Our Wildwood, Summer 2021, Volume 46

DEAR FRIENDS A Letter From Landis

2008: Landis and International Community Involvement participants in Vietnam

our secondary expansion, and every year between and since have served the school well and prepared us to meet this moment. You’ll see that for yourself in the pages that follow. Particularly in times like these, I’m reminded of a quote I’d read in the years just after I’d begun working in independent education. In a sort of raison d’être for all of us in independent schools, Lucy Madeira Wing said of the girls’ school she’d founded in 1906 to prepare girls to lead women’s colleges: “The excuse of a private school in a democracy is that it shall be a laboratory, a place for the demonstration of old experiments and the trying of new. It is a place of freedom.” Wildwood School has been that place for 50 years. Our graduates and our students carry that spirit and mission outward and forward in ways that most of us will never know. I hope you enjoy this issue of Our Wildwood, a reflection on all that we have been, are, and will be to all who are a part of our community and beyond.

Interviewing at Wildwood School in 2006, I remember spending hours talking with members of the community in the lower-level conference room at the middle and upper campus. A then-10th grader on the student interview panel asked me what superpower I’d choose if I could have any. It was such a fun and novel question, and I didn’t have to think long to realize what I’d chose: time travel. That’s what this issue is all about. And it’s why, when colleagues began talking about including an article that would capture elements of the history of Wildwood School, I volunteered to write it. I knew it’d be a gift to talk with some of the folks who’ve brought Wildwood School to this place, its 50th anniversary as a school and its 20th anniversary as a K-12. It is my good fortune to work with colleagues, some of whom have been at Wildwood School for three decades, and a dedicated Board of Trustees, all of whom are committed to maintaining Wildwood School as a constantly evolving institution, growing and changing to meet the needs of the time. It’s been my privilege to work with the likes of Andrew Solmssen, our current Board Chair, and his predecessors Joel Brand, Lisa Flashner, Cynthia Berkshire, Lee Rosenbaum, and Cathleen Collins, three of whom continue in their Board service. Lyle Poncher, another former Board Chair who was instrumental in scaling Wildwood School from a K-6 to a K-12 in 2000, is in his 30th year on our Board. Together with you, they, all my colleagues, and the rest of our Board, are working tirelessly in service to the students in our care now while stewarding the school in service to the students who’ll benefit from the Wildwood School that will be. One thing is clear, especially after the events of recent years, the mission, philosophy, and pedagogical and other foundations laid in 1971 at our founding, in 2000 with

With warm regards,

Landis Green Head of School

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CELEBRATING 50 YEARS! | OWW SUMMER 2021