the time participants arrived on campus, rain had given way to sunshine and a crew of stalwart campers elected to pitch their tents on the not-too soggy, velvety grass. The evening featured Outdoor Ed team-building activities, a barbecue, stories and s’mores around the campfire, and a night under the stars. It was so much fun, we’re doing it again!

Alumni Join the Parties Alumni joined in on the festivities, showcasing their remarkable talents during a 60th Anniversary Alumni Arts Celebration, returning en masse for the fall alumni reunion, joining current students and their families for the first annual Country School Community Tent-In, sharing their own birthday gifts to our school, and joining us on the golf course for the Golf Classic for Scholarship.

Thanks for sharing in our school’s history and our school’s celebration, alumni!

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Taking Stock: Exploring “Student Outcomes”

When The Country School was founded in 1955, the parents who came together to form a new school on the Connecticut Shoreline had three main goals: 1. They wanted a community where, “through individual attention and strong relationships, teachers would be able to reach the minds of young children, developing their natural enthusiasm for learning.” 2. They wanted a school where the “excitement of learning and the excitement of creation are a part of every child’s day.” 3. They wanted to create a place where children would be able to “develop their full potentialities.” Or, in the words of the current Country School Mission Statement, they wanted a school where young people would be empowered “to reach their highest, not only in school but also in life.”

Sixty years on, does the founders’ vision still hold?

Walk onto The Country School campus today, and these are the sights and sounds that will greet you: Everyone is engaged in active, hands-on learning — students with teachers, students with other students, and teachers with colleagues.

Animated voices and laughter fill the air. It is at once an intense learning environment and a vibrant and happy place, a setting where curiosity, experimentation, discussion, asking questions, and good, old-fashioned play are welcome, expected, and encouraged.

Within a few short minutes, you can pretty much tell that the founders’ first two conditions are being met. Yes, children are developing their natural enthusiasm for learning. And yes, the excitement of learning and the excitement of creation are in evidence everywhere you turn.

But what about the third goal? Are children reaching their “full potentialities”?

Or, in school vernacular, what can we say about “student outcomes”? For educators, that’s the perennial question. How do you actually measure the effectiveness of your program? Sure, to some extent you can judge it by things like high school and college matriculation and placement, the number of graduates taking honors and advanced courses, how our students do on standardized testing, and how they perform in their chosen careers.

We have good news on those fronts, but ultimately, perhaps the only way to adequately answer the student outcome question is to take the time to seek out and speak with the school’s product — that is, to reconnect with those who experienced the school’s program and ask them, point blank, “What did The Country School do for you?”

And so, over the course of the last year, that’s what we’ve been doing. Each week, we’ve taken time to reach out to Country School alumni, in many cases speaking with people we haven’t seen or heard from since graduation. We’ve reconnected with individuals from across the decades, asking what they’re doing, how they are doing, and whether, in their assessment, The Country School helped get them there.

In the ensuing pages, you will find some of their answers. Many more are being posted on our website, thecountryschool.org, (see Alumni News section) and on our Facebook page: facebook.com/thecountryschoolmadison. Still more will be presented in Country Connections 2017, Volume 2.

Huge thanks to the alumni who shared their stories. As you read through these accounts, we invite you to draw your own conclusions. What do you think? Are Country School students “reaching their highest, not only in school but also in life”? Email us and share your thoughts at alumni@thecountryschool.org. Or, better yet, share your stories, and we’ll add them to our growing collection. We look forward to hearing from you!

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Do What You Love and You’ll Find the Right Path – Brian Parri ’84

Brian Parri was only at The Country School for one year — 8th Grade — but when we caught up with him recently, he told us he is still feeling the impact of that one year, 30+ years later.

“I had a fantastic experience with The Country School,” Brian, owner of the popular Westbrook restaurant Cafe Routier, wrote to us in an email. “I wasn’t really ready for high school at the time and felt like I needed another year and it was one of best years ever.”

Brian described his teachers as “engaging and thought provoking,” and his fellow students as “interesting and ‘on their own path.’ There were skiers, musicians, kids who rode horses, history buffs, math geniuses, actors, etc. — kids from all over who were interested in things I had never been exposed to.”

Brian Parri with his former math teacher, Bob McGee

Recalling some specifics, Brian said, “Mr. McGee was the best. He coached everything and the 5-6 boys that I hung out with all played every sport. Mr. McGee did a wonderful job at all he did; he really just made a huge impression on me for how much he loved to teach and he was actually interested in all that we were doing. And one day he said, and I can remember it clearly, ‘Stay involved in the things you love, do what you love, and the rest is easy.’ It’s advice I’m still trying to follow 30 years later.”

Brian said he has written Mr. McGee a few letters over the years. “I wanted him to know that he still made a difference with me after all these years,” he said.

“I would often think back to that year and it really became fertile ground for all that I have done and the paths that I took.”

In recent months, thanks to our new soccer fields, Brian has found himself back on campus — as a volunteer coach for Connecticut RUSH soccer, which practices on Country School fields and for which his daughters play. (Brian himself played for Division I UConn.) Being back on his old stomping grounds has inspired some reflection on his part. “Mr. McGee was right,” he said. “I chased the things I enjoy — soccer at University of Connecticut, finance in Boston, food and Cafe Routier in Connecticut, and staying and being involved in my daughters’ lives on the shoreline, coaching a sport I love, a sport that teaches the kids about more than just soccer. I would like to think that I’m trying to put as much love into teaching these kids soccer as Mr. McGee does into teaching.... Isn’t that what it’s all about, making an impact on someone’s life that carries many, many years forward?”

Brian described a moment last summer, when he was on campus with his daughters. They happened to walk into DeFrancis Gymnasium, where the girls spotted the trophy case. Here’s how he described it: So my kids wander over to the trophy case and they say, “Are you in there, Dad?” and I’m like, “Not sure,” and we’re looking, and BLAMMO, right in front is a little silver bowl with names on it. It looks like the one I took home for a year before I returned it for the next person. I pick my littlest up and almost hang her upside down to read the name off the bottom of the bowl and she says, “Brian Parri 1984,” and all my kids are clapping for me and I felt like a champ. Just another little moment that enriches my life. My little girls clapping and hugging their Dad over a little cup he earned many moons ago. That’s The Country School to me, that one little year that set me on the right path.

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Confident, Poised, and Owning a Great Command of the Issues –Tara Maloney ’13

You wouldn’t know it to speak with her — or more accurately to hear her speak — but Tara Maloney ’13 used to get nervous speaking in public. Not so any more.

week spent camping, hiking, rock climbing, river rafting, and exploring was absolutely transformational.

When we spoke with her a few months ago, Tara had just moderated a session with then-U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington, D.C. She had been asked to moderate by the school’s director, because he knew her to be fearless in front of a crowd, excellent at speaking off the cuff, and always able to respond effectively and calmly in the face of something unexpected. Plus, she has a great command of the issues.

“It was so much fun and so important on so many levels,” she said. “Tolerating discomfort and being so far away from home, the food is not what you’re used to, the climate is not what you’re used to, not sleeping in your own bed — those were some of the things I had to deal with in Morocco.” In short, Tara said, The Country School helped her learn to embrace new challenges and enjoy being outside her comfort zone.

We expect Tara will be doing much more of that in the future as she heads off to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. And if and when she runs into an obstacle, we’re confident she will be able to handle it. After all, she has a pretty nifty trick up her sleeve. “Now I know I can recite a Billy Collins poem if worse comes to worst,” she says.

How did Tara gain those infallible public speaking/thinking-on-your-feet skills?

And what made a 17-year-old high school student confident enough to lead a discussion with a sitting cabinet member in front of a packed audience? Tara’s answer: her many years participating in the Lois MacLane Poetry Recitation, The Country School’s oldest and most revered tradition.

Tara Maloney moderates a panel with thenSecretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.

“Nothing in my life has ever been as scary for me as that poetry recitation was,” she said, recalling how she felt during that first recitation at The Country School, “standing up there, seeing a sea of people, with no microphone and knowing that if I mess up, it’s just me.”

Although that first recitation was tough, it grew easier with practice. During her 6th Grade year, Tara was awarded the top medal in the finals, beating out much older students with her unforgettable rendition of “I Chop Some Carrots While Listening to Art Blakeley’s Version of Three Blind Mice” by Billy Collins.

In addition to being a finalist in every Country School recitation (Grades 5-8), Tara went on to embrace public speaking and performance at other venues as well. She has been involved in theater (who can forget her Lucy in the TCS version of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown?) and recently participated in Princeton’s Model Congress in Washington, D.C. She is also on the debate team at Hopkins.

Last spring, Country School students had an opportunity to witness Tara’s public speaking skills in person when she visited campus as part of the Elmore Leadership Speaker Series. During her talk, she described what she learned about leadership during her fall term in Washington, D.C. Tara has also chosen to expand her speaking horizons to include other languages.

Last summer, she was selected to participate in the National Security Language Initiative for Youth program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, receiving a merit-based scholarship to learn Arabic in Morocco. Tara plans to study international relations in college and ultimately hopes to work as a foreign service officer in the U.S. State Department, where she intends to use her skills to advance American interests abroad while helping people in other countries at the same time.

Asked how her interest in international relations — and specifically Arabicspeaking countries — developed, Tara pointed to another pivotal Country School experience. “It’s hard to come up with the beginning for anything in life, but I think most directly I can trace it back to Mrs. Kelly’s 5th Grade history class, where, in my recollection, we spent almost the entire year on ancient Egypt mythology,” she said. “In retrospect it was crazy how much I knew about ancient Egypt. I really loved it. I remember thinking, ‘I want to go to ancient Egypt, but since I can’t go there, maybe I’ll go to modern Egypt.’”

Tara said there was one other Country School experience that may have impacted the person she is today, giving her the confidence and desire to embrace new situations and people: Outdoor Education. Recalling her 8th Grade trip to the mountains, canyonlands, and deserts in and around Moab, Utah, Tara says the

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Sharing A Love for History – Peter Burdge ’09

Peter Burdge truly loves history. Last year, he spent countless hours upstairs in the Farmhouse, combing through crumbling archives to dig up key pieces of our school history. As a 60th birthday present to The Country School, Peter gathered interesting (and sometimes hilarious) nuggets and compiled them into a digital timeline of The Country School’s first 60 years. Now living on the school website, the timeline can be reached in the About Us section by clicking the History tab.

As a History and Education major at Connecticut College, with a minor in German, Peter carried his passion for history to Salzburg, Austria, last summer, where he interned in an archive connected to a monastery. Peter worked with the archive’s head to catalogue papers and books found in the basement of a church just outside the city. Most of the work was cleaning and sorting, and while perhaps not as interesting (or funny) as some of the items Peter found at TCS, he did get to do some fun small projects, like entering information into a Wiki-based site.

And, of course, he improved on his German and was able to be part of the archive team.

Peter is also sharing his love for history with the next generation. This year, he student-taught at Bennie Dover Jackson Middle School in New London, balancing his own academic load with the school work of his students. He apparently juggles multiple responsibilities well; this winter, Peter was named a Winthrop Scholar, the highest academic honor bestowed by Connecticut College, and was selected as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Just before graduation, he was also awarded the Charles “Bud” Church Teaching Award for Social Justice — Secondary Student Award, the German Department Prize, and the Hannah Grace Roach Prize.

Peter plans to make teaching History his career, although next year he will do something slightly different. One of five Connecticut College students to be awarded a Fulbright grant, Peter is headed to Germany, where he will be teaching English to Middle School students. He also hopes to lead a student-run English-language newspaper club and volunteer at local museums.

We asked Peter how his interest in history and his interest in teaching emerged.

Here was his response: When people ask me why I am studying history, I always say that the spark started in 6th Grade, because that is when I first became interested in the characters of history. I remember being so excited before Mrs. Barber’s history classes, knowing that she would bring those characters to life. But she also taught me how to be a historian, how to analyze information and make my own judgments.

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“I think a lot about those outdoor camping trips,” Ari said, adding that that same pull to be “outside his comfort zone” may be what led him to found bosWell. He said he enjoyed his work at the Broad Institute doing cancer research, but found he was looking for a place where he would be stretched and learn something new.

That instinct led him to volunteer on the streets of East Boston, where he met Huey and discovered there was no workable system in place to track or update health care records for the Hueys of the world. And that realization, in turn, led to bosWell.

Since then, I have truly never thought of studying anything else. And because of The Country School as a whole, I have never thought of working anywhere else but in the classroom. I want to be a teacher because TCS taught me to like school. Beginning in Lower School, I have always felt comfortable in the classroom, so much so that I don’t want to leave it. I want to make sure that no matter where I teach, students have that same experience and feel comfortable enough to like school.

Making Every Human Life Count – Ari Mannan ’03

by John Fixx, Head of School Editor’s Note: Head of School John Fixx was so inspired after a talk by Ari Mannan that he wrote a blog about Ari’s visit. This account is excerpted from his blog (for more, from Mr. Fixx visit tcsheadofschool.blogspot.com).

What is a human life worth? Country School alumnus Aristotle Mannan ’03 knows that each life is invaluable, and so he has created a way to do good while doing well. Just as the book Moneyball changed baseball, professional sports, and many businesses by understanding human intuition, Ari is looking to change the medical profession and provide critical care earlier to those who need it. His weapon? Not the care itself, not insurance. Data.

This winter, Ari returned to The Country School to speak as part of the Elmore Leadership Program, sharing stories about bosWell, the digital health startup he founded, and mesmerizing students from 4th to 8th Grade, teachers, and visitors alike.

Our school Mission Statement calls on students to “serve their communities and the larger world,” while urging them to “reach their highest, not only in school, but also in life.” At the same time, our Elmore Leadership Program seeks to inspire — and equip with the necessary skills — the next generation of leaders, while our STEAM program teaches students to look for problems in the world and, using all of the powers to be found by bringing Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math together, find a solution.

With bosWell, Ari has found a way to do all that. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was an Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist as well as a finalist in the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage speech-writing contest, Ari went on to the University of Michigan, majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology.

He began his professional career at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, working in cancer research. While volunteering for a mobile health clinic in Boston, he met a homeless man named Huey and ended up embarking on an entirely different path. Realizing that a lack of data was preventing Huey from receiving quality and comprehensive health care, he brainstormed a solution and then worked with a friend to develop a digital platform capable of recording and tracking care for patients like Huey.

That platform is now being used by social service organizations in locations across the country, with the accumulating data also helping healthcare providers reduce their costs by intervening with patients earlier in their treatment and therefore providing more effective care. At the same time, the data amassed through the bosWell platform helps providers, both hospitals and insurers, forecast expenses and needs, also resulting in a cost savings.

Postscript: In an interview with Ari before his talk, we asked him about his Country School experience and whether it had influenced his trajectory in any way. Although he was only at TCS for one year — his 8th Grade year — Ari described his brief time there as “pivotal.” He recalls being deeply engaged in his classes with both students and teachers, loving the intense dialogue that took place in the classroom, and then looking for something similar when he went on to high school (and finding it at Phillips Exeter Academy). He also said he valued the opportunities the school afforded to be “outside his comfort zone,” whether hiking and camping on the week-long Southwest Trip or reciting a memorized poem on stage during the MacLane Poetry Recitation.

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The Gift of Rejection – Sophia Harvey ’07

In education circles these days, “resilience” is one of the buzzwords we hear all the time. It’s important, experts say, that students be allowed to stumble so they know how to pick themselves up — and make adjustments — after a fall.

