Dear Friends- We had a small traffic jam in the driveway yesterday. Bob Baisley was trying to drop off the annual order of hay bales that we use for soft landings at the bottom of our sledding hill. The conditions were perfect, with fresh crispy snow coating the back field. Bob noted that he had plowed that driveway for nearly 30 years, and had been dropping off hay in the winter for almost as long. As we unloaded the bales, up the driveway came Bob’s brother Jim in his picku

Dear Friends- Many of our teachers and parents were up at Catamount on our Friday ski trip during the formal transfer of power that occurred in Washington D.C., strangely out of touch with that important occasion. Fathers and friends glanced at their phones to check the travels of mothers and daughters who were packed into buses and trains heading down to the capitol. The ski lodge felt strangely quiet and empty all day long, and there was a weird, distracted energy to the tr

Hello Friends- My note today will probably be a bit brief, as I spent all day Friday up on the slopes of Catamount Mountain with the Upstairs students, and their parents and teachers. Our ski trips have begun, and we are looking forward to three more trips packed with fun, bonding, and what I like to call “soul development”- working on life-long lessons of perseverance, grit and determination. It’s worth mentioning that I and many of the parents were working on some of the sa

Dear Friends- Our students returned to school this week with a bounce in their step, a gleam in their eye, and seemingly an added 2-3 inches of height! It’s always amazing to see the changes that occur in them over the winter break. They mature, shift, find parts of themselves, and forget parts of themselves. They are alive and sometimes raw with emotion, laughing, talking, hugging, crying, and falling apart more readily than they did two weeks ago. Sometimes the changes feel