June 24, 2025

Dear Parents and Guardians,

With the 2024-2025 school year now complete, I am glad to have this opportunity to check in with most of the summer still in front of us. By any measure, we had a wonderful school year and it was so much fun heading down the stretch with the terrific class of 2025 making the most of their final couple of weeks on campus. We enjoyed our commencement weekend and the fitting finish all 91 members of the class were able to enjoy together. To celebrate them with you and extended family members and friends all in attendance was a real honor.

For me, I am finishing this year with an extra strong sense of thanks and gratitude to Nina Freeman, our board of trustees, all of my colleagues, our student body, and all of you, for the year we were able to have. I thoroughly enjoyed the opening my sabbatical allowed to explore some interests and spend time with my family between July and December of the past year. We were able to do some traveling in ways that are not routinely within reach and I will be forever grateful for that time. I was equally grateful to return to campus in January with the school in full stride, and have been reminded again and again about how fortunate I have been to spend my working life as part of this community. To work with so many who do such good work on behalf of our students continues to feel great. For all of these reasons, I am very much looking forward to being here when the 2025-2026 school year opens and we again embark on what we believe will be another memorable school year – Brooks School’s 99th year.

With this penultimate year of the school’s first century set to begin in July, we are moving ever closer to being in our centennial year. As a result, we will be working more actively with many in our extended community who are contributing to what we hope a 100th year full of opportunities to celebrate will look like. In addition, we have been engaged in Centennial Campaign work for a few years now guided by campaign pillars and strengths we are seeking to expand: Immersive Learning, Culture of Exploration, Genuine Belonging. An outcome of this work is an academic facility master plan and some extraordinary support that now has us poised to move forward with the plan’s first phase – a complete renovation of the main and upper floors of Luce Library in order to construct what we will be calling our Academic Commons. The facility will include five new classrooms, a range of small group and collaborative study spaces, and a new home for our Learning Center team to deliver an expanded program of academic support and enrichment that will serve our whole student body and faculty. For those interested in learning more, Director of Institutional Advancement Gage Dobbins and Director of Family Engagement and Giving Mary Merrill are available to talk with families about supporting this exciting next step for Brooks. We are on track to begin this work early in 2026 with hopes of having the facility completed by the time school opens in 2026-2027. In addition to sharing updates as the summer turns to fall, the next edition of The Bulletin will feature this Academic Commons facility and all we are hoping it will help us reach.

As we look to the summer ahead, we will be keeping plenty busy here at school through July and August. Of immediate interest to us is closing this fiscal year on firm ground and our push to secure important Brooks Fund gifts before the clock strikes midnight on June 30 is ongoing. These gifts have immediate impact on the student experience in all kinds of ways, but the arrival of summer underlines the role robust annual giving plays in campus renewal projects. For example, we are in the process of renovating bathrooms in PBA Dormitory and successful annual giving has everything to do with being able to take on a project of that scope. To do more of this kind of work moving forward is a goal and the Brooks Fund plays a vital role in making progress of this sort possible. Thanks so much for considering a gift before the end of the week.

Once July arrives, we will have turned our attention to the coming year and will continue moving forward with our preparation for 2025-2026. While you will be hearing from the school on a steady basis throughout the summer, I do want to be explicit in inviting you to reach out with any and all questions that surface during these warmer months. Here are just a few items that are on our minds and will get some additional thought before we return in early September:

• After gathering a lot of feedback regarding this year’s initial step in the direction of a policy limiting cell phone use during the academic day, we will be considering tweaks and adjustments to that policy for 2025-2026. On balance, we were extremely pleased with the ways in which cell phone disruptions were substantially reduced. Our goal is to harden the policy we have and consider additional opportunities that might build on the benefits we experienced with cell phones out of the way. We anticipate having these tweaks and adjustments determined by the middle of the summer.
• With increasing urgency, we have spent a fair amount of time thinking about artificial intelligence and the proliferation of its use. Our hope is to begin the coming year with greater understanding of this powerful resource and how we might be more effective in pointing our students in the direction of both understanding how to leverage it well and appreciating the perils of misuse.
• Finally, I have just started our All Community Read, The Last Beekeeper, and the first bit I have read leaves me thinking I will have a hard time putting it down. We hope you might join us in reading the book. Upon our return, we will find our way into some discussions of it and we will have the special privilege of welcoming the author, Julie Carrick Dalton, when she visits campus in the fall. If you have any questions about the book, let us know.

If you find yourself in the York Harbor, Maine, area on Thursday, July 24th, or the East Hampton, New York, area on Friday, August 22nd, we hope you might consider joining us for some mid- and then late-summer fun with Brooks School alums and fellow parents and past parents. These are casual events and great opportunities to both catch up with folks you might know and meet other members of the community you will be glad to know. I hope we might see you there.

Before closing, I want to thank those of you who are class of 2025 parents and guardians for all of your support of the school over these years. This will be the final letter of this sort that you receive and we are so grateful for the many ways in which you have enriched the school and the experience our students have had together. Moving forward, we will certainly hope to keep in touch and very much hope you will join us for centennial festivities when that 100th year gets underway.

For the many of you who will be returning as parents and guardians in the fall, we will stay in touch as the summer progresses. As always, please reach out at any point with questions, concerns, or anything you think we might be able to help with. I will plan to be in touch again in early August. Until then, have a great summer.

Best,

John R. Packard

Head of School

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