That was more or less the topic of Sophia Harvey’s talk during last year’s TEDx conference at The Country School. Sophia, the only alumnus/a to deliver a talk at the first-ever Country School TEDx conference, is a filmmaker and writer in New York. In her TED talk, “Rejection: It’s a Good Thing,” Sophia spoke about her Middle School experiences at The Country School and how not winning a part in the school’s production of Annie, while devastating at the time, was in the end a gift.

You can hear her entire talk at thecountryschool.org/tedx, but below is a critical excerpt. To set the scene, like many of us in Middle School, Sophia was looking for her “thing.” Many of her friends at the time considered themselves athletes or musicians; Sophia was none of those. She decided acting was for her, and so when it was announced that the school musical that year would be Annie, Sophia was certain she’d be cast not just IN Annie but AS Annie (she does, after all, have beautiful, curly red hair). That wasn’t what happened, though. During the audition, Sophia froze, forgot her lines, and ultimately didn’t get any part at all.

She was heartbroken and “couldn’t stop thinking that there was no club left for me to join,” she said.

And then one night at dinner, her parents said to her, “Why don’t you film the play?” “I thought, ‘Huh,’” Sophia said. She grabbed her family’s camera and started to film one rehearsal and then another, and soon she was hanging out with the cast and crew, not as part of either group but in her own, unique capacity, as the documentarian. She described what happened next: And then something clicked and I started to see a story in the way the play was put together. I was curious. I did interviews with the cast and by the end I had made my first documentary. In the process, I learned how to make a movie. But more important, I learned that I loved it.

What I discovered was that I didn’t really want to be an actress. I just wanted to tell stories…. The rejection from the school play forced me to think outside the box. It forced me to find a new way, for me a better way, to share my voice.

Fast forward ten years, and Sophia is most certainly sharing her voice. In addition to her unforgettable TED talk on the De Francis stage, she is working as a producer’s assistant to Mike S. Ryan at Greyshack Films (he’s the producer behind Junebug, Palindromes, Choke, and more). She’s a freelance filmmaker and producer, doing her own film projects, and guest lecturing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She writes about music and film, and a film she produced was recently accepted at the Tribeca Film Festival. In March, a photo of Sophia was featured in SOMA magazine, hailed internationally as the seminal voice and vision of independent, avant-garde arts, fashion, culture and design. Last year, she got to go to the Oscars to represent GKids, the film company she was working for, which was nominated for two Academy Awards. The year before, the film she wrote and directed as a senior at New York University’s Tisch School, Yellow Heart, was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

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What is clear, is that Sophia is thriving, and maybe not in spite of — perhaps even because of — the Annie rejection. Here are a few final words from her TED talk:

common goal. Athletes will connect with a community, work toward a personal goal, participate with a team, and get help from these coaches. These programs will exist in a Netflix-style database, where they can be searched for and then subscribed to by individual users and teams.

Use your rejection. Since finding my passion, I’ve been rejected over 100 times and I’m only getting started. Every time someone tells me I’m no good … it hurts just as much as the first time. But now I know what I want to do. I have a thing. Now when I’m rejected, I get to think, ‘No you’re wrong. I’ll show you.’

It is worth noting here that Billy is working toward a fitness goal himself. This summer he will participate in the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon, raising funds for Save the Children. The event will consist of a 1.5 mile swim (from Alcatraz to the shore of San Francisco), and an 18 mile bike ride and 8 mile run up and down San Francisco’s hills. We wish him luck!

Not a lot of people will tell you that rejection is good. ... The older you get, the less risk everyone is going to want to take. I’m telling you to question everything. You have to set your own standards and you have to exceed them. Weirdos, this is for you. Outsiders, this is for you. If you feel different or upside down in any way, no one can pave your path but you. And because of that, you being different from them, people are going to tell you you’re no good…. Don’t believe that. Take all that rejection and turn it into a positive creative force. It will propel you.

Living the Tech Dream – Billy Irwin ’07

When we spoke to Billy, he was happy to hear about The Country School’s STEAM and robotics programs. A big advocate for early exposure to computer science and tech, Billy says his best advice for wannabe techies is to “just get started.” He recommends checking out some of the hands-on programs developed by code.org and says, “I’ve always found that the best way to learn a new language or skill is to try and make a real life product. It keeps me engaged and excited about learning something new.”

As for how his Country School experiences may have influenced his direction, Billy shared the following:

Billy Irwin’s career as a software engineer for the likes of Twitter and the startup Chorus more or less came about by accident. During his freshman year at The University of Michigan, a friend in his intro to engineering class told him how he had made iPhone apps in high school. Billy was curious, and so “later that day, I Googled, ‘How to make iPhone apps,’ and the next thing you know, I began teaching myself how to code and started working on my first app,” he said. A few months later, Billy declared Computer Science as his major and “everything just started falling into place.”

One thing that I remember fondly about TCS was how supportive all of the teachers were when it came to dealing with failure. There were plenty of times I didn’t perform as well as I wanted on a test or project, and all of my teachers had their own way of explaining that it’s OK to fail, as long as your learn from your mistakes and try to improve yourself.

Being able to turn your failures into learning experiences has been an invaluable skill that’s helped me throughout my entire career. A big part of software engineering is constantly tackling new problems. That often leads to a lot of failing, learning, and rebuilding.

By “falling into place,” Billy means that he and his friends starting collaborating on apps, and ultimately they all ended up with jobs in Silicon Valley, in Billy’s case, first Twitter and then Chorus, which was founded by his former boss at Twitter, Dick Costolo.

The more in-depth version of the story, reported by the University of Michigan’s Michigan Live, is that Tag Contacts, the app Billy and some of his pals developed, happened to attract a big name follower on Twitter — none other than Twitter’s Costolo. From Michigan Live: “We had a little bit of a freak out when we saw that we got a tweet from the Twitter CEO,” said Tag Contacts co-founder Billy Irwin. “I saw (co-founder Chris O’Neil’s) jaw drop and he just said, ‘Dick started following us.’ We stood up and gave each other a hug then we both immediately called our dads to tell them about it.”)

One thing led to another, and Billy landed a summer internship at Twitter. That internship turned into a full-time job when he graduated, with Billy working on the company’s iOS products, including the main Twitter app and a child app called Twitter Engage. Costolo left Twitter during the summer of 2015, and this winter, Billy joined him at his startup.

Chorus is a fitness, nutrition and mindfulness app aimed at helping people make connections that lead to healthier lives. Billy says Chorus does this by giving users a platform to build small teams of friends, family, and experts dedicated to supporting them in their fitness and wellness goals. The company operates under the philosophy that you are much more likely to achieve your goals if you are being held accountable by people close to you who are also working towards their goals. Billy explains that Chorus is partnering with elite coaches and trainers to deliver programs to a group of athletes all working towards a

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Learning and Teaching Independence, Resilience, Compassion – Bobbie Semple ’09

Recently we spied a photo of Bobbie Semple being used in a promotion for Camp Hazen, the YMCA summer camp in Chester and the site of the 7th Grade Outdoor Education overnight for many years. In the photo, Bobbie is displaying some of the outdoor leadership skills she learned back in the day with Mr. McGee and co. during Outdoor Education trips with The Country School. Bobbie has been a Camp Hazen counselor for three summers and this summer will serve as Director of Onandaga, the teen village. We decided to reach out to her to ask why she seems to enjoy outdoor leadership so much.

Bobbie, now a junior at American University majoring in Public Relations and French Language with a minor in Education Studies, got right to the point.

My passion for outdoor education most definitely began at TCS — specifically our trip to Utah. I still talk about that trip with my friends! I realized upon graduating from TCS how many lessons I learned from our outdoor trips: from camping along the Delaware Water Gap to Deer Lake to Utah. I learned independence, resilience, and compassion for nature as well as the people around me.

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Fighting Stress and Burnout – Olivia Jorgensen ’06

We caught up with Alexandra to see how and why she chose her path and whether anything in her Country School experience helped lead her down it. Alex told us she chose Physics and Mathematics because she’s discovered that she genuinely enjoys them, adding that she’s always been the type of person who wants to find an answer to the problem at hand. As to whether The Country School may have contributed to her direction, Alexandra’s answer was yes. Here’s how she elaborated:

Olivia Jorgensen comes from a family of medical doctors and researchers, and while she did not end up taking that route herself after graduating with a degree in Psychology from Yale, she has found another way to support health and wellbeing through her work with Thrive Global, the startup founded by Arianna Huffington.

“Thrive Global’s mission is to end the stress and burnout epidemic and catalyze the culture shift away from the idea that burnout is the necessary price for success by offering companies and individuals sustainable, science-based solutions to enhance both well-being and performance,” says Olivia, who serves as social media director for Thrive Global. “I work directly with Arianna on her social media, pulling together talking points for her speaking engagements, and doing research to prepare for events and meetings.”

Olivia, left, with brother Tyler ’02 and sister, Elisa ’99

Most notably, I still identify by Mr. McGee’s classic phrase: “Exercise your daily, inalienable right to be completely and utterly wrong.” In my fields, I’m wrong a lot. We all are. One of the greatest lessons that Mr. McGee taught me was that it’s okay to be wrong! Have a good attitude, learn from the mistake, and start the problem again.”

(On a side note, Mr. McGee wouldn’t be surprised to know that I am STILL notorious for making “bonehead errors” on the level of 2+1=4, and I hear his voice in my head every time I do so.....) I am very grateful for the way that TCS encouraged me to be able to ask questions and for help. The ability to speak with professors is a skill that I believe originated at TCS.

Olivia, who after The Country School went on to Choate Rosemary Hall and then Yale, said Thrive Global’s mission appealed to her immediately. “When I read about the mission of Thrive Global, I just couldn’t stop saying ‘Yes!!!’ out loud,” Olivia explained. “Burnout is a passionate topic for me, largely because I’ve observed the hours and lifestyle that my sister, Elisa Jorgensen (TCS ’99), who’s a chief resident in OBGYN at Yale University, has kept; she and her colleagues work nights, 24 hour-long shifts, and on holidays. She’s so passionate about her career and absolutely adores working, but I imagine she’d also benefit from a little more time to sleep and spend with her friends and family, and burnout is extremely prevalent in the medical community.”

Before joining Thrive Global, Olivia worked in the banking and media industries, which, as she said, “tend to be very fast-paced.” She said she found she produces her best work when she’s “able to take time to prioritize sleep, exercise, and recharge.” When she learned about Ms. Huffington’s new venture, Olivia said she knew she “needed to get involved with Thrive Global and be part of a movement that will help change the mindset that people need to be always-on in order to be successful.” Asked if her Country School experiences in any way helped lead her down her current path, Olivia had this to say:

Alex also pointed to another formative Country School experience that she calls upon from time to time, especially when things are stressful. “A slightly random thing that sticks with me from TCS has been the memory of poetry recitations,” she said. “I still have poems memorized from my Country School days, both in English and in French. I’ve learned to think through them in my head if I’m feeling stressed or need to distract myself. I’m very grateful for the appreciation of poetry and quotes that I believe originated at TCS.”

Once a “Lifer,” Always a Lifer – Eric Fabricant ’99

Since last fall, when he graciously accepted the role of co-chair of the school’s Alumni Association, Eric has been on campus a lot, giving even more meaning to the term “lifer.” Each time he comes to school, he feels like he’s returning to a place resembling home.

In each of my ten years at TCS, my teachers emphasized how important it was to be a well-rounded individual — that art, music, and outdoor education were just as important parts of my life as science and history.

That theory has absolutely inspired my career, which is really founded on the idea that people’s work lives and home lives aren’t separate, but integrated, and that spending time on the activities that recharge me will only enhance my mind at work. I still practice DEAR (drop everything and read) when I need to take a little break!

No doubt, that will be music to her 1st Grade teacher’s ears!

Exercising Her “Inalienable Right to be Completely and Utterly Wrong” – Alexandra Wagner ’11

A sophomore double majoring in Physics and Math at St. Lawrence University, Alexandra Wagner is off to a strong start. She was just admitted into Pi Mu Epsilon, an honorary national mathematics fraternity; Sigma Pi Sigma, the national honor society in Physics; and Omicron Delta Kappa, also known as The Circle and ODK, a national leadership honor society. Her first year, she was also honored with the Mary Reklis Award for Physics and Corolyn Susan Conkey Scholarship award for the highest academic record.

Alex is pursuing the 3-2 Engineering Program at St. Lawrence, which means that after three years there, she will spend two years at an engineering school, in her case, Columbia. At the end of the five years, she will graduate with a B.A. from the liberal arts school and a B.S. in engineering from the engineering school.

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Eric Fabricant attended The Country School from 1989-99, PreKindergarten through 8th Grade, qualifying him for that coveted designation, “Lifer.” (Back in the day, there was no 3-year-old PreSchool class, so anyone who attended for all 10 years earned the Lifer title.)

“Driving here always gives me a special deep feeling inside my entire being because TCS is a large part of my life’s foundation,” Eric said one morning after arriving on campus for a meeting. “This school and its staff gave me a major spark that I needed to achieve my goals, a launching pad for me to do it.”

On a recent visit to campus, Eric caught up with his 1st Grade teacher, Marcat Knowlton.

Eric, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Family Psychotherapist in private practice, said the teachers and peers he knew throughout his years as a student helped shape not only the kind of person he became, but what he does for a profession. “This school, its pedigree, the outreach and investment in its students, the help and encouragement, the practice of demonstrating good morals and values, it made me want to make a difference with others,” he said, adding that he draws on that sense of community he knew as a student in his work, as he helps others realize that they “have resources and they don’t have to do it alone.”

In his role as Alumni Association co-chair, Eric says he enjoys hearing from other graduates and finds it interesting how many of them “truly love what they’re doing and at the same time are often doing something out of their own choice to give back and help in some way, and I believe TCS had an influence on that.”

“I’ve always said, ‘Find a job that you love and you’ll never work another day in

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your life,’” Eric said. It’s a mantra he, himself, lives each day. “I can say I’m blessed because it’s unbelievable to have a career and feel like you’re not working. To witness first-hand you’re making a difference is an amazing experience,” he said.

“There’s just nothing more special than that.”

Looking around the new elliptical green by the Farmhouse, part of the Shaping the Future campus transformation, Eric said the campus feels even more welcoming these days than it did when he was a student. “This school gave me so much hope and optimism and so much confidence,” he said. “I owe so much to this school. No matter where I am and what I’m doing, I will always reconnect with The Country School.”

Lessons from The Country School – by Marina Sachs ’07 Editor’s Note: Marina Sachs worked at The Country School last year, running our Owl’s Nest and Enrichment program and organizing TEDxTheCountrySchool, a year-long series of workshops and events culminating in our first-ever TEDx conference. This year, Marina has been living and working in Boston, where she is applying to graduate school in arts education. Fortunately for The Country School, she has continued her relationship with our school, serving as co-chair for the Alumni Association alongside Eric Fabricant ’99. Marina is a 2015 graduate of Connecticut College, where she majored in Government and Religious Studies and helped run the college’s TEDx program. She wrote the following article about her experiences with young women on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

Sometimes it’s difficult to share another person’s story, especially when it has an overlooked (and unpopular) history, and millions of untold stories woven through it. Since 2015, I’ve worked to share the stories of a community I’m connected to on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota.

Like most Indigenous communities in North America, their history, which is American history, isn’t included in the popular texts about “American History.”

