January 17, 2025

Dear Parents and Guardians,

I hope all of you are enjoying a nice start to 2025 and had a terrific holiday season before the calendar turned to the New Year. With Winter Term well underway and your students heading into the final stretch of this wonderful change of pace in the middle of our school year, I am so glad to have this opportunity to be in touch. It has been a while! My family and I have settled back into our home on campus over the past four weeks, and it has been so exciting to be here again after spending the past six months on the move. I am looking forward to what I hope and think will be a terrific second half of this 2024-2025 school year.

Before turning my attention to Winter Term and some of what lies ahead over the next few weeks, I want to begin by thanking Nina Freeman for doing an outstanding job as acting head of school while I was on sabbatical. Anyone who is able to spend time with Nina would surely attest to the consummate educator and exceptional leader and person she is at her core. Her focus is always on putting students first and I am excited to be returning with the opportunity to continue working with and learning from her over the months and years ahead. I am also grateful to our board of trustees, my colleagues, all of the school’s employees, and, importantly, your students for launching this 2024-2025 school year with the spirit, energy and drive that I dearly missed while away. It is so nice to be back in the mix of all of that good feeling. And, finally, I am very much looking forward to seeing and meeting many of you as the winter and spring move along. I have a lot of lost time to make up for!

Here at school, it was a real thrill to start Winter Term together in Ashburn Chapel on Tuesday morning of last week. While it was quite a different feeling to begin my school year more than four months removed from when everyone else got started in early September, it was so nice to be with the whole school in that space – without cell phones! For the first time since we launched Winter Term in 2012, I am not teaching a course, as there is simply too much reentering to manage this month, but I did enjoy having an opportunity to launch this three-week term with some thoughts about its purpose, my sabbatical, our school value of integrity and how all of that is connected. 

We created Winter Term 13 years ago in an effort to deliver more fully on the school’s mission: At Brooks School, we seek to provide the most meaningful educational experience our students will have in their lives. With meaning serving as the operative word in our mission, it is our view that deep and immersive experiences are essential. Winter Term is designed around precisely that – working with one group of students and teachers for three weeks on a focused endeavor in project-based, experiential and hands-on ways. Over the years, students have written college essays about Winter Term experiences, and they have served as a nice complement to the many deep experiences our students have through the more conventional part of our school year in dormitories, advisory groups, teams of all sorts, clubs and affinity groups and subject areas they are passionate about. Winter Term has strengthened and broadened our program in ways that have allowed students and teachers to learn differently in the middle of our school year. I am looking forward to learning more about this year’s array of courses at our symposium at the end of next week.

It would be very difficult to try to encapsulate anywhere near all I was so fortunate to be able to do over the past few months. Yet, when I was thinking about returning and speaking in Chapel to begin Winter Term, I was immediately drawn to how my sabbatical was really an extended Winter Term of my own. I was able to spend large blocks of time that are so hard to find in the run of life learning with people I had never met before, and exploring places I had never been before with my wife, Kim '87, and our children, Kate '18 and Elizabeth '21. I had hoped for extended stretches of time to do precisely what I was able to do, and the inspiration I found and continue to feel was only within reach because I was able to live at a different speed, in a different mode, full of opportunities to be present and in the moment with amazing people – much like the opportunities all of us have during Winter Term at Brooks. 

At the beginning of the year, Nina focused the school on integrity, one of our six core values, and Winter Term, which is intentionally less scripted than our first and second semester, requires a high degree of integrity if we are to realize the deep and immersive experiences we aim for. We watch ourselves and depend upon one another’s integrity in courses that are team-oriented, experiential in nature, and build upon the work and contributions each of us bring to the table. Thus, being who we say we are, and fulfilling our commitments to one another, have everything to do with reaching the sort of collective and shared experiences I am so excited to learn about as these courses wrap up. Whether they have been conscious of it or not, your students' integrity has had much to do with the experience the school is having during these three weeks.

With so many faces that are new to me on campus, I am late to this year’s Hello Campaign that Nina launched earlier in the year. I shared in Chapel that I needed a minute to raid the school’s Brooks Bucks vault before actually turning the switch and doing my best to learn new names and reconnect with the many who have been here for two years or more. I was able to get a head start at this past Saturday night’s open house at my home with lots of students coming, going, enjoying one another’s company, and eating an alarming volume of the Raising Cane’s order that was delivered for the event. Aside from the food and fun, it was just so nice to have students in our home reminding me of what makes this life so great. At our small school, it is important that we all work to know one another well, and I will be neck-deep in trying to do just that as we move forward. 

I am also very much looking forward to seeing many of you who are new Brooks parents and guardians at a reception for all of you on Friday, January 24, at 6 p.m. in the Keating Room immediately ahead of the Winter Term Symposium beginning at 7 p.m. While we may have met during last year’s admission process, I am eager to catch up and hear how this year is going. There will be a lot to take in and celebrate that evening.

Before I sign off, I want to share that on Wednesday morning, Reverend Dr. Theodore Hickman-Maynard, Associate Dean of Harvard Divinity School, visited Brooks in our Chapel as part of a special program honoring the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The event was designed to celebrate Dr. King's vision of justice, equality and the "Beloved Community," inspiring faculty and students to reflect on its continued relevance. Dr. Hickman-Maynard delivered a powerful address that captivated the audience, weaving together his personal history and a call to action for the present. The morning was enriched by music and singing, creating an atmosphere of reverence and unity, and students were visibly transfixed by the speaker's eloquence and the profound message he shared.

In closing, I have noted on a couple of occasions that being back on campus in what has been the only home our family has known underlines the adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That is certainly true for me here at Brooks. It is wonderful to be stepping in the direction of doing all I can to help this school year continue to be the experience we all hope and want it to be for your children. I will look forward to seeing you as the year moves along.

Best,

John R. Packard

Head of School

Brooks School • 1160 Great Pond Road, North Andover, MA 01845