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“The thing about an archive is you don’t usually know you’re going to want to have one until you’re well beyond wishing you had one,” laughs Melanie O’Kelley, Wesleyan’s high school librarian and archivist. “The fact that a school our age has an archive is rare, and that is a credit to the foresight of administrators in the early days on the Peachtree Corners campus.” The mission of archives for any organization is to document and preserve history to share with future generations. Items stored in the archives have played a critical role in telling the story of Wesleyan School as we grew from a K-8 school in Sandy Springs to a K-12 community in Peachtree Corners. Without the archives, much of our history would be lost. In the school’s early days in Peachtree Corners when the high school was newly formed, Headmaster Emeritus Zach Young and then High School Principal Brian Kennerly were vocal advocates about collecting items for future archival purposes, recalls O’Kelley. As the school was being miraculously built around students and faculty, there was an awareness that history was being created every day. Extra emphasis was placed on collecting materials that might one day be important to the school’s history and organized into a formal archive. “If we don’t keep collecting, cataloging, and preserving our history, we lose it for future generations,” says O’Kelley. “Archival work is always a work in progress, and we’re never done. As long as the school continues, there will always be an opportunity to capture the moments of significance each school year. Those items may one day be how a future generation shares the rich history of Wesleyan.”
ABOVE: Early edition of the Wesleyan Quarterly. LEFT: First issue of the Wesleyan Magazine
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