Why? Perhaps because the history of Indigenous communities in the U.S.A. doesn’t make America look so great. It’s a story of unfulfilled treaties, broken promises, and human displacement.

Indigenous issues were brought to the forefront of the American imagination recently because of the overwhelming response from Indigenous communities to the anticipated construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The stories of Native American folks in the United States are less ignored than they were previously, but when their history is the history of our country, shouldn’t those stories be told together?

My connection to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock Reservation and as a white ally emerged in 2015. I spent the summer of 2015 in the town of La Plant, on the Cheyenne River Reservation. While technically sovereign territory, the Cheyenne River Reservation is a plot of land about the size of Connecticut, located within the state border of South Dakota. Towards the Eastern edge of the Cheyenne River Reservation, La Plant is a town of about 160.

In 2015, alongside my good friend Ellie Storck, I began Lakota Youth Speak as a restorative justice and adolescent enrichment program that collaborates with teenagers to provide youth with access to sacred Lakota sites (like the Badlands and the Black Hills) and connect indigenous grief and mental health professionals and activists with community members through workshops on Lakota diet, language, and identity.

During our first summer, Lakota Youth Speak consisted of meeting with a dozen 13-16 year-old girls three times a week, offering workshops focused on positive body image, physical health in connection to indigenous diet, outdoor education and trips, and other creative exercises. At the end of the summer, all 13 of the young women involved in the program traveled to the Badlands for an outdoor trip and performed with Peter Yarrow at the Black Hills Unity Concert.

La Plant was my connection to indigenous folks, and their history. What was my original connection to La Plant? Believe it or not, a Cultural Arts performance at The Country School. When I was searching for a community that might be interested in partnering with me on Lakota Youth Speak, I reached out to Tiokasin Ghosthorse, an Indigenous activist, educator, and musician. When I was a student at TCS, I had seen Tiokasin perform the red cedar Lakota flute during a Cultural Arts performance, and had gotten a chance to speak with him afterwards. I think

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I was in 3rd or 4th Grade, and I distinctly remember him sharing with me that music always tells a story, and that it was important to tell stories, even if they were difficult to hear.

So, all these years later, in my senior year of college, I reached out to Tiokasin to see if he might have any suggestions. He did: his home community of La Plant, on the Cheyenne River Reservation. With support from a Davis Projects for Peace grant, I was able to connect with La Plant community members and nonprofit Simply Smiles, Inc. to create Lakota Youth Speak, which is anticipated to continue indefinitely.

During the summer of 2016, I returned to La Plant to spend time with the young women I connected with the previous summer, and our focus turned to the outdoors. Together, we traveled to the Black Hills, the Crazy Horse monument, and Sylvan Lake. With several weeks of planning and preparation, we finally traveled the seven hours to the Black Hills, and hiked, swam, and did doing teambuilding activities. Here, I must highlight the value of outdoor education. With so many of these young women engaging in activities that aren’t body-positive, I wanted to support them with opportunities to transform negative energy into one that promotes strong self-image.

This summer I will return to La Plant again to continue to work with my young friends. Among other activities, we will organize the first Indigenous youth TEDx conference, featuring Lakota artists, farmers, and activists, garden tours, a farm stand, and music performances.

It will take much more than one person with one small program to reconcile the way the United States has treated Indigenous Americans. In my opinion, it demands a revision of the way children learn U.S. history, a change in the way people explain Thanksgiving and the “Colonial Days,” and most importantly a shift in American thought about the value of Indigenous lives.

People make choices, and all history really is, is a series of choices. One of the many things I learned during my time as a student, and as a staff member at TCS, is that our choices matter — no matter how big or small our community. So much of what initially inspired Lakota Youth Speak came from my choices on outdoor trips at TCS. Whether it was on the 8th Grade trip to Moab, or the 5th Grade overnight to Deer Lake, there was never an easy choice out. The challenges on each trip demanded that we — students and faculty — work together as a unit. We had to acknowledge our differences in age and physical capacity and set a pace for the slowest member of the group, the person with asthma or the one recovering from a soccer injury. As a group, we had to recognize our most vulnerable members and make sure that we were supporting them the most as we summited the La Sal mountains. This kind of thinking is what made each outdoor trip with TCS so special, and all of us feel capable and included.

Returning from those outdoor trips at TCS, I always found myself struggling how to share everything and not bore my family with the story, or run it off like a list of activities. It’s difficult to tell stories, especially when they involve a backstory, an untold history, or vulnerable members of the community. And yet, these experiences and stories remind us that we are human, and that we need to continually work to amplify the voices of our friends whose stories and lives have been ignored or values diminished. This is the kind of thinking that I believe should guide our nation: acknowledge our differences, celebrate what makes us unique, and ensure that everybody, especially the most vulnerable members, can participate fully.

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Finding it difficult to explain these issues to your child? Sherman Alexie’s book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian captures what living on a reservation is like from the perspective of a 14-year-old cartoonist. For those looking for material for an older audience, I suggest An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.(beacon.org/An-Indigenous-PeoplesHistory-of-the-United-States-P1164.aspx)

Balancing Social Justice and Immigration Law – Nate Roy ’06

class and discuss things like critical race theory,” Nate said, adding that he became deeply involved in the college’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.

A heavily recruited lacrosse goalie out of high school, Nate was also bold enough to question the role athletics was playing in his college career. Ultimately, he decided to hang up his cleats, pads, and stick, opting to focus on academics without the distraction of sports, in part so he could experience different viewpoints outside his team. The freed-up time also meant he could dive deeply into issues that interested him and he even traveled to Peru for a month and a half to work with indigenous people in a quasi-NGO.

Nate Roy, a second year law student at American University’s Washington College of Law, hopes to become an immigration judge so he can combine his interest in social justice with the pragmatic realities of the U.S. immigration system and the laws that govern it.

Nate ended up graduating Cum Laude, with distinction in his major. In addition to helping run the seminar on race and ethnicity, he had an article published in the Small Wars Journal and was awarded the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity Award for Public Intellectual Excellence. At law school, he has continued to pursue some of those in-depth, outside-the-classroom interests; in addition to his work on immigration issues, he is also Executive Editor of the American University Business Law Review.

Nate traces his interest in immigration law to experiences he had as a Government major at Connecticut College, where he focused on Latin America, and particularly on U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis the region. He cites an independent study he did with a professor who specialized in justice, sustainability, and movement of people as particularly transformative, describing how that study evolved into a seminar on social justice and Latin America.

Nate acknowledges that this is a complicated time for anyone working in immigration law, but he remains hopeful that he can help strike a balance between social justice and what needs to be done to protect our country, and he embraces the opportunity to participate. “Having a job is one thing, but if you’re doing what you love, you’re going to get the most out of it,” he said. “At the end of the day, if I can grant someone asylum who really needs it, there will be nothing better than seeing the smile on that face. I can do that every day. I can change lives.”

With that in his background, when he entered law school, Nate enrolled in an immigration seminar. That experience, in turn, led to a job last summer with the Department of Justice’s Philadelphia immigration court, where he was able to work with several different judges and write opinions, two of which were asylum cases. “I loved it,” Nate said. “I’ve always been inspired to work on issues related to social justice. For me, working in the immigration system is that healthy balance. I really want to work on social justice issues but, as a lawyer, I have to face pragmatic issues.”

The experience in immigration court led him to seek out additional work in the field, and so Nate clerked this winter with the Department of Justice, having previously clerked with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. He has also served as a research associate for the International Refugee Assistance Project and as an intern at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Latin American Program. This summer, he will work for an immigration law firm specializing in corporate immigration law.

Empowering Others to Share Their Stories – Kate McNally ’09

Especially in this political climate, Nate’s determination to work in the field of immigration law takes some fortitude, and perhaps that’s where his Country School experience comes in. For him, Nate says the biggest takeaway from TCS may have been the opportunities he had to try new things. “The exposure to go to Moab, to be a free thinker, rather than being confined to just doing math, grammar, etc. — at TCS, you learn to try new things every day,” he said. “You learn to challenge your way of thinking.”

Available at Amazon, Forethought & Labor is the result of conversations Kate had with an array of Grand Manan personalities, from fishermen and boat builders to educators and artists. Her goal was to capture the stories of a community in a state of cultural and economic flux.

Kate, an Anthropology major, said she has a keen interest in people’s stories — particularly those whose stories would otherwise not be heard — and an equally strong interest in environmental studies. “I’m in Anthro trying to interview people whose livelihoods depend on natural resources,” she said, adding that she’s also collected stories from logging and farming communities. “I think sharing people’s stories can help legislators understand the daily realities of these people.”

Specifically, he talked about how Bob Borden, his 4th Grade teacher, encouraged him to listen to his own heart and mind. “Mr. Borden was a huge proponent of open thinking and open thought, of doing what you want to do vs. doing what society wants you to do,” he said. “I didn’t realize it then, but as you get older you realize how fortunate you were to have that opportunity.”

For her senior thesis, Kate wrote about her summer in the Shetland Islands in Scotland, where she collected stories from farmers. Ultimately, Kate plans to go on to graduate school in Anthropology, perhaps working as a high school or college teacher while also continuing to do her own research.

Likewise, his 5th Grade teacher Kerri Kelly allowed students to come into her room and listen to music during lunch recess. “She fostered and developed a little space for us to do what we wanted to do,” he said.

The net result, Nate said, was that he wasn’t “afraid to challenge the norm,” and that came in handy in college. For one thing, Nate found he was comfortable speaking up in class, even when the topic was difficult. “I wasn’t afraid to go into a

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When we caught up with her this winter, Kate McNally hadn’t even graduated from college yet, but she had already published a book. During the summer between her sophomore and junior years at Bates College, Kate was awarded an Otis Fellowship to collect oral histories from residents of Grand Manan, an island in Canada’s Bay of Fundy. Kate spent nine weeks in the fishing community interviewing local residents, taking their photographs, and illustrations, and ultimately compiling it all into her book, Forethought & Labor: Oral histories from the island of Grand Manan.

Kate, holding her book, catches up with her former English teacher, Teresa Sullivan.

When she stopped by campus this winter, she made a point of visiting the 5th Grade, where she actually conducted her first oral history, thanks to her 5th Grade teacher, Kerri Kelly. Kate recalled that Mrs. Kelly had asked students to interview

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family members; Kate chose to interview her grandfather about a trip he made to Colorado, eventually compiling his story into a book, complete with transcribed text and illustrations, much like Forethought & Labor.

Kate also recalled the history classes she took with Sarah Barber and how Mrs. Barber always inspired her students to consider history from the perspective of the people going through it. Rather than simply reading a text book, her students were inspired to actively portray historical characters. Doing that, and interviewing people to hear their recalled stories, “makes you see strangers as more complicated, whole people — and it means that these people can be your teachers just as much your college professor,” Kate said.

Postscript: As we went to press we learned that Kate has been awarded a Fulbright to support a fisheries research project in Newfoundland.

Lessons from MacLane Poetry – John Burt ’71

John Burt, the winningest MacLane Poetry reciter ever, with four 1st place medals to his name, has spent his entire career working in theater and the expressive arts. The founding artistic director of Traveling Artists and Performers Company, he has also served as associate producer of the Broadway musical Starmites, executive producer of the Children of War Theater and Film Project, producing director of the Eco-Theater Festival, co-founder and Chair of Cambodian Living Arts, and executive producer of the Cambodian-American rock opera, Where Elephants Weep. He is also a practicing Expressive Arts therapist and coach.

With such an illustrious resume (and such a busy schedule), The Country School was honored when John joined us to judge the 60th Anniversary MacLane Poetry Recitation. During the recitation, John told us he was also honored to be back on campus, judging a recitation which he recognizes as having played a formative role in his own life.

“One thing that I really have appreciated about this competition in my life is that it both informed who I became as a theater practitioner, as a theater therapist, and also as someone who spoke publicly and could refer to and often wanted to basically be able to tell a story,” he said. John went on to describe why he believes telling stories in this way is so important: We really are a people and a place of story. I work in a part of the the world where the oral tradition is still alive and very active and it’s really prominent more than the written word. And so it’s a joy to come back to where we are obsessed by the written word and be able to bring it forward in living evidence.

Selflessly Serving Others – Christopher Arrandale ‘14

When he graduated from The Country School in 2014, Christopher Arrandale was the recipient of the Community Service Award, presented annually to the 7th or 8th Grader who best exemplifies an awareness of the needs of others within and beyond the school community and who works selflessly to provide for those needs. Nearly three years later, Chris is still selflessly serving others.

Since the beginning of the school year, Chris has coached robotics for The Country School robotics teams, teaching both experienced robotics enthusiasts and novices about bot design and programming. Recently, he began teaching a 3D printing class, working with participants to design and use precise measuring devices for 3D printing. Through testing, students also gain an understanding of the engineering process. Last summer, Chris was one of the instructors for The Country School’s popular Minecraft camp, and this summer he will run another camp.

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Chris manages to balance extracurricular pursuits with his schoolwork at Daniel Hand High School. In addition to his activities at The Country School, he has worked at the Eli Whitney Museum for the past four years, teaching numerous computer classes, including Digital Photography, Scratch, CNC, and 3D printing.

He regularly volunteers at the high school, serving on the tech crew for the school’s various productions, a role he also fills on an as-needed basis for the Shoreline Arts Alliance. (From time to time, he still returns to The Country School to help out with theater tech needs, just as he did when he was a student.) He is a member of the Hacking Club at Daniel Hand, for which he serves as an advisor, he has been an altar server since 4th Grade at St. Margaret Church in Madison, and for many years, he helped teach Madison seniors computer skills through the Scranton Library.

In recent months, Chris has assisted one of his high school teachers in the preparation of a series of drone videos recording the transformation of The Country School campus through the school’s 60th Anniversary Shaping the Future campaign. Together, they recorded the evolution of the new athletic fields, tennis courts, and other athletic complex enhancements. They also recorded drone footage of the new parking and driveway system and the new courtyard between the Farmhouse and the academic buildings. Their handiwork can be seen on the school website.

Chris, an honor roll student at Hand, is taking an array of tech-related courses, including AP programming, and he hopes to study mechanical engineering in college. Asked if anything in his Country School experience helped spark his interest in technology and engineering, he answered, “Probably the very basic HTML class Mr. Leidt [Director of Technology] taught when I was in 5th Grade.”

“That set me on the programming path and then programming evolved into 3D printing and robotics and everything else I do,” Chris said, admitting that what really drives him is “probably a love for the subject. I don’t really see it as work. I enjoy it.” He also praised his other Country School teachers for helping him along the way. “They were all very encouraging,” he said. “They all saw the passion that I had.”

Truth be told, in addition to seeing Chris’s passion, his teachers also saw how willing he was to help others, and they knew the value of an older student mentor on a campus where students range in age from 3 to 14. Back when his teachers awarded him the TCS Community Service Award, this was part of their tribute: Congratulations, Christopher. Within a selfless group of students, you stand out. You volunteer when a teacher or peer needs help and you are generous with your time to students and people of all ages. You have demonstrated a particular talent with technology, which you eagerly share with the rest of The Country School community without making us feel like, well, dopes.

That makes you a gifted teacher and it makes the school’s younger students want to be just like you.

Those words, delivered by Head of School John Fixx in 2014, still hold true. On any given afternoon, whether he’s providing guidance on robotics programming or design or discussing the finer points of 3D printing, Chris can be found back on The Country School campus, surrounded by bright-eyed, eager young students, anxious to be just like him. We should all be so lucky.

