Here’s Our Version
“You
learn a lot about people when …” occurs to me regularly when reflecting on the past 12 months. This issue of our magazine occupies a now-familiar genre for publications from schools — yet includes what others locally, nationally, or globally have not chosen to do. At each step along the way, we keep learning. The pandemic, as we see incessantly, amplifies differences that already existed: regional, economic, racial, political, philosophical — all in combination, in ways that challenge efforts to form and preserve an inclusive consensus. Such has been our experience at USN. Sending this message out to your household helps open a window amid an uncommonly bubbled time, with those of us on the mitigated inside distinct from so many constituents watching from the outside. It’s just not our nature to be buttoned up. Going back decades, people here never set out to follow the herd. And right now, the question would actually be, “Which herd anyway?” Our part of the country responded less directly to COVID-19 guidelines (to put it mildly), then felt (and feels) the consequences of that stance as case numbers soared. We took our time in opening and sought public health directives from renowned research centers. Then by October we were all back in person, unlike scores of trusted peer schools across the country — despite our checkered record locally. The numbers we tracked at 2000 Edgehill confirmed our path. As you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, schools have not proven to be transmission vectors for the virus. So we work our plan, we modify our protocols in light of the emerging understandings, and we recalculate our risk budgets
This plaque hangs on the west wall of the Director’s Office.
UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF NASHVILLE
in a way that listens to each individual experience while taking care of everyone. And this all happens decision by decision, quite literally case by case. In the midst of the journey, heroes continue to emerge. I could not have understood back in July the importance of our staggeringly qualified Medical Advisory Board with its weekly consults, nor could any of us have predicted the difference that our rock-solid and impressively credentialed Health Team on campus would make. Teachers transform into academic contortionists on short notice to reach students with tools we barely could identify not long ago. Families find ways to make amended routines work, for the good of the whole. Students from the Blue, Yellow, Green, and Red Doors of kindergarten to the halls outside Janet Schneider’s College Counseling Office have in inspiringly large numbers thought far beyond themselves. We hope these examples prove contagious, a buttress against COVID-19 fatigue and a bulwark against just doing what we remember used to be OK. Making a compelling argument for the right choices in the moment remains an ongoing challenge, but I wouldn’t trade our school community for any I’ve ever seen. The range of opinions expressed by USN households remains wider than at any time I can remember, but we still feel broad support on big priority issues — like taking care of faculty and reducing spread of the virus with the resources we need. Our attention is riveted on what’s directly in front of us. In that effort, you would find tremendous urgency in our response to the overdue generational reckoning on race, so palpable since last summer. To be the school that we need to be, we need to be about that work, pandemic notwithstanding — actually especially so as stark societal inequities lay bare in this time of parallel crises. Read in the stories to follow our version of school right now, to see us focusing on issues so fundamental that they might ironically have escaped attention at another time. In so many easily demonstrable ways USN could boast of being in the best position ever, yet that doesn’t seem right at this crossroads time in the wider world. Better that we continue learning a lot about people. nn Stay connected — keep sharing your stories too,
Vince Durnan, Director
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