As we approach the darkest days of the year, cold nights are countered by a stubborn midday sun that warms us while threatening to soften the frost hardened ground. The thin film of ice on the pond each morning reluctantly gives way as the sun comes up over Gannett House and the east end of campus.
Each time campus empties for a vacation, we are reminded that our students’ presence in our lives fuels our work as educators. This place is just not the same without their energy and enthusiasm pulsing through the community. We are teachers and coaches and advisors and dorm parents only because they are our students, players, advisees, and dorm residents. We are because they are.
For a teenager, especially one who is living away from home at boarding school, a smile, food, and hug are the simplest, most profound acts of love one can receive. Edna Peters, GP ‘11, ‘14 made sure that each Proctor student who walked into the dining hall experienced all three forms of love each day for more than 40 years. Today, we celebrate her life and her profound impact on the Proctor community.
New students arrived on September 6 for Wilderness Orientation, their faces filled with uncertainty. How would they fit in socially? Academically? Athletically? Artistically? How would they find their friend group, who would sit with them at meals? Today, during a packed Brown Dining Commons lunch, we look around and see connected faces, smiles, seemingly endless Spirit Week energy. We see young people who are finding their way through their high school experience, with the support of an amazing, tireless group of adults who keep this community running.
During Monday’s assembly, five new members of the Class of 2023 were inducted into the Allan S. Bursaw Chapter of the National Honor Society. Recognized for their scholarship, character, service, and citizenship, these twelve students (Grace, Kally, Emma, Eliza, Ella, Grace, Sophie, Samantha, Ingrid, Phoenix, Henry, and Jonathan) include some of the highest academic achievers in the senior class, but perhaps more importantly represent the variety of experiences that makeup the Proctor journey.
During assembly this morning, guest Elena Terry, Executive Chef/Founder of Wild Bearies, a non-profit community outreach catering organization that supports participants to overcome alcohol and other drug abuse issues or emotional traumas, shared a story about her work gathering indigenous seeds and the importance of understanding the history and source of the food that nourishes us.
As the forecast for Friday morning waffled between rain and potential clearing, we decided to move our planned outdoor assembly for Fall Family Weekend into the Wilkins Meeting House for the first time since the fall of 2019. Only the parents of our four-year seniors had experienced assembly in the theater, and we realized in that moment how much we had missed the shared energy of this space.
If you spend enough time in the New England woods, you will run across old stone walls bisecting a dense forest. Follow those walls and you will likely find an old cellar hole that will immediately transport you back in time to a different era when Proctor’s 2,500 acres were clear cut pastures sprinkled with farms of hardworking families scraping a living off the rocky soil.