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Bringing a Problem Into the Light – Matt Siretta ’04

Postscript: As we were going to press, we learned that Disco’d has been selected for the 2017 Brooklyn Film Festival. Congratulations, Matt!

Matthew Siretta is a filmmaker whose most recent film, Disco’d, examines the lives of homeless residents in Los Angeles as they face conditions that perpetuate uncertainty, displacement, and discombobulation. Disco’d reflects the harsh reality of both the promise of widespread assistance and the reality of a surging homeless population throughout the city and county. The film takes place against the backdrop of glitzy Los Angeles. Throughout the city, people are living in tents, coping with starvation, addiction, mental illness, and struggling to survive each day.

For a while, CC served as a teaching assistant in a New Orleans elementary school classroom, but in the end she found the atmosphere wasn’t what she had in mind or what she remembered. She switched her major to Psychology, where she found her Country School experiences served her well as a student in Tulane’s Science and Engineering School. “Coming from a school that fostered a love for science” was really helpful, she said, especially in a place where people were getting “stressed out” about the workload and expectations.

We caught up with Matt after he had launched a Indiegogo campaign to help with the final production of the film, which has been a year and a half in the making and for which he serves as director, writer, and producer. A graduate of SUNY Purchase College of New York with a degree in Cinema Studies, he has made several of his own short films, worked in TV and commercial production, and worked on documentary films directed by others. In 2014, he apprenticed with Frederick Wiseman on In Jackson Heights.

For her part, Tess said memories from The Country School continue to inform her direction. “I feel the fact that I want to work with kids stems from The Country School,” she said. “The Country School is so unique because the teachers are friends with kids, and having Reading Buddies made me realize I love to work with kids.”

Matt, who was grateful to several Country School friends for participating in the Indiegogo campaign, said he looks back on his Country School years with gratitude as well. “Looking back now I think the school helped preserve and nurture my interests creatively,” he said. “The first thing that comes to mind is Mr. A. [art teacher David Acheson] in art class not letting me erase a sketch, which forced me to work through it, finish it, to not feel too insecure about it, and think of everything as a mistake. This was a great lesson. I have many friends in the art world who have a hard time completing a work and getting it out there because there’s always something wrong with it.”

Matt said other things that come to mind include the annual poetry recitation, the school talent show where he screened one of his movies for the first time, classes that had students watch and discuss serious films, and classes that allowed students to make films. “I’m especially thankful for the classes where I had the option to make and show a film instead of having to write and hand in a paper,” he said. “I had already made movies at home with friends and family, but this was different. It was confidence-building and encouraged my interest in filmmaking in a more serious way. Suddenly I could focus on a subject in school, and instead of writing about it, I could make a film about it that would result in a grade and a real reaction from people. Looking back, I’m sure this further developed my passion for film early on, in recognizing the medium as a powerful tool of expression and visual storytelling.”

Classmates Since the Beginning – CC Cunningham & Tess Cianciolo ’09

pretty sure she wanted to be a teacher and also really interested in science, in part because of what she experienced in grade school. “Being in Mrs. Hartsoe’s advisee group and her science class fostered a love for science, love for research, and love for learning,” she said. She started out as an Education major, with a specific desire to teach 3rd Grade, explaining, “The person who inspired me to be a teacher was Mrs. McCurdy.” (Mrs. McCurdy is Kathy McCurdy, who recently retired from The Country School after 23 years.)

They were pals and classmates throughout their years at The Country School, went their separate ways for high school (Pomfret for one and Guilford High School for the other), but spent college together at Tulane University, where they have been roommates. Depending on where they move after graduation, CC Cunningham and Tess Cianciolo may just be roommates again.

We caught up with CC and Tess during a small mini-reunion in New Orleans this winter, when Liz Lightfoot ’77 was there visiting her daughter, Isabel Clements ’07, a first- year teacher through Teach for America.

CC majored in Psychology and minored in French and served as the musical director of Tula, an all-female a cappella group at Tulane. She’s interested in sustainable business and corporate responsibility and has had internships at Thomson Reuters. Tess majored in Communications and English, has had internships at NBC and Sesame Street, and hopes to work in children’s television.

Over coffee and breakfast, Tess and CC reminisced about The Country School and how it has helped shape their paths to this point. CC said she arrived at Tulane

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She also feels energized by the confidence The Country School instilled in her.

“The Country School makes everyone think they want to be superheroes,” she said. “So it might seem a stretch to apply for a job at Sesame Street. But I thought, ‘Why not?’”

Cultivating an Interest in Other Cultures (and Viticulture) – Matt Murphy ’98

Matt Murphy hadn’t necessarily planned on owning a wine distribution business, but he loved foreign languages and other cultures, and during terms abroad in college — first in Europe and then in South America — he was introduced to the world of wine. At the ripe old age of 23, he found himself running a wine importing business.

Fast forward some eight years, and Matt and his Murphy Distributors are representing 1,000 different products in their 20,000 square foot facility in Branford. Their repertoire now also includes beers and spirits, the company has spawned a non-profit leg to assist people in need and selected non-profits, and Matt has been honored as “Small Businessman of the Year” by New Haven Magazine.

We hadn’t seen Matt Murphy in years, though we had seen an interview on Fox news about his business, and so it was a treat to run into him on the golf course during The Country School’s annual Golf Classic for Scholarship last June. Matt said he was delighted to be supporting an event that would enable other children to experience The Country School. “I had a lot of really great teachers, and it was an amazing time in my life,” Matt said. “The experience, the way they taught, it was fantastic.”

We visited Matt at Murphy Distributors and, while touring his large facility, he explained how he more or less fell into the wine business. He had started college at the University of Arizona and decided to do a study abroad program in Prague in the Czech Republic. That experience led him to want to explore other locales, and so, after a visit to Brazil, he resumed his studies in Argentina, where he worked on his Spanish, played soccer, and discovered Malbec.

After heading back to Arizona to receive his diploma, the travel bug bit again, and he decided to visit a friend in Brazil. While there, he and his friend started a wine business. Eventually, Matt felt it was time to head home, so he sold his share of the business and returned to Connecticut.

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Back home, though, he kept thinking about the wine, so he sold his car and with the cash he earned, filed for his LLC, importing a pallette of Pinot Noir from Mendoza, Argentina. From his house in Madison, he would drive down Route 1, stopping at restaurants and liquor stores.

Department of Health, looking at the health effects of climate change and how events like hurricanes can impact public health.

After graduating from Yale, Zaynah got a job at the National Institutes of Health, working with the National Cancer Institute. There, she says, her focus shifted to nutrition. Basically, she was “looking at various cancers and how they might be influenced by different dietary factors”; in other words, assessing how life style might affect morbidity. Zaynah then spent six months at the George Washington School of Medicine, focusing on multidisciplinary work involving medicine, economics, and law. In essence, she was looking at tort reform and how it might affect the behavior of physicians.

“I was learning as I went, delivering out of the back of my car and doing books at night,” he said. He made his first sale in 2009. “I was 24, 23 years old and I turned into a businessman.”

Matt started the nonprofit leg of his business after Hurricane Sandy, when he noticed how many people and business were suffering. “We were trying to think how we maintain our sales when customers are shut down,” he said. “We created Buy Wine, Help CT.” Through his non-profit, they also hold wine dinners and wine tastings, with money donated back to charities.

Which brings her to her current undertaking — medical school at Northwestern.

“I thought about it when I was working at the NIH,” she said. “I had an interest in med school and looking at the health of population as a whole. I wanted oneon-one contact with individual patients but still have an interest in population health. My long-term goal is to have a career that combines public health and patient care.”

As we talked, Matt said it’s possible that what he’s doing had its roots in his years at TCS. He remembers loving his history classes and his language classes, both of which helped him gain an interest in other cultures and travel. He also loved the sports program — “athletics were huge,” he said — and part of attraction to live in Argentina was soccer. He even played professionally for a time.

Looking back on her path, Zaynah says she thinks she began to embrace school — and its many and varied offerings — during her years at The Country School.

After she joined the community in 6th Grade, “I started to really enjoy academics and really become curious,” she said. Specific memories include pricking her finger to check her blood type in science class with Terrie Hartsoe (“I really enjoyed science”), English with Jim Storms (“I got excited about literature and writing”), and, as she has already said, Latin with Mr. Wainio.

Matt recalled the active, hands-on nature of his classes and the study skills he gained, all of which stood him in good stead when he got to Hamden Hall for high school. Beyond that, Matt said he learned about the really important things, and those lessons have figured in his work as well. “I learned how to be a good person,” he said. “The school made me do things that I didn’t necessarily want to do, but they made me do it and I ended up liking it.”

A Woman of Many Talents and Interests – Zaynah Abid ’02

“I’ve never been just the science person — I really like the humanities, and TCS helped me acquire an interest in all subjects — math, science, history, English, Latin,” she said. “It definitely had an impact on me and where I am now.”

Now in her third year of medical school at Northwestern University, Zaynah Abid is interested in pursuing a career in pediatrics. On the other hand, she’s also keenly interested in public health research. Knowing her, her she’ll find a way to do both.

There was one other aspect of Country School life that was also hugely influential. When she entered 6th Grade at The Country School, Zaynah had never experienced a night in a tent before or the kinds of outdoor activities Country School students routinely engage in. All of the outdoor trips were impactful, but the week-long Utah trip really stands out in her mind. “The Southwest trip — I think that helped me in terms of experiencing and learning more about teamwork,” she said. “Teamwork is a huge part of medicine, and I think that trip was the first time I had that experience.”

In addition to her Country School diploma, Zaynah has diplomas from Taft (2006), Brown (2010), and the Yale School of Public Health (2012). In the not-too-distant future, she will add Northwestern Medical School to that list. When we caught up with her, Zaynah said she grew to love the sciences during her years at TCS. Even back then, though, her interests were multifaceted; as much as she was fascinated by science, she also found she loved Latin with Jason Wainio. “There’s something about the analytical thinking in Latin, math, and science,” she said.

“When I applied to college, I thought, do I want to do more classics or more science?” she said, explaining that she started out at Georgetown, planning to major in Chemistry with a minor in Latin and Math, but after two years she transferred to Brown, where she ultimately received her degree in Chemistry.

Summers spent interning at Pfizer and Merck were interesting, but she realized after graduation that she really “wanted to get out of a lab. I wanted to use the knowledge for more practical purposes and to have an impact on people.”

That led her to Yale, where she studied for her MA in Public Health, focusing on environmental health “because it was a way for me to combine my newly developing interest in public health with my background in chemistry,” she said.

Specifically, she looked at environmental contaminants, chemical structures, and how they might affect human health. She spent time at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, focusing on environmental health and again explored environmental contaminants such as cigarette smoke and how it can be measured in the blood of smokers. She then had an internship with the NYC

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A Call to Teach – Daniel Hartsoe ’05

Despite being the son of two teachers, Daniel Hartsoe says he never thought much about becoming a teacher himself. That changed in college at University of Pennsylvania, when he interned at Choate’s summer school, co-teaching classes in U.S. government and political ideologies and living in a dorm.

“I loved helping kids figure out how to be a student and an adult, especially those who were living away from home for the first time,” Daniel said. “When I went back to college that fall, I found myself imagining new courses and lesson plans for the subjects I was studying and reading about, and thinking back to my teachers at TCS and how they made each subject come alive for me.”

Since last fall, Daniel has been a History and Economics teacher at Northfield Mount Hermon. He has also been a coach and a dorm counselor. His first term, he says, was a bit of a blur, but there were things that felt familiar.

“NMH has a pretty unique history and culture among New England boarding schools,” he said. “And while it’s a bit too big to be ‘the best little school in the universe,’ some of the quirky traditions here bring me back to Reading Buddies,

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camping trips, the Lord and Lady of Levity, the MacLane Poetry Recitation, and all of the other traditions that make TCS so special.” Those qualities also remind Daniel why he decided to become a teacher in the first. In his words: To me, education isn’t about gaining knowledge or even gaining skills, but allowing yourself to be changed by what you learn and who you learn with.

I hope that I can help my students become better people, and that I can make close to the same impact on them as my teachers at TCS made on me.

Fulfilling a Prediction and a Promise – Micah Stahl ’01

When Micah Stahl was in 5th Grade, he had a conversation with Lois Tucker, his English teacher. As Micah recalls it, he and Mrs. Tucker were discussing writing during recess, when she said to him, “You know, Micah, you could write a book some day.”

Micah says he “kind-of chuckled, dismissing it as teachery banter that everyone is fed at TCS.” But then he remembers her looking right at him and saying very seriously, “No, you can do that. You can be a writer if you want to be. But you have to promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?” Micah recalls asking. Here was Mrs. Tucker’s response: That you’ll dedicate your first book to me. “And we both laughed, and I nodded in agreement,” Micah said. “It was a jovial moment, but it was one that really stuck with me.”

Twelve years later, after completing his undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing at the University of Rochester, Micah wrote his first comic book.

“I made sure to deliver on my promise,” he said. “There’s an insert in the front cover that dedicates the comic to her.”

Here is the message Micah wrote in that first comic book. We don’t know if Mrs. Tucker has seen it, but we’ll be sure she receives a copy of this magazine.

Fast forward another eight years, and Micah has just learned that he will have a second book published soon. Micah, now studying for an MFA in writing for television and film at Emerson College, is the book’s author, while a friend is the illustrator. Micah describes the story as dark humor that follows two celebrities, loosely based on Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek, during a day of golf. Micah has also had several pieces selected as finalists in writing competitions, and he’s hoping an animation he created will be accepted for an upcoming competition.

Focusing on his art and writing full-time is a new thing for Micah. For several years, he inhabited the high tech world, working in quality assurance for companies like Bluefin and then Twitter. That ended two years ago, when he quit his day job, opting to focus on art and writing more or less full-time, while doing some teaching and working on a startup in his spare time. This fall, Micah really jumped into the life of an artist, enrolling in the Emerson MFA program, which takes place partly in Boston and partly in Los Angeles. (He previously received an MA in Graphic Design, Comics, and Illustration from Hogeschool Sint-Lukas in Belgium.)

In retrospect, Micah’s interest in the arts really started back at The Country School. “I did a lot of drawing at The Country School — I loved to make things,” he said, recalling that there was always a group of guys who would spend lunch period in the art studio, working alongside Mr. Acheson. It’s no surprise to Micah that some of those guys are now renowned artists, including Jared Madere ’01, whose show he saw at the Whitney Museum last year.

Just as he credits Mrs. Tucker with influencing his writing, Micah says Mr. Acheson influenced his artwork, if not his entire path in life. “The most amazing thing that Mr. A. does is that he pushes you to work something out,” he said. “If you think it’s not good, push through, which is an amazing lesson to learn if you’re under 15 years old.”

It’s a lesson Micah says he has applied at several points in his life, whether in school, in his work, or in his art. In the end, it may also help him achieve his ultimate goal. Asked what that might be, Micah responds, “My ultimate goal is to be able to do the work I like to do and to live on it.”

