The Buzz

Members of Proctor’s AP Environmental Science, Engineering, Physics, and Entrepreneurship classes joined together for a celebration of innovation at Proctor Tuesday evening. More than a dozen student groups presented their research, business plans, solar oven constructions, and rocket designs to the community in the Wise Center and English classrooms of Maxwell Savage Hall. The evening’s presentations were a powerful reminder of the quality and depth of the project based learning taking place in Proctor’s classrooms.

For more than sixty years, Proctor Academy students have built boats in the school's woodshops. Originally, the building of these boats was a necessity for those students wishing to take part in Proctor's sailing team that competed in regatas around New England throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In recent decades, the building of boats in the Alan Shepherd Boat House is a rite of passage for many students looking to craft their own vessle. For Doug Park '01, his passion for boat building fostered at Proctor in the woodshop and aboard the Harvey Gamage on Ocean Classroom led to a career working on wooden boats for Redd's Pond Boatworks. 

Each year approximately 20% of the Proctor Academy's graduating class goes on to compete in NCAA athletics at the collegiate level. The Class of 2016 is no exception with 22 of 95 members of the class pursuing careers at the collegiate level, including a remarkable eight NCAA Division 1 athletes! Thank you to all members of the Class of 2016 for their contributions to Proctor's athletic programs over the past four years. Thank you, also, to James Neylon '16 for helping put this article together on the majority of our Division 1 athletes, and to Rich Tilton P'16, '18 for the photography. 

Wilderness Orientation and Senior Project bookend the Proctor experience for students. They are incredibly different, but require many of the same traits: a sense of adventure, confidence, passion, and a willingness to disregard comfort zones for the sake of authentic learning. Enjoy this window into Senior Project 2016! 

Each week in our Parent Page newsletter, we profile a faculty or staff member in order to help our internal community get to know each other on a different level. This week's Parent Page will feature a profile on Brooks Bicknell '77 that we thought we would share on The Buzz as well! Check out other Faculty/Staff profiles on our past Parent Pages HERE! 

We all run for a reason. We run to get exercise. We run to relieve stress. We run because our dogs love to run. We run because we crave that feeling of the wind whistling past our ears. We run because we're too impatient to walk. Others, however, run because they never thought they would be able to run again, and each step they take is a gift. 

At Proctor, we live in this wonderful bubble where intellectual curiosity is celebrated, students embrace challenging conversations alongside each other, safely travel the world on Proctor’s off-campus programs, warm meals are provided three times a day, and our biggest stress is not having enough hours in the day to learn all we want to learn. Families choose to invest in this safe, supportive, intentional learning community at Proctor, and it is without a doubt the best environment for students to learn about themselves and the world around them. 

Proctor's Spring Formal is the one time a year students dress up and gather as a community to celebrate the year before seniors depart for Senior Project. Sunny skies, warm temperatures, and a slight twist to the Spring Formal resulted in a wonderful night of good food, dancing, and enjoying each other's company.