June 14, 2024

Dear Parents and Guardians,

I hope all of you are doing well and that your summers are beginning to take hold. It has now been two weeks since students finished up following a wonderful commencement weekend and celebration of the class of 2024. With the dormitories now empty, and our final faculty meetings behind us, I wanted to take this opportunity to be in touch with all of you - including those who will be parents and guardians at Brooks for the first time when the 2024-2025 school year begins. Welcome! While we certainly don’t want to rush in the direction of getting next year underway with the summer still in its infancy, we do want to open lines of communication and make clear that we look forward to staying in touch through June, July and August. The time moves quickly and we are eager to help in any way we can.

Before getting too far along, I would like to begin by congratulating all of you who are parents and guardians of a member of the class of 2024. It was a lot of fun to celebrate with you through all of the weekend’s events leading up to our 93rd Prize Day on Memorial Day. All 88 of this year’s graduates contributed a great deal to the school, and we were so pleased to have opportunities to recognize them at our Donning of the Stoles Ceremony and Lawn Ceremony ahead of Prize Day itself. Their care for and commitment to the school after a challenging and pandemic-altered beginning made a huge difference over these four years. We will certainly miss them as they move on to next steps in their lives.

Turning to the summer, and as this letter reaches all of you, our Director of Institutional Advancement Gage Dobbins, and I are enjoying an incredibly warm and gracious welcome from a number of you as we travel through Korea and China. From Seoul, we are making our way to and through Beijing, Qingdao and Shanghai, with many opportunities to visit with some of you along the way. It has been more than ten years since I was last in Beijing or Shanghai, and I have never had a chance to visit Qingdao. With the school’s centennial year set to begin in just 25 months, we have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to share some of our aspirations for the next couple of years, and meet a number of prospective students and families learning about Brooks for the first time. We will be heading back to school at the end of next week. This has been a terrific way to begin the summer.

Once Gage and I return to North Andover, we will be nearing the end of the current fiscal year on June 30. This, of course, means that we will also be working as hard as we can to finish well with our Brooks Fund effort. Thank you so very much to the many of you who have given generously in this way, among others, during the course of the year. With our final push now upon us, we are grateful for any consideration of a gift before the fiscal year draws to a close. Your participation and support means a great deal to us.

In addition to the fiscal year ending when the clock strikes midnight on June 30, I will begin my six-month sabbatical running until the end of the calendar year. I first shared these plans with current parents and guardians back in February, and have since had an opportunity to write about this incredible gift of time in the most recent edition of The Bulletin. While I will certainly miss being at school during the first half of the coming year, I am looking forward to both the professional and personal opportunities the time will provide. I will be returning on January 1, 2025 more excited than ever to be at Brooks!

During these six months, our Assistant Head of School Nina Freeman will be serving as Acting Head of School, and will be working closely with a terrific administrative team, devoted faculty and staff and an exceptional board of trustees to get the 2024-2025 school year off to a great start. Nina will be beginning her third year at Brooks and has been an unbelievably quick study. The school could not be in better hands. 

Before closing, I want to provide some updates to school policies that I have referenced through the late winter and spring: 

Weekend Policy:



As current parents and guardians know, in the second semester, we limited the number of weekend overnights boarding students were allowed to take. We did this in conjunction with efforts to enliven the weekends on campus and felt a tangible and positive difference between February and May. As we move into the 2024-2025 school year, we will be implementing the following policy:

• The first and last weekends of the school year (September 7-8, May 31-June 1) are community weekends. During these weekends, boarding students will not be granted permission for an overnight leave. We will permit day leaves during these two weekends with the expectation that students are back on campus by 8 p.m. for weekend programming.

• All weekends in the school calendar that consist of more than one free night (Family Weekend, Winter Term Weekend, Presidents Day Weekend) will be designated as free weekends and may be taken by all students who have permission to leave. These weekends will not count toward the total number of weekends a student takes during the year.

• Students will be permitted to take six weekend overnights per term. Unused weekends will carry over to the next term. Sixth-form college visits, with approval from a student’s college counselor, will not count toward this limit. 

Our hope and belief is that this approach to weekend overnights for boarding students provides important access to going home or elsewhere from time to time, while also contributing to a fun and vibrant weekend experience for boarding and day students alike. We are looking forward to giving this approach a try when September rolls around.

Cell Phone Policy Thinking:

As I have noted in earlier letters, we will be moving in the direction of restricting cell phone use in the 2024-2025 school year. In addition to holding student forums in May, we devoted a substantial amount of time to this line of thinking during our final faculty meetings last week. From here, a committee will be formed and tasked with crafting a policy inclusive of feedback we have gathered, research we have done and intuition we have about how we might make progress on limiting cell phone use. Our plan is to share this policy with all of you in mid-July and implement the step we determine we are going to take when students return to school in September. Our goal is to grow engagement and enhance our experience together on campus.

In both cases, please do be in touch with us if you have any questions or additional suggestions you would like us to consider. Your thoughts and feedback to this point has been extremely helpful.

With Nina Freeman scheduled to be in touch with all of you in mid-July after she has had a couple of weeks under her belt as Acting Head of School, I will be signing off for the next six months. I look forward to picking up again in January with a lot to share about my time away, along with excitement about reentering school life certain that Nina and all at Brooks will have the year moving along beautifully. Finally, thanks so much to all of you who are graduating as parents and guardians this year. Your support in all forms has meant the world to us.

Have a great summer.

Best,

John R. Packard

Head of School

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