Postscript: Before he left for the West Coast last fall, we caught up with Micah at an art exhibition and auction he organized to benefit Camp Amerikids, a summer camp for children with HIV/AIDS and sickle cell. Micah’s siblings, Adam ’03 and Rachel ’04, have volunteered for the camp every summer for years, and Micah wanted to do something to help out. His idea for the show was “Stretch Armstrong, I Loved You” — or basically design the toy you wish you’d had as a child — and he invited fellow artists to submit designs. We were pleased to see several alums and current and former teachers at the show, including David Acheson and his wife, Linda; Adam Stahl ‘03; Rebecca Kostich ’03; Marina Sachs ’07; Isabel Clements ’07; Honor Clements ’12; Pam Glasser, TCS Director of Admission and Curriculum, and her husband, Martin P ’09, ’11; and Liz Lightfoot ’77, P ’05, ’07, ’08, ’12, Alumni Relations.

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Alumni in the News

Designers and Builders: Oliver ’93 and Evan ’98 Haslegrave Oliver and Evan Haslegrave are New York-based designers and builders whose bar and restaurant designs have won numerous awards and accolades from the architecture and design community. Wired magazine said the Haslegraves are “responsible for the look and layout of a particularly beautiful class of bars in New York City” and Dwell said their company, hOmE Studios, is “responsible for some of New York’s most beloved jewel-box restaurants.” They’re even featured talking about their design work in an ad for Timberland.

Now The New York Times Style Magazine has joined the chorus, featuring the duo in a recent article about furniture and objects designed for the home. From the article: “The Brooklyn-based interior design firm Home Studios has been slowly catching up to its name. The brothers behind it, Oliver and Evan Haslegrave, earned their reputation by outfitting some of New York’s coolest bars and restaurants (Elsa, Paulie Gee’s) with custom carpentry, tile work, lighting fixtures and furniture. Commercial commissions still make up the bulk of their operation … but they’ve begun to take on residences as well, and Oliver recently designed a line of objects and furniture called Homework, debuting in May.” We were thrilled last April when the Haslegraves sent photos of their work for the 60th Anniversary Alumni Art celebration. They weren’t able to be with us in person (they were on a project in Las Vegas), but their mother, Candace, and sisters, Hadley and Morgan (both former Country School students), joined us. One of these days, we hope to get them all back to Madison.

Like Father, Like Daughter: Eva Lewitt ’99 Eva Lewitt was featured recently in an article in WMagazine titled “Meet Sol LeWitt’s Artist Daughter Eva LeWitt.” The article describes how, as a little girl, Eva would work side-by-side with her famous father, the “late, great conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.” (She also spent plenty of time working side-by-side with her classmates in the TCS art studio.) “He always made me a space where I could work next to him,” Eva is quoted as saying in the article. “I would use all of the extra materials that were lying around to make sculptures out of them.” The article coincided with “All Over,” an all-female group exhibition in London in which her work was featured.

Climate, Environment, Disasters, and Humans: Michael Mann ’94 Michael Mann, assistant professor of geography at the George Washington University, was featured on WKPBS about a study showing that human activity is to blame for 90 percent of California wildfires. He was also interviewed on WAMC’s “The Academic Minute” about whether local weather influences whether someone believes in global warming. Here is an excerpt from the latter:

Andrew Epprecht ’13: Teenage Sock Magnate At the ripe old age of 16, Andrew Epprecht launched a sock company using crowd-sourced funding and design and featuring bamboo fiber. Now a senior at Hotchkiss, Andrew and his company, Noblestitch, have sold a few thousand pairs of socks and won an international design award.

A few months ago, Andrew was interviewed by Ann Nyberg of WTNH TV. “How are you so smart?” she asked during the interview. This photo is from a tweet by WTNH’s Scott O’Donnell when he visited the studio. Note his comment: “CT kid making things happen. Cool socks, great story.” Andrew will be heading to Duke University next year, where, no doubt, many of his classmates will be wearing flashy socks made of bamboo fiber.

A Consumer Diary: Elizabeth Chin ’77 Elizabeth Chin has written a new book, My Life with Things: The Consumer Diary.

Described by Times Higher Education as “unconventional and provocative,” her book is a “meditation on her relationship with consumer goods and a critical statement on the politics and method of anthropology.” Elizabeth examines her attachment to the things she values and “in so doing, she prompts readers to reconsider their own consumption, as well as their assumptions about the possibilities for creative scholarship.” My Life with Things was published in 2016 by Duke University Press. Elizabeth, formerly a professor of Anthropology at Occidental, is a professor of Media Design Practices at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Immigration Policy and Civil Rights: Gabriel “Jack” Chin ’78 Gabriel “Jack” Chin, the Edward L. Barrett Chair of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at University of California Davis, has been in the news a lot in recent months, commenting on immigration for news outlets such as the Sacramento Bee, KPFA, Vox, and NPR. A teacher and scholar of Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Race and Law, Jack is a graduate of Wesleyan (BA), the University of Michigan (JD), and Yale Law School (LLM).

A World of Color: Photographer Adrien Broom ’94 Renowned photographer Adrien Broom, was much in the news this year. We read articles about her work in The New York Times, the New London Day, Ink magazine, Smithsonian, and more. She has had exhibitions recently in New Orleans, New York, Switzerland, and the U.K. and also locally at the Florence Griswold Museum, where she was part of the recent blockbuster photography exhibition, In Place: Contemporary Photographers Envision a Museum. This winter, her work was featured in A Colorful Dream, a solo exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London.

In our study, we wanted to understand the relationship between people’s local experiences with weather and the likelihood they believe in climate change.

We found that the two are closely related: In regions of the country that have experienced record-breaking heat, locals are more likely to believe in climate change. But people in areas that have experienced record low temperatures are less likely to trust the scientific consensus. … It’s unfortunate that climate change was framed early on in people’s minds as imminent and universal ‘climate warming’.

This set up an expectation that everyone could simply open their window and feel its damning effects.

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A Few Alumni Statistics

(Detail) from a photograph by Adrien Broom which was part of the 60th Anniversary Alumni Arts Celebration.

Punching Above Our Weight: Alumni Athletes Another statistic we noticed as we went through news reports and files — and especially as we watched the evolution of our new athletic facilities — was how many Country School athletes have gone on to play not only at the high school level, but at the collegiate level. For a complete list, visit thecountryschool.org/athletics/alumni-collegiateathletes. Below is a list of alumni currently in college (or recently graduated) who played on a collegiate team.

Considering that our graduating classes have an average of 25 students, the number of alumni playing collegiate sports is pretty staggering.

College Placement Last year Head of School John Fixx wrote a compelling and popular blog about the so-called “college arms race” and the fact that it matters less where you go to college and more what you do once you get there. That said, the blog also pointed out that, given the intense competition in college admissions, the list of colleges attended by Country School alumni is impressive. Below, from the blog, is a list of the colleges Country School alumni enrolled in as freshman at the start of this academic year:

Maria Boyle ’12 - Harvard, rowing Henry Hunt ’12 - Hamilton, lacrosse Morgan Malloch ’12 - Gordon, field hockey Miles Michaud ’12 - Bates, baseball Matt Murchison ’12 - Bryant, football Remy Newton ’12 - Northeastern, rowing Patrick O’Leary ’12 - Kenyon, baseball Sloane Sweitzer ’12 - Bryant, lacrosse Charlie Zane ’12 - Dickinson, golf Jack Foyle ’11 - College of Charleston, golf Max Griswold ’11 - University of Rhode Island, sailing Kelsey Hartsoe ’11 - Union, soccer and softball Noah Hastings ’11 - Princeton, ultimate frisbee MacKenzie Hawkes ’11 - Northwestern, golf Luke Nguyen ’11 - Amherst, soccer Alexandra Wagner ’11 - St. Lawrence, swimming Emily Yue ’11 - Harvard, ice hockey Phillip Crampton ’10 - Kenyon College, basketball Ryan Epprecht ’10 - Tufts, sailing Jordan Glassman ’09 - Kenyon College, soccer Luke Lemieux ’10 - Fairfield University, tennis Rachel Muskin ’10 - St. Lawrence, soccer Matt Picard ’10 - Trinity, lacrosse Alex Rieger ’10 - Kenyon, tennis Lucy Chadderton ’09 - University of Wisconsin, rowing Samantha Sandler ’09 - Trinity, field hockey Nick Setaro ’09 - St. Lawrence, football Jake Smith ’09 - Lehigh, rowing Will Steiner ’09 - Villanova University, soccer Matt Wallack ’09 - UConn, basketball Ryan Wallack ’09 - UConn, basketball Elizabeth Weathers ’09 - Bowdoin, soccer Lauren Yue ’09 - Wesleyan, field hockey and lacrosse Alastair Clements ’08 - Columbia University, rowing

Bryant University (2) Fairfield University (2) Harvard University (2) Bard College Bates College Bentley Boston University Catholic University of America Clemson College of Engineering College of Charleston Dickinson College George Washington University Gordon College Hamilton College Ithaca College Kenyon College Massachusetts Maritime Academy Northeastern University Pomona College Quinnipiac University Tulane University Union College University of Miami University of San Francisco Wofford College Yale To read the entire blog, visit tcsheadofschool.blogspot. com/2016/03.

We have yet to hear from all alumni who will be entering college next year, but among those we have heard from or about, these are the options being considered or to which former students have already committed: Columbia (2), Yale (2), Boston College (1), Carleton College (1), Clemson (1), Colorado College (1), Duke (1), Georgetown School of Foreign Service (1), Hofstra (1), Middlebury (1), University of Michigan (1) For more about alumni high school and college placement, visit The Country School website.

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What Could Be More Important?

Ode to our Teachers

An Homage to Teachers

by Steve Davenport, Head of School from 1973-77

A Thank You to Teachers from a Parent, Grandparent, and Special Friend

When I think back on my tenure as the head of The Country School, what comes most clearly into focus is my reverence for teachers who work with elementary age students. TCS is an elementary school in both senses of that word, where very good teachers teach fundamental skills and the love of learning to very young people. What in the world could be more important?

Genie Copp P ’69, ’71, ’73, ’76, GP ’02, ’04 has spent a good portion of her life either driving to Madison from her home in Old Lyme or volunteering on The Country School campus. A former trustee and the mother of four Country School graduates (Allyn ’69, Lucy ’71, Betsey ’73, and Genie ’76), Genie is also the grandmother of two graduates (Antone ’02 and Zef ’04 Konst). In addition, she has been an honored guest during Grandparents and Special Friends Day, serving as special friend to David, the son of Katherine Cahouet Conolly ’77 P ’21.

I have several friends, professors, who have recently retired after a lifetime of teaching at my alma mater, Oberlin College. They are celebrated, well known, widely published. There’s an aura around them. It so happens that their spouses have spent a lifetime teaching too, in the local public elementary school. They are nowhere near as widely known or celebrated, but I’m convinced they had the more challenging job. And certainly the more important one. After all, first thing first.

When I came to TCS, my experience in the classroom had been mostly in high school, and a short stint teaching at night in a community college. My job in teaching literature was to lead the student to find the significance and the beauty of the work for her or himself. The fact is, though, the novelist or poet or essayist had already done the work by the act of writing it. The nature of my work was akin to translating — while the nature of the elementary teacher’s work is akin to code breaking. That’s a more complex, subtler challenge.

I had already sensed this when I arrived, but it was impressed more deeply every time I observed a great Country School teacher at work, and saw how designed her, or his, classroom was, and watched the pedagogical decisions made, the subtle adjustments to meet each student’s need, minute by minute. And when, on occasion, I substituted for a teacher, it was impressed on me even more deeply.

I frequently felt on the verge of being in over my head, and at the end, I was always exhausted.

During a recent visit with Genie, we talked about what, in her estimation, makes The Country School so unique.

Genie doesn’t hesitate when asked that question. “A good teacher is the secret,” she says.

But my biggest take away from my time there is my admiration for the teachers.

Genie talks about what a difference The Country School made when she enrolled her oldest child, Allyn, in the 1960s. Almost immediately, she said, his teachers found a way to engage him — deeply — in his classes and life at the school. “During the carpools, I’d hear all about the teachers,” she said, adding that she never minded driving to school, because that’s where you’d learn all the details. “Car talk is such an important time that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Steve Davenport, who served as Head of School at the Athenian School in Danville, CA, after leaving The Country School, is the author of two novels. The first, Saving Miss Oliver’s, was published in 2006. The second, No Ivory Tower, was published last summer. Both are about a leadership transition at the same independent, girls’ boarding school. We were thrilled to welcome Steve and his wife, Joanna, to campus in May for a reading of No Ivory Tower and to talk about Steve’s favorite topic: teachers and how they change lives.

Genie says she still remembers many of the teachers from that time. Some of the names she mentions are Mr. West, Mr. Morrison, and Mrs. Shermer. “They were all good,” she said. “They were all teaching because they wanted to, because of the subject.”

I can remember many wonderful moments at the school, such as the annual poetry recitation, which inspires the love of poetry — my son Jim, now in his 50s, can still recite, and be moved by, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est.

Genie also said she was impressed with the way Country School teachers were able to engage all students, finding something that each child could be interested in, so that every student wanted to participate. “The teachers were aware of the various abilities,” she said. “In a class of 30 or 35, how much can you really help release that interest? Our children were very, very lucky. Nobody ever said they didn’t want to go to school.”

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Yes, Genie says, as she looks back on her years at The Country School, it’s the teachers — and the happy students — that stand out. “It would be interesting to know how many of The Country School’s students became teachers,” she said.

We agree. Genie raised an interesting question, and so following our discussion, we began researching.

We’re not even close to finished, but a quick survey of our most recent classes to graduate from college, reveals the following: Hannah Johnson ’08, a recent graduate of American University, is teaching at the Lab School of Washington, D.C. This summer she will teach two courses at our Summer Fun & Learning camp program — one for girls and robotics and one a co-ed a cappella group Alastair Clements ’08, a recent graduate of Columbia University, will start teaching in Chicago through Teach for America Isabel Clements ’07, a recent graduate of Wesleyan University, is teaching 4th Grade English in New Orleans through Teach for America Hannah Chappell ’07, a recent graduate of Hamilton College, is studying for her MA in English Language and Literature at University College London, and prior to that, taught at Greens Farms Academy and at Choate’s Summer School Jerry Gargano ’07, a graduate of Bryant University, spent two years teaching English in Cuenca, Ecuador Marina Sachs ’07, who oversaw Owl’s Nest and coordinated our outrageously successful TEDxTheCountrySchool program last year, plans to attend graduate school in arts education Daniel Hartsoe ’05, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, is teaching History and Economics at Northfield Mount Hermon, having spent several summers teaching at Choate’s Summer School and a semester teaching in the Economics department

There are also several teachers among Genie’s offspring. Grandsons Zef and Antone are both teaching — Zef, a Haverford graduate who is pursuing his PhD in Chemistry at UC Irvine, is teaching Chemistry, while Antone, who graduated from Cal Arts and received his MFA from Yale, is teaching art at Brooklyn College. Genie’s son, Allyn, teaches AP Physics at Fall River Public Schools in Rhode Island.

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Genie Copp attends Grandparents and Special Friends Day with Katherine Connolly ’77 and her son, David.

A Salute to Parents

the event brought together close to 200 members of our community, both current and former, and raised more than $100,000 for the Shaping the Future Campaign.

Once a Part of the Family, Always a Part of the Family Since The Country School’s earliest days, parents have literally made our world go around. Founded by a group of moms and dads and then overseen and supported by a largely parent Board of Trustees in the earliest years, The Country School has always relied on the support of parents.

