Our Wildwood, Summer 2021, Volume 46

“It was really a tremendously wonderful team effort. It was one of those things that you ask ‘How often in life do you get to make a difference?’ And this was one of those times, and people got that, and a lot of people worked really hard to make this happen, a lot of people.” —LYLE PONCHER, BOARD OF TRUSTEES, BOARD CHAIR, AND ALUMNI PARENT OF AMY ’97 (ELEMENTARY) AND ZACH ’11

work through a DEIB lens. Having maintained a healthy gender balance for years now, the Board has also continued to make progress in broadening the diverse perspectives present around the Board table. Hope Boyd often reminded colleagues and parents that our true role as educators wasn’t to prepare our students for our present but rather for their future. Disruptions like those that have occurred in this year that marks our 50th anniversary—a global pandemic, a broad call to face and fix the systemic racism that’s plagued our society for centuries, and a debilitatingly divisive political climate—aren’t the exception to the rule. We can’t know the disruption, challenges, or opportunities our children and our students will face over the course of their lives, but we can provide them with the Life Skills and Habits of Mind and Heart to be undeterred in meeting them, contributing to the solution, and using their individual and collective power to make their personal and professional communities better for having had them involved. Like hundreds of people I know who’ve made a difference at Wildwood School, only a sample of whose stories I’ve captured for our school’s archives and noted here, Wildwood School graduates will, no doubt, contribute to the “sum of the actions of numerous people over time.” W Note: It goes without saying, but I am very grateful to those who made time to sit and talk with me, telling me stories, and providing insight on the culture and history of our school. The transcripts of the conversations will be captured as part of the school’s archives, so that perhaps at the time of our 75th or 100th anniversary, those who are part of the path then might have as a resource the stories of those who have been a part of the path now. Wildwood School has been fortunate—as have generations of Wildwood School students—to have such hardworking and dedicated visionaries.

couldn’t, as much as they believed in the philosophy of Wildwood, resist the pull to have younger children follow older siblings. The tenets that connected Summerhill and the Coalition of Essential Schools—arguably the most important of them the idea that students should be at the center of their own learning—continues to drive curricular and programmatic innovation at Wildwood. Evidence of that has been documented in more recent articles about everything from Systems Thinking, a program researched and introduced by former Wildwood teacher and now administrator Sarah Simon, to our professional development partnerships with public school counterparts through the Outreach Center, led by Steve Barrett, to the introduction and expansion of the Wildwood Institute Model, as envisioned by Lori Strauss, former director of upper and then associate head of school. FORGING OUR FUTURE Never static, at this writing, the Board of Trustees has structured the six Design Teams outlined in this issue (pages 46-47). Ensuring that the Board’s historic commitment to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are central to envisioning the school’s future, all six Design Teams have been asked to approach the

2019 (L to R): Trustees Ashley Kramer, Lisa Flashner, Cynthia Patton, and Kira Powell-Verica

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CELEBRATING 50 YEARS! | OWW SUMMER 2021