If anyone knows Proctor is a perpetual work in progress, it is Proctor’s Maintenance Department who has spent their summer months managing construction projects, caring for our 2,500 acres of land, and chipping away at a never-ending work order list from Proctor’s 45 buildings. As we prepare for the school year ahead (new faculty begin meetings Monday morning), we must remember our physical plant is not the only piece of this community that requires constant maintenance.
August is upon us and that means the start of the school year is just around the corner! For boarding school students, normal start of year jitters are sometimes amplified by the unknown of living with a roommate for the first time. As we prepare to welcome 125 new students to campus, the vast majority of whom will be boarding students, we asked a few of our dorm leaders their thoughts on sharing their space with their roommate and the lessons they’ve learned from living away from home at boarding school.
I boarded the Roseway on Thursday morning at 6:30 am with trepidation. I had signed up for the day sail from Portsmouth to Boston on a glorious hot, still, calm July day in Andover. But this morning was fogged in, rain and thundershowers were predicted and big swells were inevitable. We sign up for things, sometimes, with a romantic notion of what they will be—an AP class that will impress our parents and colleges, a summer service trip that will be fulfilling and profound, an off-campus program that will challenge and inspire. And then when we get to the class, or the airport, or the dock, our feelings sink—why did we ever think this was a good idea?
The last ten days feels like a blur. A week ago I wrote a blog titled Ship, Shipmate, Self as we worked to process loss in our community, and while my intention is not to run an entire blog series on grief, it is important to continue the dialogue that too often gets swept under the rug following a tragedy like this.
“Grief is the price we pay for love, and when you feel the weight of the grief we are all feeling right now, you recognize just how much love lived in the one you are grieving.” These words were shared by Proctor’s counselor, Kara Kidder, during an informal gathering for faculty and staff Tuesday morning in the wake of longtime forestry faculty member Dave Pilla’s sudden passing. Just as Proctor’s Maintenance Department approaches the tireless clean up of downed trees from Tuesday night’s microburst that ripped through campus, the path to healing for our community will take time.
It is with the greatest sadness that we share news with the Proctor community that longtime faculty member Dave Pilla passed away Sunday afternoon. His sudden passing leaves our community with an immeasurable void, and only the smallest solace can be found in knowing that the lives he touched and the passions he kindled move outward in the world.
We have crossed the midpoint of summer break, and begin to shift our attention to the school year ahead. With a new year comes the opportunity to educate new parents (and returning) on how to help their child get the most out of their Proctor journey. We published a blog post on this same topic last summer (Being a Proctor Parent: Empowering Independence) but wanted to take another look at how parents can best support their son or daughter’s boarding school experience.
The soul of a school is less tied to a physical place than it is to those with whom you share experiences in that space. An aerial shot of Proctor’s campus from the 1960s represents a skeleton of the physical plant supporting Proctor’s 370 students today. But the soul of Proctor? The soul of a school does not live in buildings, it lives in those connections made in dormitories, on athletic teams, with advisors, teachers, coaches, dorm parents. Ask any alum who attended Reunion 2018 this weekend, whether from the Class of 1953 or the Class of 2013, and they will tell you unequivocally the soul of Proctor and its faculty and staff (past and present) is alive and well.
