April 16, 2024

Dear Parents and Guardians,

With a few weeks of spring now under our belts, we are beginning to find our stride as the weather improves and our beautiful campus begins to come to life. As you know, we have had more than our fair share of rain and stormy weather this year and are hoping for a nice stretch that allows us to enjoy more and more outdoor activity between now and June. Along the way, our pace will quicken and culminating events of all sorts will fill the calendar. It’s an exciting time of year.

Much of our focus, of course, will be on celebrating the class of 2024 as their time winds down and they prepare for the next steps in their lives. This year’s group of 88 sixth formers has come a long way and contributed a great deal since many began at Brooks in the heart of the pandemic nearly four years ago. They have done extremely well in and out of the classroom and it will be fun to see much of that good work come to fruition over these final six weeks. 

Before taking a look at what lies ahead over the second half of April and all of May, I do want to try to capture some of what has been particularly notable and fun at Brooks of late. 

To start, I want to thank so many of you who have played vital roles in our admission effort throughout the year. While far from an exhaustive list, this includes spending time in our admission waiting room talking with prospective families, making phone calls to families to help with questions that only a fellow parent could answer and supporting the two revisit days we hosted last week - one of them in a snow storm! We are pleased to have enrolled some terrific students and are excited to have the opportunity to begin working with them when the 2024-2025 school year gets underway.

I also want to underline how much fun it was to take in the nearly full solar eclipse we all experienced together when classes ended on Monday afternoon of last week. With protective eyewear covering our eyes thanks to Chair of the Science Department Laura Hajdukiewicz, a huge number of us made our way to the observatory area on campus and saw the sun just about disappear. Honey Plum ’24 had prepared a solar eclipse playlist for all of us to enjoy, and it was really nice to have adults and students all taking in the moment at once. My understanding is that the next solar eclipse in this area will not happen until 2079. So, we made the most of this one!

Finally, it was a lot of fun to have grandparents and special friends joining current students in classes this past Saturday morning. I was glad to have an opening to welcome the group ahead of some musical performances, and it seemed like our visitors were enjoying themselves. The day has a very nice cadence to it and we enjoy seeing current students do so well sharing their school with grandparents and people who are important to them.

As we keep moving into the spring with an increasingly full plate of activity, I wanted to underline some of what is still to come, along with a couple of areas we are thinking about and working on for 2024-2025. 

On Monday, we remembered and honored former faculty member Kippy Liddle and women’s athletics in our annual Kippy Liddle Day service in Ashburn Chapel. See photos below of guest speakers, Margaret Klein ’10 and Emilie Klein ’13. We will turn our attention on Wednesday to our Cum Laude Induction ceremony. This opening to celebrate academic excellence is a highlight of the early spring, and I am certain that Associate Head for Academic Affairs Susanna Waters will deliver a memorable talk in her final opening to do so before departing to be Fay School’s Head of School beginning on July 1.

We remain on track for an exciting prom on Sunday, April 28, and this will take place on the heels of our board of trustees being on campus for our spring meetings over the previous two days. As we continue to move forward with centennial campaign initiatives looking at housing, academic space and endowment aspirations, we have done well to sharpen plans and share ideas more broadly. We hope to continue in this direction with increased focus heading into the summer and new school year. Finally, we will welcome alums back to campus over the second weekend in May for alumni weekend and an opportunity for graduates spanning more than sixty years to see the school in action. All of this will take place in the midst of sixth formers speaking in Chapel throughout the spring in ways that are always moving and thoughtful reflections on the years they have spent here. We will pack a lot into this final stretch!

Looking a bit further ahead, there are a couple of areas we are working on and thinking about that we will be updating all of you about as the spring turns to summer.

First, as you know, we pivoted in the middle of this school year to limiting boarding students to seven weekend overnights over the course of the second semester. As a result, we did experience a considerably higher level of student presence and participation in weekend activities throughout February, and this trend has continued since we returned from Spring Break. We have also engaged a number of other boarding schools in an effort to understand how our peers are approaching their weekends. As a result of our shift in policy and the outreach we have done, we are moving in a direction of staying the current course and limiting weekends in a similar way in 2024-2025. We have not yet determined the particulars of what our approach will be next year, but the benefits of a more robust and full campus on Saturday nights, in particular, have been palpable. We are planning to circulate our approach for 2024-2025 over the next month and welcome your thoughts and feedback as we pull it together.

Second, we are also in some conversation at an adult level about our current approach to student cell phone and social media use. With more and more data emerging about the deleterious effects of cell phones and social media surfacing all the time, we are at a point where we feel a need to engage in determining a step in the direction of interrupting the current level of use we experience on campus. While this concern has not surfaced overnight, we feel that the level of use we see on campus detracts from the experience our students are having at school - educationally, communally, socially. We are not of a mind that eliminating cell phones altogether makes much sense. We depend on our cell phones in a number of important ways - emergency communications, for instance. Yet, we no longer feel that our current approach to cell phone and social media use holds up with the harmful effects of unrestricted use getting clearer all the time. The challenge ahead will be determining times of day and/or spaces on campus where cell phones will not be permitted. This will take some time and require a lot of input. To that end, we would welcome your thoughts and intend to share some of what we are reading and experiencing with you as we go. To have a step in place to begin the 2024-2025 school year is our goal.

I hope to see a number of you on campus at any of the many school events we will enjoy over the next month. In the meantime, please do be in touch with questions and anything I might be helpful with. Thanks so much for all you do to support the school.

Best,

John R. Packard

Head of School

Brooks School • 1160 Great Pond Road, North Andover, MA 01845