This year’s magazine focuses primarily on our alumni, but we also take a moment to salute the Country School parents who have given us so much over the years. Here, we highlight a few:

Thank you, Sheila, for your remarkable contributions. We also thank your husband, Jeff, and Bianca, Francesca, Gabby, and André for allowing The Country School to be a major part of the Salkin family for so many years.

Laurie Noble P ’03 Thank you to Laurie Noble, parent of Michelle ‘03 and the mastermind behind Laurie Noble Design, LLC, for sharing her design vision and expertise with The Country School.

This spring, students and teachers returned to campus after March break to some beautifully transformed classrooms and public spaces, and we’re excited for more improvements to come.

Alden Murphy P ’02, ’02 Thank you to Alden Murphy, parent of Graham and Alec ‘02, for kicking off The Country School’s 5th Annual IDEA Day with some wonderful storytelling. IDEA Day (IDEA stands for Interpreting Diversity Education through Action) is a school-wide celebration featuring a series of workshops, activities, and discussions aimed at helping students view the world differently through a better understanding of the nature and development of diversity on a personal, national, and global scale. This year’s theme was storytelling, and throughout the day students shared stories about their own families and their ancestors as they also heard others’ stories, helping us celebrate both what we have in common and what makes us each beautifully unique.

Wil Bradford P ’93, ’96, ’00 and Mary Dangremond P ’01, ’06 Back in the day, Wil Bradford and Mary Dangremond were an incredible duo as Country School trustees and volunteers at all manner of events. Fortunately for us, long after their children have graduated from The Country School, Mary and Wil continue to do their thing for TCS. Just this spring, they were back at it, serving as auctioneer and auctioneer assistant at Shipshape & Ready for the Future, our spring auction and gala at Mystic Seaport. As they always seem to do, Mary and Wil galvanized the crowd, inspiring generous and boisterous bidding, and helping to raise more than $72,000 for our school and its program.

Sheila Salkin P ’06, ’08, ’10, ’16 As the mother of four Country School alumni — Bianca ’06, Francesca ’08, Gabby ’10, and André ’16 — Sheila Salkin not only spent the better part of two decades driving to and from campus, but she spent countless hours during each of those 20 years ensuring that The Country School was the best school it could be.

Wil and Mary and their respective spouses, Deetsie Bradford and David Dangremond, have done inestimable good for The Country School over the years. Likewise, their children, Sam and Gus Dangremond and Tyler, Sam, and Harry Bradford, have been supportive alumni, with several of them returning to campus to judge the MacLane Poetry Recitation and/or supporting the school, their teachers, and their classmates in other ways. As a community whose mission statement calls upon us to “foster a feeling of family,” we are grateful for these longstanding friends. By their example, they show us that, at The Country School, it’s not only education that lasts a lifetime.

During her two decades as a Country School parent, Sheila served as Parent Teacher Association leader, a Room Parent, and chair or co-chair of almost every single auction we held, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for our school. On occasion, she even served as school nurse.

In recognition of her truly inestimable contributions, Head of School John Fixx presented the first-ever volunteer service award, henceforth known as the Salkin Volunteer Service Award, to Sheila last year, her final year as a Country School current parent. Established in honor of the 60th Anniversary of the school’s founding by parents, the Salkin Volunteer Service Award “recognizes an individual whose long-term leadership, commitment and fondness for The Country School have increased community awareness and support of the mission of The Country School.”

Alden, an arts therapist, arts advocate, and accomplished performer, started the day off during All School Meeting, explaining how stories were originally passed down orally from generation to generation. She then shared two stories, one from a West African tradition and one Native American.

As she finished one of her stories, a 6th Grader exclaimed, “NOW that makes sense!”

Laurie Noble Design, LLC is a 2017 Best of Houzz Award winner. Laurie’s designs, professional stagings, and other contributions can be seen in issues of CTC&G, Country Home Country Gardens, House Beautiful, House & Garden and Victoria magazines.

We are grateful to Alden for all she has always brought — and continues to bring — to TCS. When her twin sons were students, she arranged for artists to visit campus through our vibrant Cultural Arts Program. In recent years, she has returned to judge the MacLane Poetry Recitation, and last year she portrayed Ophelia during the musical portion of the 60th Anniversary Arts Celebration, which featured a musical ode to Shakespeare. How fortunate we all are that Alden is a part of The Country School story.

Michelle, Laurie’s daughter, attended The Country School from 3rd through 8th Grades, graduating in 2003. The entire school community was devastated in 2013 when Michelle died in a car crash in Guilford, with classmates holding gatherings to remember her and many members of the community coming together for her memorial service.

Until this winter, Laurie hadn’t been on campus much since Michelle’s graduation, and her return was definitely a homecoming. “I am thrilled to be back at The Country School,” she said. “It has brought an unexpected joy and healing element to my life. Thank you all so very much!”

Laurie had this to add:

Mary Dangremond and Wil Bradford led the auction action at our spring fundraiser at The Cooley Gallery in Old Lyme a few years back.

Someone recently asked about preschool recommendations in a Madison group on Facebook.

Of course, I added The Country School. I was happy to see that others did as well. I only wish that I could thoroughly convey in words the magnitude of the foundation that The Country School creates for the duration of the student’s lives. It is so much more than a school.

We say the same to you, Laurie. It is a pleasure to reconnect, and we can’t thank you enough for sharing your vision and your love for The Country School with the whole school community. For more about Laurie’s work, see laurienobledesign.com.

Fittingly, Mr. Fixx made the presentation during the 60th Anniversary Diamond Jubilee Auction. Co-chaired, yet again, by Sheila, working with Terese Howey P ’14, ’16, ’19,

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Class Notes Class of 1964 The Country School was honored to present the 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award to Duncan MacLane. In a special celebration last May, Duncan was honored for his groundbreaking work in the field of naval architecture and for his leadership at The Country School. A renowned boat designer and world-class catamaran racer who has played a key role in several America’s Cup campaigns, Duncan is also the moving force behind the David and Marcia MacLane Endowment for Scholarship at The Country School. Duncan and his wife, JoAnn, established the scholarship to honor his parents, Marcia and David T. MacLane, The Country School’s first Headmaster.

During his talk at the Distinguished Alumni Award Ceremony, Duncan shared stories about growing up on the Country School campus and about his groundbreaking work in boat design, a prime example of STEAM in action. Duncan currently serves as naval architect and Vice President of Engineering at Express Marine in Camden, N.J. He also does consulting through MacLane Marine Designs, through which he has helped design several world-class racing catamarans and been involved in seven America’s Cup entries.

Susan Strickler retired as director and CEO of the Currier Museum of Art in June 2016, after serving the

Manchester, N.H., museum for 20 years. Her retirement was announced in New Hampshire newspapers and on New Hampshire public radio. From an article on NewHampshire.com: Little is recognizable between the Currier of 1996, when Susan E. Strickler took the job of museum director, and the institution that she leaves later this month. Its name has changed, from the Currier Gallery of Art to the Currier Museum of Art. Its size has changed, doubling after a two-year, $21 million expansion that opened in 2008. And everything has grown: its bank account, its programming, even its reputation.

Class of 1966 We enjoyed seeing Jonathan Waters at our 60th Anniversary Alumni Arts celebration, and we are delighted that his sculpture, Haiku, continues to grace our campus. Now situated in a new location near the new oval grass courtyard, Haiku greets everyone who arrives on campus. Jonathan installed his sculpture in celebration of our school’s 55th Anniversary.

Class of 1970 Stephen Davis, the 2014 Country School Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, is a global leader in the field of corporate governance. Also a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, Steve serves as a senior fellow and associate director at the Harvard Law School Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investor. He has authored or co-authored several books, including The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda, and Apartheid’s Rebels: Inside South Africa’s Hidden War, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A former member of The Country School’s Board of Trustees, he also served for four years as legislative director of the State Senate majority caucus in Hartford. Steve’s son, Gabriel Davis, is a member of the Class of 2010.

Class of 1974 The 2008 Distinguished Alumni Award winner, Jerry Davis is a film and theater producer and children’s book author who recently returned to Madison to manage Davis Realty.

Since 1991, Jerry has been involved in

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animation, beginning with Pixar’s original Toy Story. His other movies include Warner Bros.’ Iron Giant and Fox’s Ice Age. Last year, Jerry joined us at our 60th Anniversary Alumni Arts Celebration. Jerry and Peter Black catch up at the 60th Anniversary Alumni Arts Celebration.

Class of 1976 Ann Sherwood joined us back on campus on Prize Day 2016 to present the Ruth Lee Sherwood English Award to a graduating 8th Grader. Here she catches up with Liz Lightfoot and Katherine Cahouet Connolly, both class of 1977.

Distinguished Alumni Award. At that time, he shared stories about his work to better serve those trying to make a living at the base of the pyramid — or the world’s largest but poorest socioeconomic group.

Katherine Cahouet Connolly is on the Board of Trustees at The Country School. Her son, David, is a happy 4th Grader at TCS. Cecil Marlowe lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where she is married with three grown kids. Her youngest is a freshman at the University of Dayton, her middle is a nurse in Chicago, and her oldest is a consultant in Washington, D.C. Annette Sachs Cook designs luxury handbags through her company, Pink Tulips. Pink Tulips handbags are sold at boutiques and were recently featured at Urban Outfitters. Learn more at pinktulips.biz.

Class of 1977 Ted London, vice president and senior research fellow of the Scaling Impact Initiative at the William Davidson Institute of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, was honored recently with a Faculty Pioneer Award from the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. The Aspen Institute, an educational and policy study organization that provides a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues, presented the award to business professors teaching about the pressing “grand challenges” faced by the world today, including climate change, inequality, global health, financial inclusion, human rights, resource scarcity, and economic development.

Ted’s award came with a Field Building distinction, recognizing his longstanding contributions to base-ofthe-pyramid strategies and his impact on the collective understanding of a field of inquiry and how that field of inquiry is taught in MBA classrooms.

Ted was on campus six years ago to receive The Country School’s 2011

young son to campus during our fall 2015 alumni reunion. As Kimberly told us, she and John met in The Country School’s 5th Grade, graduated, and went their separate ways. A few years ago they reconnected and the rest is history. (We are so glad that The Country School was part of that history!)

Liz Lightfoot continues to work parttime at The Country School doing alumni relations and outreach. Contact her (alumni@thecountryschool.org) if you have news to share! Her four children, Graeme, Isabel, Alastair, and Honor Clements, are all Country School graduates (classes of ’05, ’07, ’08, and ’12. respectively), meaning she has spent almost 21 years on campus — and that doesn’t include her own years as a student. Corny as it sounds, Liz will say that it’s been a pleasure to be part of the TCS community for so long. She remains eternally grateful to her own teachers and to everyone who taught her children. “Both as a mom and as a former student myself, I feel very lucky to have had The Country School in my life,” she says.

Liz recently connected with Trey Pegues through a mutual friend on Facebook, Sandy Broadus, a Country School parent and trustee. They have yet to catch up in person, but she’s hoping to get Trey back to campus one of these days.

Class of 1988 It was a treat to welcome Kimberly Knight and John Dykstra and their

Class of 1994 We loved seeing Adrien Broom, and her sister, Margot ’98, at In Place: Contemporary Photographers Envision a Museum, the blockbuster show at the Florence Griswold Museum, where Adrien was one of the artists featured.

Class of 1996 We enjoyed catching up with Owen Dodd this past fall when we spoke with him about his work to support Green Card Mtaani, an organization in Kibera, Kenya, dedicated to empowering students through sport.

Look forward to hearing more about Owen — including his day job working for the U.S. House of Representatives — in Country Connections 2017, Volume 2.

Class of 1997 We were devastated to hear the news that Luke Coccomo passed away in mid May. Our condolences to his family, classmates, and friends. For more, see In Memorim.

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Class of 1998 Kristen Gunther is teaching 1st and 2nd Grade at The Mountain School in Winhall, VT. Class of 1999 In a special celebration just before we went to press, astrophysicist Jonathan Pober was presented with The Country School’s 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award. An Assistant Professor of Physics at Brown University whose work focuses on the origins of the universe, Jonathan is part of an international collaboration known as the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, through which scientists aim to look back more than 13.5 billion years to learn about the period when the universe first became bathed in light.

Students were riveted by Jonathan’s talk and peppered him with questions about his work. Stay tuned for more detail about his visit in Country Connections 2017 volume 2.

Eric Fabricant caught up with Liz Gunn this winter. Liz lives in New York City, where she works for BaubleBar jewelry. Eric, a licensed clinical social worker, is co-chair of The Country School’s Alumni Association Board (see Taking Stock: Student Outcomes).

Noah Stahl is living in the Boston area, where he serves as Budget and Planning Manager at City Year. Until recently, he was in New Orleans, where he served as Associate Director of Early Childhood Strategy with Louisiana’s Recovery School District, a special statewide school district tasked with transforming underperforming schools into institutions that promote the academic and life success of all students.

Aaron Silidker joined us at the retirement party for Sarah Barber and Kathy McCurdy. It was great to catch up with Aaron, who shared a few words of tribute for Mrs. Barber, his history teacher. Aaron, a graduate of the University of Michigan, is a mechanical engineer who lives and works in Boston. We thank him for making the trek back to Madison to celebrate his former teacher!

This year the class of 1999 lost two beloved members. Our deepest condolences to the families of Rob Chrostowski and Kira Miers and to all members of the class of 1999. For more about Rob and Kira and plans to celebrate their lives, see In Memoriam.

Class of 2000 Jesse Brockwell is a full-time tutor and director of Middlesex County for Learning Consultants Group, a popular tutoring and test prep company based in Old Saybrook, CT. Many Country School alumni have worked with Jesse (if they can get him, because he is always in high demand). A few years back, Jesse was instrumental in helping The Country School Alumni Association plan several reunions and he initiated the Alumni Association’s foray into social media, for which we are eternally grateful. Jesse is also grateful to his teachers. Two years ago, when Sarah Barber and Kathy McCurdy retired from teaching, Jesse shared this message on Facebook: “Two incredible teachers. It’s almost unfathomable how many lives they have influenced with the seeds they planted in those critical years. We owe them so much.”

Class of 2001 An unforgettable presence on the DeFrancis stage when he was at The Country School, Brian Mummert has been singing professionally since he graduated from Yale, where he served as musical director of the Yale Whiffenpoofs, America’s oldest collegiate a cappella group.

A baritone, Brian has performed at venues from Carnegie Hall to the Kennedy Center and in genres from opera to pops. He recently received his Master of Music in Voice at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and, this past fall, began further graduate work in choral conducting at Trinity College Cambridge. Brian is the founder and conductor of The New Consort.

Last spring, we were thrilled to welcome Brian and The New Consort, winners of the 2015 American Prize in Chamber Music, to campus for the 60th Anniversary Alumni Arts

Celebration, where they performed Much Ado About Music: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Song.

This musical celebration of the Bard’s enduring legacy included works written by English composers of Shakespeare’s time, choral settings of Shakespeare’s texts, and readings

by Country School personalities from some of his greatest plays and sonnets.

The concert also featured the world premiere of “When He Shall Die,” composed specifically for this occasion

by Lyme resident, Wesleyan emeritus faculty member, and former Country School music teacher Sarah MeneelyKyder.

After earning his PhD and working in academia for several years, most recently as a visiting assistant professor of Political Science at Duke, Aaron Roberts recently made the shift to the world of consulting. He joined the firm CEB, now Gartner, where he is working as a research consultant. Learn more about Aaron in the forthcoming Volume 2 of Country Connections 2017.

