The New Dorm Starts Up

After six weeks of crushing ledge, moving dirt and relocating utilities, we finally achieved what feels like upward progress. The cement trucks were coming most of the day, filling the foundation forms that will yield the walls for the foundation. It feels great to starting up...
These are the early steps in what will be a new dorm with rooms for up to 62 students and four faculty apartments. Construction will be completed late next winter with landscaping waiting for spring to come. The first students will most likely move in next summer. For a look at some of the early plans for the new building, click the images under "One Building Scheme".

This is an exciting new chapter for The Winchendon School. The new student rooms will allow us to bring the home stay students back on campus, provide new rooms to replace the aging ones in Cottage, and free up rooms in the existing dorms to expand faculty residences in those buildings. And, as importantly, the new dorm will provide two apartments for faculty families now living off campus and two other single family members.

Stay tuned for further updates!

And we talk about the pace of change?

I had the opportunity this past weekend to revisit the Class of 1962 Vestigia. This yearbook is labeled "Volume 1" as it was the first for the School in its new home in Winchendon MA and with a new name. At the end of the prior academic year, the Board had decided to move the Hatch School to what has proved to be a wonderful new home.

What I find stunning is not just the foresight that the Board and Headmaster Robert Marr showed in making this decision, but also the amount of change that Mr. Marr successfully guided the School through during these first years in Winchendon. According to Mr. Marr's comments, only six faculty members made the move to Winchendon, and more than half the students were new to the School that fall. However, in those early years the stage was set for what has been an incredible five decades of advancement.

There are moments today during which we may think that we are marshaling the School through an important period of change. We implement the Global Dynamics program. We steadily introduce new technology. We renew older facilities including the Rotenberg Arts Studios, Posich and Ford Hall, and we build new including the tennis courts, now the new residence hall, or soon the new indoor field with the Clark Memorial.

However, these are nothing like the changes that The Winchendon School went through in the early 1960's. The Vestigia staff captured The School's spirit very well in the yearbook's introduction:

When a new idea appears among men, it is welcomed - sometimes with tumult, sometimes with joy - but always with an avid interest in each progressive step. A new school year, a new campus, a new name - indeed, our school is a new idea taking a child's first steps in the world of learning. Yet, like the Roman god, Janus, whose visage scanned both past and future, we look to the past for sowing and to the future for harvest...
The introduction continued...

"Vestigia", a Latin term for footsteps... In the motto - "Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum" - lies more than just a name; it is both a shadow of our theme and the substance of our hope - No Steps Backward. Only the future, which is big with promise, can bear out the aspirations that swell our thoughts today. We are assured, however, that meeting every challenge as it comes, we will see the footprints of the past firmly placed on solid ground and the footsteps of the future plain before our eyes.

I am in awe not just how well the Mr. Marr and the School thrived through its first decade but even more so how this group of students captured the culture of embracing change that is still a hallmark of The Winchendon School today. The School thrives and is a leader in our field of secondary education not just because of this eagerness to embrace change, but also because our mission and philosophy are well rooted thanks to the tilling of first Mr. Hatch and then Mr. Marr. Our future "is big with promise", our vision for the future is "plain before our eyes" just as the Vestigia staff captured it in 1962.

Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Marr.

Where in the world has John Kerney been?

For readers who don't recognize the reference to one of my favorite videos of Matt Harding and his world travels, I have been feeling a little bit like Matt in recent months. Now if only the 45,000,000 people who have checked out Matt's videos would read this blog! At the least, I will use the excuse of feeling like him for the reason that I have not been writing.
In an effort to rationalize my absence, I have put together a little top 10 list of why I have not been more expressive during the last three months:

1. In March, my wonderful hosts in nine different cities in Asia kept me so busy and well fed that there was no time or energy to write.
2. Then Hayfa Abdujabar joined us from Harvard for a day to infuse our school-wide dialog on gender and rights in Islam and the Middle East. Hayfa had me thinking about a lot.
3. In April, the town-wide Earth Day effort kept us busy, leaving us especially tired after work and the end-of-day fun.
4. Throughout the spring, we continued to work at our goal of raising at least $10,000 for Haiti relief, eventually exceeding what to some had deemed an unreasonable goal by more than 20%. This was achieved by many different initiatives involving everyone in the Winchendon School community. Some of that effort has gone to support the terrific efforts of Forward in Health.
   
5. Come late April and May, I could blog or cheer on the Winchendon athletes. You choose...
6. Coach Patty and others did a great job of organizing a fun alumni lacrosse weekend. There will be more like these.
7. There was the Boston Harbor cruise with all looking sharp and dancing the night away.
   
8. Then a generous donor made it possible for all of the freshmen, sophomores and juniors to spend an afternoon in Boston seeing the Imax film "Arabia" and visiting the Museum of Science.
9. The same donor paved the way for the Class of 2010 to spend an afternoon and evening reconnecting to our Hatch School roots by relaxing in Newport, RI.
10. The Student Art Show was a stunner. Stop by the dining hall if you haven't had a chance to see some of the great work that was done this year.
11. And soon the end of the year was upon us with a wonderful baccalaureate at Cathedral Pines featuring the Winchendon Singers, a memorable senior night dinner and graduation day with lots of memorable words, tears, smiles and send-off hugs.
12. No time to spare...days later, thanks to the significant efforts of several of our Board and staff members, we were able to break ground on the new dorm project. The new building will be complete by next spring.

Oh, was this supposed to be a top 10 list? I ramble... I hope that you get the point!

I am back and will work to do a much better job of keeping up with the blog. Have a good weekend!