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The Final Blog

It is amazing to acknowledge that this will be my final Friday blog of the 2015-2016 school year. It is time for me to spend some time coming up with new material for the fall – I am quite sure the audience needs more of a break than I do. Earlier yesterday I participated once again in Young Author’s Day, watching as we pushed Lower School students out of their comfort zone to present their work in a public way. Simultaneously the push is on in the rest of the school to motor through exams and final assessments. There are final athletic and musical events, and awards ceremonies abound; there seems to be an infinite amount of activity on this campus right now. It is the time of year when schools want to see tangible evidence of progress as a validation of our collective work to date. Sometimes that evidence is a bit more qualitative than quantitative in nature.

Earlier this week, I was deeply touched by the number of parents who have approached me to indicate just how proud they are that we had a student successfully initiate a gender transition process in our Middle School. I want to tip my hat to the deep and thoughtful work done by Ryan Feely and Michael Buensuceso, among others, to bring us to this point. Much of the story is a personal one, and I want to respect that privacy in my comments today. However, I do think this event is something to celebrate as a school. For example, I know now that we had a Lower School student a number of years ago who did not feel able to transition in this community, and I continue to feel a sense of sadness that this was the case.


If we are searching for evidence of progress, surely the events in our Middle School this week are strong indicators of positive progress. We all can have different levels of worry or concern about Berwick’s policies on supporting transgender students, but I think it would be hard to argue the fact we have a student feeling safe enough to make this kind of change during the school year is a statement about our culture. So while I do not want to single out this student, I do want to single out a school community that has clearly grown in recent years. Through an increased willingness to engage in complex topics as a learning community, we are making headway. While the courage and the praise for this transition process belongs to one individual, I want you all to know that this has been a week when I have been particularly proud to call myself the Head of School at Berwick Academy.

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