Sam Dangremond is Digital Articles Editor at Town & Country, covering luxury lifestyle, travel, fine dining, real estate, culture, cocktails, society, and the arts. Recent pieces include a story about the renowned Le Cirque restaurant closing, the “mobile cannabis lounge” in Aspen, and President Trump’s preference in steak preparation and what those preferences say about a person. A few years back, Sam used his writing talents for a tribute to his former history teacher, Sarah Barber, upon her retirement. “I will never forget the masterful and hilarious acting directions Mrs. Barber gave me when

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I played St. George coming to slay the dragon in 6th Grade,” he recalled. “She devised a brilliant scenario in which my sword was so heavy I could barely carry it. I made my entrance down the middle aisle of the gym dragging a comically large sword behind me at a snail’s pace. It was genius!”

Class of 2002 Katie Hartsoe returned to campus in 2015 to receive the 2015 Distinguished Alumni Award for her work in costume design for theater and television.

Working as Assistant Costume Designer at the time for the popular NBC show The Blacklist, Katie credited The Country School for providing her with a broad exposure to a variety of disciplines and subjects and had this advice for students: “By being exposed to different things at TCS, hopefully you will each start to get an inkling of what you can’t live without. And, if you don’t know, that’s fine too. It’s probably buried in there somewhere just waiting for the right opportunity.

So I encourage you all to take every opportunity that TCS and your higher education will give you. Don’t close yourself off to new experiences or get so focused on one thing that you don’t see what else is out there.”

Antone Konst, living and working Brooklyn, is a lecturer in painting at Brooklyn College. Recently he announced the launch of the Virtual Dream Center, a radical virtual exhibition/game which he helped develop. An autonomous exhibition space developed for new forms of digital artistic experience, the Virtual Dream Center borrows the navigation and the interactivity of video games.

Learn more at virtualdreamcenter.xyz/ en/. Antone received his BFA from Cal Arts and his MFA from Yale.

Stephanie Zollshan is a photographer based in the Berkshires. Through Stephanie Zollshan Photography, she photographs a range of subjects, including portrait, wedding, and event, and for a variety of clients, including publications and commercial. She also works as a photojournalist for the Berkshire Eagle. Stephanie received her BAS in Photojournalism from Boston

University. We are so grateful that she shared some of her work with us for the 60th Anniversary Alumni Celebration of the Arts.

Graham and Alec Murphy joined us at one of our recent fall Alumni Reunions.

Along with other young alums, they were among the first to subject the hoops on our new, outdoor basketball court to some serious dunking action.

Also attending the reunion was Travis Gulick, a Country School trustee.

Travis, a graduate of Savannah College of Art & Design, works with his father, former Facilities Manager Peter Gulick and Harvey Treat, also a former facilities manager, at Gulick & Co, Renovation Contractors. Travis and his colleagues have overseen many of our school’s recent renovations.

Class of 2003 We enjoyed catching up with Rebecca Figler Kostich and Adam Stahl during the art exhibition/ fundraiser Adam’s brother, Micah ’01, held in Cambridge last fall (see story in Taking Stock: Exploring Student Outcomes).

Rebecca, an artist and high school art teacher in Groton, MA, returned to campus a year ago for the 60th Anniversary Community Tent-In. She recently received her Masters of Arts in Education from the New Hampshire Institute of Art. Adam had traveled to Micah’s show from Washington, D.C., where he works for the Senate Committee

on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. We had last seen Adam during the fall of 2015, when he visited campus after receiving his MPhil in Russian and Eastern European Studies at Oxford University in the U.K. Adam frequently sees Ari Mannan ’03.

(See Taking Stock: Exploring Student Outcomes.)

Zane Rooney is working in data analytics for FARE (Food Allergy and Research Education) in New York City.

Class of 2004 Rebecca Joslow MacGregor returned to campus this summer to join us at the planting of the new Leaning Tree.

She is still working in fashion design, and recently celebrated her marriage to Justin MacGregor with several Country School friends and classmates in attendance. Old Friends: Rebecca MacGregor catches up with Jeff Burt ’61 during the planting of a new Leaning Tree on campus.

Charlotte Madere is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Minnesota. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where she majored in English Literature and Theater, she is particularly interested in 18th and early 19th century literature (novels, educational theory, conduct books, and children’s literature), history, and representation of gender.

Amelia Holmes is the librarian at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in Great Barrington, MA. In her work there, Amelia has reorganized the center’s collections and online library cataloging system and she is expanding educational outreach programs. She also assists with the center’s social media and publications.

Amelia graduated from Bennington College with a BA in Environmental Science and Ceramics.

Liz Walbridge spent several years teaching English and working in the theater department at Choate Rosemary Hall, her high school alma mater. Last year, she enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where she received her Master’s in Technology, Innovation, and Education. During her year there, she served as a research assistant at MIT’s Media Lab and Harvard’s Kennedy School, and those experiences led her to her most recent venture.

Since last summer, Liz has been working at WGBH in Boston, serving as a production assistant in digital children’s media. You can learn more about Liz and her path in the forthcoming Country Connections 2017, Volume 2.

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Tom McGee, Joel Glassman, and Rachel Stahl were among the alumni who joined us for the 60th Anniversary Community Tent-In. Tom is working in Boston, where he serves as a program manager at Mass Mentoring Partnership. Joel, who recently received his MFA from Columbia, was featured in a story on WNYC about New York artists who work out of unconventional spaces.

(The program talked about Joel’s Bookshop Workshops program, which develops and presents new plays in area book stores.) Rachel lives in Virginia, where she is in nursing.

Stephanie Bradford is in her second year of law school at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has just been chosen as editor in chief of the University Law Review Journal. She loves Austin and UT Law. She received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College, where she was an Athena Scholar.

Class of 2005 Mary McGee was one of the alums who turned out for the 60th Anniversary Community Tent-In.

She lives in New York City, where she works in content management for The Atlantic. We were also thrilled to see her at our recent spring auction and gala at Mystic Seaport.

Before leaving to attend a threemonth outdoor leadership training program with NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School), Vicky Cooley stopped by campus to see some of her former teachers and to talk about the importance of outdoor education to her life and to the life of students everywhere. We look forward to seeing Vicky when she returns and can’t wait to hear what she learned during her latest Outdoor Education experience.

More to come in Country Connections 2017, Volume 2.

Class of 2006 Zoe Cianciolo is a writer at ABC’s Good Morning America. Previously, she was a production manager and segment producer. Zoe graduated in 2014 from Tulane University, where she majored in English and Political science.

Gus Dangremond returned to campus to judge the 60th Anniversary MacLane Poetry Recitation. The youngest MacLane Finals winner ever (he was but a 5th Grader reciting Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” when he won the gold medal), Gus is now working at Sotheby’s, having received his

BA in Art History, Criticism, and Conservation from Trinity College.

Gus said the experience of judging MacLane returned him to his younger years, recalling the hours and hours he spent practicing his poem. “The thing that I really do remember is the effort and time it takes to memorize these,” he said, when asked to share a memory from his recitation days. “The time spent sitting at home with parents, with mothers and fathers, going through the poem ten times a night, 20 times a night. It takes hours, it takes days, and those memories — spending time with your family like that — are what really made this poetry recitation so so special.”

Congratulations to Carter Banker on the publication of Why Latin America could be the next frontier for Syrian refugees, an article appearing in the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Carter is pursuing her Masters in International Relations and Foreign Affairs at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, having received her BA in History from Johns Hopkins. Several years ago, long after she’d moved on from The Country School, Carter stopped by campus to see her 5th Grade history teacher, Kerri Kelly. She had just visited Egypt with her family, and while there, she bought a book about Egyptian archaeology and had it signed by the author, renowned Egyptologist Kent Weeks. She very thoughtfully returned to TCS to deliver the book to her former teacher, who had first sparked her interest in pharaohs and queens. In a small world

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twist, Dr. Weeks visited The Country School last year to talk about his work and the library he founded in Luxor to educate the next generation about the importance of protecting Egypt’s treasures.

graduated from Connecticut College, is now working as a case assistant at Fragomen Worldwide, an international immigration law firm in NYC. She plans on applying to law school in the fall.

Max Rooney graduated from Trinity in May after taking some time off to work full-time at Pilot’s Point Marina.

Isabel Clements is teaching 4th Grade English through Teach for America in New Orleans. This year, she and Country School teachers Heather Butler and Kerri Kelly collaborated on some exchanges between students at the two schools. When Isabel’s school, ReNEW Schaumburg, was hit by a tornado, Country School 4th Graders wrote individual notes to their new friends. The two 4th Grades also enjoyed a FaceTime chat, during which they talked about their mutual interest in Greek gods and goddesses. Isabel’s students shared drawings they’d done of Greek deities using art materials donated by Country School students.

After graduating from Hamilton College and enjoying a year as a ski instructor in Jackson Hole, Caroline Gregory now works in the New York office of Netsuite.

Lucy Burdge received her MA from Northeastern University’s School of Journalism this May. She works for the radio network WEEI and writes for their website. She continues to enjoy the action of Boston professional sports, about which she has been writing for different outlets since her freshman year at Wellesley. She also volunteers at Boston Children’s Hospital/Dana-Farber.

Class of 2007 Jerry Gargano recently returned to the U.S. after living in Cuenca, Ecuador, for two years teaching English. He plans to attend UConn next year as part of their pre-dental program, but first will return to Ecuador for a mission trip for education, helping build relations with local schools and developing a scholarship program through which Americans can choose to sponsor a student. A graduate of Bryant University, where he received his degree in International Business/ Marketing, Jerry swam all four years and was named to the MAAC AllAcademic Team.

Ally Picard graduated with a degree in Nursing from James Madison University and is now working as a registered nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

We spotted Sarah Bradford on the cover of a recent issue of Maine magazine. This was the magazine’s “camps” issue, and Sarah spent six happy summers at Camp Runoia in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. Sarah, who

Above, Isabel and her students in New Orleans talk to Country School students about Greek gods and goddesses. Below, Country School students share their perceptions from a classroom in Madison.

Hannah Chappell is studying for her MA in English Language and Literature at University College London. Last summer, she taught English at Choate’s summer program. She was also an Lower School associate teacher at Greens Farms Academy. She received her BA in English and Psychology from Hamilton College and spent a year abroad at Oxford University.

After graduating from Otis College of Art and Design, Lilli Siretta is working as a jewelry designer for Tory Burch in New York. Previously, she worked for Stella and Bow Jewelry in Los Angeles.

A recent graduate of Salve Regina, Catherine Kelly is a graphic designer in Essex.

Class of 2008 Capri DeBiccari, Luke Sherman, Garrett Osborne, Hannah Johnson, Alastair Clements, and Ben Cowper all caught up at the 60th Anniversary Community Tent-In. Capri had just graduated from Emerson with a degree in Marketing/Communications and Writing and she is now an associate at Arnold Worldwide. Luke had graduated from Tufts with a degree in Environmental Studies, French, and Economics and is now studying for his MA in Public Policy at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany.

Garrett graduated from Georgia Tech last spring with a BA in Electrical Engineering, and he’s now studying for an MA in Music and Technology at Carnegie Mellon. Hannah received her BA in Psychology at American University and is now teaching at the Lab School in Washington, D.C. Alastair graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in Political Science and English. This summer, he will move to Chicago, where he will teach early childhood students through Teach for America. Ben received his BA in Cinematography and Film/Video Production from Hampshire College and works in film.

Daniela de Aguiar graduated this spring from Northeastern University with a BSBA. She has accepted a full time position with Chadwick Martin Bailey, but is also working

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with ReferralMob, a Boston-based startup centered around “who you know.” ReferralMob is a platform for individuals to discover and share career opportunities with their network.

Riley McCurry is an acclaimed singer/ songwriter/instrumentalist who performs as Riley Pinkerton at venues across the country. In 2015, she stopped by campus to see her former 3rd Grade teacher, Kathy McCurdy, before Mrs. McCurdy’s retirement. She wrote the following after her visit: I couldn’t imagine being provided with a more emotionally and educationally nourishing foundation than the one I received from TCS from 2000 to 2004.

I am so grateful for, and overwhelmed by, all of the support and kindness associated with this school, its teachers, its students/alumni and their families; even 13 years later! No matter where I’ve lived or which schools I’ve attended, I’ve always cherished those four years as the cornerstone of my childhood and education.

Thank you, Riley, for stopping by and for sharing those beautiful and heartfelt sentiments. Be sure to let us know if you perform anywhere near Madison!

A 2016 graduate of Brown University with a degree in Applied Math, William Gregory is working at Lazard.

Katherine Speltz was on her way to New York City two years ago when she read on Facebook that The Country School would be celebrating two retiring teachers, Mrs. Barber and Mrs. McCurdy. She asked her parents to turn the car around, and they headed to Madison to pay tribute to two women who had played a major role in Katherine’s life. A graduate of Tulane University with a degree in Finance, Katherine is now working as an investment research analyst for a New York real estate company.

The retirement of Mrs. McCurdy and Mrs. Barber also inspired Ben Ballard to weigh in. Then still a student at Connecticut College, he was en route to

a summer job in Morocco so couldn’t attend in person. He did, however, email the following tribute for his Middle School history teacher: I’ve studied with a lot of teachers and professors of all shapes and sizes. Each has left their mark on me, some I’m simply happy to have survived. More often I think back on the men and women who have altered the course of my life in ways that seemed trivial at the time. Sarah Barber was one of these mentors. I can safely say that it is because of her that I have majored in History in college and plan on studying it in graduate school as well.

But she didn’t just give me a love of history, she showed me something that I lost for many years under different teachers, in the midst of that chaos and fury that is high school. It wasn’t until college that I rediscovered something that has now redefined the way I approach every aspect of my life: Passion. Whether in the classroom or on the stage she made me question my own potential and the limits that I thought constrained me. Her sharp wit and maverick persona lit a fire in me that I’ve carried with me all my life.

After graduating from Vassar, Sarah Muskin spent a year working with Americorps in the Sierra Nevadas.

Before she graduated, she wrote her thesis on the effect of Outdoor Education on the students fortunate enough to experience it. Watch for more about Sarah, her vast experiences in the outdoors, and why she chose to survey Country School alumni as part of her thesis research, in Country Connections 2017, Volume 2.

Chris Presto is the lead writer and creative director at MojoFilter Media, a video game startup company. A recent graduate of Boston College, Chris reached out to us to let us know about his new project with MojoFilter, a video game called Springvale: Tempered Stone. Learn more in the forthcoming Volume 2 of Country Connections 2017.

Jake Gadon is in his first year in a full-time sportscaster, but he’s already

winning awards. As Sports Director at CBS7-KOSA in Odessa, TX, Jake won two Texas Associated Press Broadcast Awards this spring, one for Best Sports Anchor and one for Best Sportscast.

Watch for more in Country Connections 2017, Volume 2.

Class of 2009 Matt and Ryan Wallack burned up the basketball court when they were students at TCS. This year, they did more of the same at the University of Connecticut, where the two were walk-ons on Kevin Ollie’s team.

