“How can we learn from things that didn’t go as well? What can we do to enhance all of that moving forward?” -Ms. Rachel Lintgen, Dean of Students.
Those are the questions driving Dr. Molly MacKean, Upper School Head, and Ms. Lintgen as they begin planning for the 2022-2023 school year. With masks now optional, the cafeteria reopened, and Prize Day in the Arts Center, some major signs of normalcy have finally returned to GA.
Both Dr. MacKean and Ms. Lintgen are hopeful for the upcoming school year. “My first year was so hard… and this year has been so much better. So, I’m just thinking if we continue this trajectory, next year is going to be off-the-wall amazing!” Dr. MacKean said.
Ms. Lintgen shares Dr. MacKean’s excitement for next year. She added that she is “pretty excited for a school year where we really get to do all of the things that we want to do.”
Simultaneously, Dr. MacKean and Ms. Lintgen saw the challenge of the last few years as an important opportunity for growth and innovation.
“Mr. Ferrier said to me at one point last year, if we come out of COVID and all we do is try to make the present look like the past, we will have missed something really important about this moment,” Ms. Lintgen said.
Dr. MacKean echoes this concept. “We need to let go of the nostalgia for some utopian moment when this is all just going to go away and we’re going to be able to go back to the way it was.”
Ms. Lintgen added that instead we should draw inspiration from “Alex Goodridge’s [Student Voices] speech, talking about how being at home so much allowed her to have a reset for herself.”
From this desire for innovation and growth, Dr. MacKean and Ms. Lintgen have found the “COVID silver lining,” as Ms. Lintgen describes it. The Pandemic “forced us to try new things and innovate in ways we didn’t entirely think we wanted to, but it has turned out to be a good thing.”
One innovation that the administration would like to keep is the new schedule. “I think a schedule is a reflection of your values,” Dr. MacKean said. This year, there were two major additions to the schedule: Flex, a daily 25-minute block, and Community Time, a twice per rotation 50-minute period.
In her initial email last year about Flex, Dr. MacKean described it as a measure “to give our community time for the impromptu and organic.” Making this addition was challenging. “I had to fight really hard to get it on schedule as a pilot,” said Dr. MacKean, “and then keep it when it might get eaten away.”
Community Time is another addition the administration hopes to continue building next year. Ms. Lintgen is excited to review and implement “some proposals from students and teachers about ideas for Community Time.”
Dr. MacKean also hopes to have student-driven Community Times. Using the Pop Assembly and quilt-making activity for Black History Month as examples, she describes Community Time as an opportunity to “let students shine, to let them create opportunities to connect with each other, to have fun, to find joy.”
Community Time is also part of the administration’s plan for the upcoming 2022 Midterm elections. Part of this is rooted in the history of Community Time itself. “The fact that we were going through a super contentious election year [in 2020] was actually where the concept of Community Time came from,” Dr. MacKean said.
Elaborating on their plan for election programming, Ms. Lintgen added that, in discussions with history department chair Dr. Julie Kimmel, they have begun to discuss ways to “talk about civic involvement” and “voting local.”
“Most of the things that affect our daily lives are decided really local, like in your township meeting, in the state assembly and by your county commissioners,” Ms. Lintgen said. “It’s not cool sounding, but it’s really, really important.”
Ms. Lintgen described that another major focus of the election events would be to discuss “civil discourse and how we agree and disagree with each other in respectful ways,” a concept common to previous election year discussions. For example, before the 2020 election, the school invited Rosetta Lee to discuss how to have “courageous conversations.”
This ties into a main aspiration for the upcoming year: celebrating community. Dr. MacKean said she wants to “foster community connections in ways that celebrate all of the different kinds of people that make this community amazing.”
Ms. Lintgen agrees, elaborating that one of her key principles can be found on “the sign of my office: ‘work hard, be kind.’” She also added that she wants to make the Upper School “a place where everyone feels like they belong regardless of who they are.”
A key step the administration would like to take towards this goal is to connect with clubs and student organizations. Ms. Lintgen says a priority is to build relationships with “our clubs and our student groups, to make those ideas come to life.”
Dr. MacKean adds that she wants more time for “experiencing poetry readings and performances happening in the art center, or kickball happening out of the quad.” In addition, Dr. MacKean says that “building those rich traditions that involve constant recreation is refreshing because we constantly have a new group of 565 kids who are coming through the Upper School every single year.”
“I’m hoping that we can innovate gently,” Ms. Lintgen said. “I’d like a year of tweaking … so we can feel good about where we are, where we can just move a bit more gently.” She wants there to be a “willingness to continue to look critically and thoughtfully at what we do and innovate where it makes sense and reiterate our traditions in places where that makes sense.”
Dr. MacKean believes that GA can emerge well from COVID by “making things … more than about academics.” She also wants the community to “reframe the struggle away from things that you’ve lost to superpowers that you’ve gained.”
Instead, she believes our community should celebrate that “we’ll have brightness and human connection and celebration and all the things that we’ve been able to achieve over this really challenging stretch of human experience.”
Looking forward to the upcoming school year, she said GA community deserves praise for developing “capacities that are going to serve you so well in life. I like the fact that you have been able to do everything you’ve been able to do over the course of the past two and a half years. It is superhuman, truly. And so I hope that it is a year of just continuing to leverage and celebrate all those superpowers!”