Congratulations to Allie Leidt on her graduation from Ole Miss with the following honors: Summa Cum Laude, Phi Kappa, ADPi, and Honors College. Allie, who received her BA in Psychology, is now headed to USC for graduate school.

program history. During the season, Will was twice named BIG EAST Goalkeeper of the Week. He was also named Defensive Player of the Week by the Philly Soccer Six. Class of 2011 “Resting in an NYC Laundry Room,” a photo by Milan Sachs, was one of the winners of Smithsonian magazine’s 14th annual photo contest. Milan’s photo received the highest percentage of more than 36,000 reader votes, earning her the Readers’ Choice award. There were more than 48,000 submissions for this competition.

Milan attends Emerson College, where she is majoring in writing, literature, and publishing and minoring in photography.

Hannah O’Leary graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in Economics.

Class of 2010 A few days after the presidential election, we stumbled across an op-ed piece by Gabe Davis. A sophomore at the University of Chicago majoring in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Gabe wrote the piece for the Chicago Maroon. Here is an excerpt: So where do we go from here? I feel as though it starts in conversation. We need to start a new national dialogue — not in terms of what we say, but in terms of how we say it. We need to promote inquiry and acceptance in a sincere struggle for political ideals, and we can’t hide behind personal biases or avoid ideas we dislike. We need to dive deeper than the surface level of uncomfortable beliefs to find out the real rationale that buoys them up in groups like those that support Trump. And we must be open to, rather than dismissive of, heated civil discourse.

Will Steiner, a junior goalie on Villanova’s soccer team, had another great season, helping the BIG EAST team qualify for the NCAA tournament for the first time in

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What a treat to run into Noah Bavolack in Old Saybrook recently when he got of the train from Mass Maritime Academy to visit his parents. Noah was looking dapper in his uniform.

Kelsey Hartsoe had a stellar soccer season at Union College, being named Liberty League Defensive Performer of the week after she stopped three shots to earn her the league-standing sixth shutout of the season.

Luke Nguyen was also much in the news for his prowess on the soccer field. En route to leading Amherst College to a 3-0 victory in the finals of the NESCAC men’s soccer championships, Luke scored two goals and was named NESCAC player of the week. Luke was also a key contributor to Amherst’s third-round finish in the NCAA Division III championship race.

Last year, during his freshman season, Luke and his teammates won the overall NCAA Division III title.

Class of 2012 Madie Leidt graduated from Loomis Chaffee this spring and then heads to Middlebury College, where she will play hockey.

Thank you to Henry Hunt and Sloane Sweitzer, both TCS Class of 2012 and Lyme-Old Lyme High School Class of 2016, for returning to campus to lead a lacrosse clinic last spring. AllState players on Lyme-Old Lyme High School’s undefeated teams and also each named Lacrosse Player of the Year by the New London Day, they are both are now playing in college, Sloane at Bryant University and Henry at Hamilton College.

Maria Boyle is a freshman at Harvard, where she is on the women’s lightweight rowing team. She was Class Valedictorian at Lyme-Old Lyme High School, where she was also a member of their crew team that won the National Schools Championship Regatta.

Charlie Zane, a freshman at Dickinson was named the Centennial Conference Men’s Golf Athlete of the Week earlier this spring after leading the Red Devils to a win over St. Joseph’s (N.Y) and Philadelphia University, carding a 74 to match the low round for the day. That marked his fourth straight, sub-80 round and eighth of the season.

Patrick O’Leary just finished his freshman year at Kenyon College, where he is majoring in Economics and plays on the baseball team.

Honor Clements graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and will head to Columbia University, where she will be on the women’s rowing team.

Class of 2013 Congratulations to Eli Griswold on winning the Athlete of the Year award at the Williams School. Eli, headed to Boston University next year, was a stalwart on the Williams cross country and basketball teams.

Here’s what Logan Kydd, his Williams School basketball coach, had to say about Eli after the conclusion of the season: “Eli is one of the most driven, hardworking, and honest young men I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.

The passion with which he approaches games, practices, or team activities demonstrates his natural leadership. It is a pleasure to not only coach him, but to know him.”

We spotted Brendan Elrick in the local newspaper recently, where he was featured in the lead role of Horace Vandergelder in Hello, Dolly at Clinton’s Morgan High School. Who could forget Brendan on The Country School stage in Beauty and the Beast and in the title role in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown? Brendan was also in the paper for making the high honor roll. We hear he is headed to Hofstra University.

A senior at Hopkins School and accomplished and celebrated bassoonist, Paul Stelben was recently invited to perform as a soloist with Orchestra New England under the direction of Maestro James Sinclair.

This marked Paul’s third year playing in the Greater New Haven Youth Orchestra as co-principal bassoonist.

He was selected by audition for the 2016 and 2014 Connecticut Music Educators Association All State Orchestras and was the principal bassoonist in the 2015 All State Concert Band. Paul also is a member of the Neighborhood Music School Premier Wind Ensemble.

Class of 2014 Anna Catlett and Christopher Arrandale caught up with science teacher Stephanie Johnson and some

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of their former schoolmates at the Middle School robotics tournament in Old Lyme earlier this year. Christopher and Mrs. Johnson were there to help coach the TCS teams; Anna was there as a representative of the Lyme-Old Lyme Robotics Team, the Technoticks.

Christopher’s been coaching at TCS all year, and Anna joined us for a special girls and robotics event on campus.

We also enjoyed seeing her quoted and photographed in an Ink magazine article about the Technoticks this spring.

Class of 2015 When he was at TCS, Joseph Coyne led the school’s successful service effort to raise money to underwrite the construction of a well in rural Uganda.

Thanks to his leadership, students at the Odengai School now have a well that delivers fresh water to the school and surrounding villagers. A rising junior at Choate, Joseph spearheaded another well effort at Choate, with proceeds from the student-run Daily Grind coffee benefiting Call to Care Uganda. Joseph is also a sports writer for the Choate Daily News, writes his own sports blog, and is on the cross country and sailing teams.

Hunter Singewald is continuing on his rock star path. He plays drums with the acclaimed Daniel Hand High School bands and also outside of school with several other bands.

Last summer, he and his bandmates in the group The Downfalls opened for The Fixx at the Madison Beach Hotel. He’s also played in gigs as far away as Brooklyn and Boston with the School of Rock Madison House Band.

Last summer, he attended a three-day

percussion camp at Berklee College of Music with a guest instructor who was a drummer for five years performing with Beyoncé.

Class of 2016 After serving as emcee for The Country School’s first-ever TEDx conference last spring and delivering his own talk during the TEDx Youth Day at Connecticut College, Gordie Croce decided to bring his TEDx expertise to the Pomfret school. He pitched the idea of a TEDx event to administrators at the Pomfret, CT, boarding school, and once his proposal was approved, he was off and running. “This is Progress,” TEDxPomfretSchool, was held this April, with Gordie as organizer.

Congratulations to Tommy LaTorre and Charlie Sullivan, members of the Daniel Hand High School boys’ varsity soccer team. The Hand team won the CIAC Class L State Championship last fall, defeating Joel Barlow High School 1-0 for the title.

An All America Junior Olympics runner and a Connecticut Association of Independent Schools All League runner while he was at The Country School, Robbie Cozean continued his reign as a top athlete at Xavier.

As a freshman, he was third at State Opens and second at Junior Olympics nationals, earning All Courant boys cross country runner of the year.

Congratulations to Sophie Salgar and the Williams School girls’ lacrosse team, winners of Southern New England Prep School Lacrosse Championship. Sophie, a freshman, added four goals in Williams’ 14-9 win over Marianapolis Prep in the title game. Not only that, but she is the alltime leading scorer at Williams, which had its first undefeated season (going 13-0) in 20 years. Sophie was also named offensive MVP of the year and a league all star.

In Memoriam The Country School community was devastated to learn of the passing of three graduates this academic year and a long-time friend, supporter, and Country School family member. The school plans a memorial gathering this summer to remember our friends and celebrate their lives and contributions to our community.

Kira Miers ’99 Kira Jean Miers passed away on October 23, 2016, leaving her parents, Laurie and Keith, her two beautiful children, Dakota and Braydon, and siblings, Skylar ’03, Nick ’11, and Mikaela ’14, as well as countless other family members and friends who knew her and loved her spirit.

In addition to The Country School, Kira attended Williston Northampton, and Western New England College. Later, she served in the US Coast Guard.

Kira is remembered for her bright and contagious personality. As her TCS classmate, Eric Fabricant, said, “We all remember Kira as an amazing girl with spunk, an outgoing personality, and a beautiful smile that lit up any room.”

Kira loved family gatherings, especially Christmas, things that sparkled, movies, poetry, and most of all, her two babies, who were her pride and joy. Dozens of Country School classmates, former teachers, and friends, joined her family and others for Kira’s beautiful memorial service at The First Congregational Church in Guilford.

We plan to honor Kira’s memory and bright spirit with a sunshine garden filled with bright-colored flowers.

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Robert Chrostowski ’99 Robert Chrostowski passed away on October 29, 2016, leaving his parents, Joseph and Kathleen, his extended family, and countless adoring friends.

Rob, a Country School “lifer,” having attended from PreK through 8th Grade, went on to the Williams School after TCS, followed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - The Lally School of Management and Technology. At the time of his death, he worked as the Digital Marketing Manager at Stratton Mountain Resort in Vermont.

sit there, books in hand. For years to come, Country School readers will be guided by his gentle spirit.

Luke Coccomo ’97 As we were going to press we received the very sad news of the passing of Luke Coccomo. Luke, 34, of East Haddam, passed away on Saturday, May 13. He loved skateboarding, snowboarding and live music, and will be remembered as kindhearted and sociable by all who knew him.

Luke was a loving son to parents, Denise and Carmen, brother to Danielle, Melissa and Katie, and grandson to Adel. A service was held on May 18 in New Britain. The Country School will find a time to remember Luke as well. We offer our deepest condolences to the Coccomo family.

Eric Fabricant, Rob’s classmate, said Rob was a “fun, outgoing, smart, personable guy who always seemed to be having fun and making others laugh.” Eric said it was perfect that Rob, a big snowboarder during his Country School days, went on to work his dream job at Stratton Mountain. “I believe Rob truly never worked a day in his life because he always loved what he was doing in Vermont and impacted so many people’s lives beyond The Country School community and his family,” Eric said.

Described by all who knew him as a uniquely kind and gentle person, Rob was remembered by his Williams School classmates and teachers during a gathering to celebrate his life in New London in late December, an event that was also attended by Country School classmates and teachers. A second celebration of his life was held in January at Stratton.

The Country School community will remember Rob during a June celebration. During that time, a tree will be planted in Rob’s memory. Our plan is to plant Rob’s tree alongside a reading bench, where it can provide shade to the students and teachers who

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All photographs on this page are taken from Country School yearbooks.

Allee Burt P ’00, ’03 Excerpted from a Letter to the Community from Head of School John Fixx:

Memorial Celebrations In addition to plans for community members who died in recent months, we plan to honor Michelle Noble ’03 on campus this summer. Michelle died tragically in a car accident in January 2013. Her service was attended by several members of the school community, and members of the class of 2013 held a gathering to remember their classmate.

The Country School community lost a dear friend on May 5, 2017, when Allee Burt passed away after a long and valiant battle with cancer. Allee, the wife of Jeff Burt ’61 and mother of Taylor ’00 and Hilary ’03, was a longtime Country School volunteer and supporter who, through her spirit, can-do attitude, and generosity, left a lasting legacy at The Country School.

For all the years her children were enrolled at The Country School, Allee was an energetic and omnipresent volunteer on campus, someone who was always willing to roll up her sleeves and do whatever was required to make the TCS experience the best it could be, not just for her own children, but for everyone’s child. Allee did everything, from overseeing student community service initiatives through the Parent Council to running the Ski Club, where she spearheaded an effort to ensure student safety by seeing that all participants wore helmets. She ran the school’s Girl Scout troop, served as a Room Parent, was a constant field trip chaperone, spearheaded the school pumpkincarving contest, and caused more than a few bidding wars at Country School auctions with the magnificent doll-sized TCS outfits she designed and assembled.

Allee’s activities complemented the work of her husband, Jeff, a longtime Country School trustee. While Jeff focused on behind-the-scenes strategic work, Allee was hands-on with students and teachers. It is a testament to Allee’s can-do attitude and Jeff’s strategic thinking that, long

This spring, The Country School has been working with Michelle’s mother, Laurie Noble, to update Country School classrooms and other interior spaces (see A Salute to Parents). Together, Laurie and Country School faculty and staff have a plan to plant Michelle’s favorite flowers on campus. Stay tuned for details and photos.

after their own children graduated, other children are still benefiting from their efforts. In 2006, in honor of The Country School’s 50th Anniversary, Allee and Jeff provided the seed money for The Country School’s Founders’ Promise Fund for Scholarship. With an enormously generous $50,000 gift, Jeff and Allee began an undertaking that has grown exponentially over the years, thanks to their continued generosity and the generosity of other donors they inspired. To date, the Founders’ Promise Fund has helped 173 unique students, contributing to the more than $4.6 million in scholarship dollars that have been awarded to Country School families in the decade since the fund began.

In recent years, the Burts lived in the beautiful mountainside home they built in Franconia, N.H., where Allee took inspiration from the natural majesty surrounding her. Her passion and appreciation were contagious, allowing all who visited to come away feeling energized, optimistic, and inspired.

To honor those qualities, her sense of community, and her love for nature, The Country School will be dedicating the new, oval green between the Farmhouse

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and academic buildings to Allee and her family. To be called the Burt Family Green, the oval will, no doubt, be the site of many an outdoor class, pickup soccer game, and picnic lunch — a happy outdoor gathering place for all who wish to enjoy it. Like Allee, the Burt Family Green will be a beautiful symbol of community, nature, and optimism.

At last summer’s Community Tent-In, alumni, teachers, and former teachers came together to honor the memory of Catherine Rose Reed ’09, who passed away last June after a courageous battle with brain cancer. Catherine’s roses have started blooming again, reminding us of her spirit, beauty, and courage.

Top right, the soon to be dedicated Burt Family Green

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Staying Connected

Please stay in touch with The Country School. Here’s how: Check out our new, responsive website thecountryschool.org Email communications@thecountryschool.org (school-wide information) or alumni@thecountryschool.org (alumni information) Call 203.421.3113 Visit or write 341 Opening Hill Road Madison, CT 06443 Follow us Country School Facebook: facebook.com/thecountryschoolmadison Alumni Facebook: facebook.com/groups/20256693020 Instagram: instagram.com/tcs_madison Twitter: twitter.com/countryschoolct Alumni LinkedIn Group: linkedin.com/groups/8592022 Announcing the Little Hoot App Throughout the school year, Country School families receive a weekly e-newsletter known as the Little Hoot. Thanks to an innovative Country School 7th Grader, you can now receive it right on your iPhone with the Little Hoot app!

Here’s the lowdown from the brilliant and innovative John Arrandale: Are you tired of checking your inbox for “The Little Hoot” and never receiving it or it never loads?! Well, I’m happy to introduce you to “The Little Hoot” app!

Upon opening the app, you are greeted with a simplistic design and the most recent “Little Hoot” in seconds! Right there, when you open the app – you no longer have to dig through your inbox to find the email. It’s just there. As easy as that.

Upon further inspection, you have quick and easy access to archived “Hoots” as well. No need to open up Safari to search for a past “Little Hoot.” Again, It’s just there. Where and when you need it. All in one place John, you’re not just a great techie, but you’re a marketing/communications whiz too. Something tells us we’ll be writing an alumni profile about you sometime in the future.

To all of our alumni, families, and friends, thank you for sharing your time and talents with us!

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