March 6, 2026

Dear Parents and Guardians,

As we head into Spring Break, I am glad to have this opening to share some thoughts with all of you as we transition from winter to what I hope will be an early spring by the time we return. This has certainly been a cold and snowy stretch since we emerged from Winter Term in late January and our students and faculty have done a terrific job navigating around more weather challenges than we typically face – even in February. My hope is that we will return in late March with warmer temperatures, rapidly melting snowdrifts, and the longer and brighter days that eventually make their way to our campus. There is a lot to look forward to in April and May.

It has been some time since I was last in touch in this way – an indicator of how full our life at Brooks has been since 2026 took hold. We enjoyed a terrific Winter Term through the better part of January and it was nice to see a number of you at the symposium we held on the first Saturday of the second semester. I continue to thoroughly enjoy the speed, pace and concentrated time we have in our cohorts during those three weeks. It is exciting and affirming to engage with students and colleagues about the experiences they enjoyed together as we aim to design an even better program for next year. 

Our board of trustees was in for winter meetings at the end of January and a part of the weekend always includes spending time engaged with school leaders who are advancing work in different areas. In this set of meetings, we covered some student affairs survey data, some thinking about our daily academic schedule for next year, and our athletic and afternoon programs. In all three areas, we updated the trustees on our strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Beyond this, we also spent time talking about campus security. In the fall, we hired a new Director of Security, Nick Fiset, who has been focused on assessing our current practices and the state of our infrastructure. There are a couple of areas at the front of our minds:

• First, we want to ensure that both gated entrances to campus are either staffed or closed at all times when school is in session. We have issued car tags to all community members in order to help with this initiative and anticipate being able to operate at this level in the spring. This will help direct visitors when they arrive to campus and will better position us to turn around any unwanted guests.

• Second, we have done a total audit of points of entry to all ten dormitories and will be moving in a direction to shore up some of those doors that have been less reliable and/or get propped open from time to time. To do everything we can to ensure that residential spaces are as tight as they can be is a priority.

We are also doing a lot of work assessing cameras and contemplating additional places to deploy them. While this thinking continues, we believe we would benefit from some new cameras covering parts of the campus that are frequented and do not get the kind of coverage we would like those areas to have. There is more to come as we head into the 2026-2027 school year.

I want to emphasize that this security work is not in response to anything in particular and is instead a function of thinking we have been engaged in over time, some thoughtful and helpful feedback from the community, and the addition of Nick Fiset, who is seeing the campus with fresh eyes. I would add that we continue to enjoy a lot of support from the North Andover Police Department who have been terrific working with us on dangerous intruder protocols. We will continue to share updates as we move into the spring.

We also spent a bit of time with trustees reviewing where we are with our Academic Commons project and I am glad to report that work in Luce Library is well underway. Along with a number of folks playing key roles, Nina Freeman has been leading this effort and we are working on creating sharper renderings and offering hard hat tours in the spring. Beyond this initial phase of work, we are also moving in the direction of realizing a new classroom building to replace the Link and advance the master plan we have in our sights. We remain on track to have the Academic Commons up and running as we begin our 100th Brooks School year in the fall.

As we moved into February and the heart of the winter, I really enjoyed being able to attend our Lunar New Year celebration on campus. You have seen some images of that event in a recent newsletter and it was so much fun to spend time with students and families at such an important holiday for many in our community. The food was superb, the entertainment impressive, and I was honored to have the privilege of distributing red envelopes full of Brooks Bucks to all of the students!

As you know, we have also been challenged over the past few weeks by the use of racial slurs and a Chapel talk delivered by a student that pushed us to think critically about how we are doing at supporting the diversity we are so fortunate to have at our school. In the midst of a more acute phase of what surfaced in fairly short order in the middle of February, I had two openings to speak to the school in Chapel. I tried to emphasize the following: First, racism and hate speech in any form have no place at Brooks School. I happen to believe we are living at a time when both are on the rise in especially dangerous ways and these recent experiences have underlined work we need to do and perhaps undo in order to live together at a standard we all deserve. Second, we will not realize the standard we have in mind without trying differently. To that end, we need to do some work that builds our capacity to be both inclined and equipped to disrupt and interrupt behaviors that undermine the sense of belonging we seek for everyone at our school. Our circumstances do not have a quick fix, and they are certainly not particular to Brooks School, but we have an opportunity to build a better community by engaging in what is confronting us.

Here are a few more thoughts and items on my mind before wrapping up:

• Our admission office is just about done making decisions about all of the applications we have received for admission to Brooks in 2026-2027. Thank you in advance for all the help you provide in talking with families wanting a parent’s or guardian’s perspective on the school. We are excited about this year’s group and will be working hard between March 10 and April 10 to enroll as many of these students as we can. Our Revisit Days are scheduled for April 2 and April 7, so the first step is getting admitted students to come for one final and exciting look at the school. Thanks for your help in making that happen!

• We have been engaged through the year in searches for both a Chief Finance and Operations Officer and a Chaplain and Dean of Community and Belonging. Both of these positions report to the Head of School and will be tasked with replacing Paul Griffin in the case of the former position, and Jim Chapman and Terri Ofori in the case of the latter position. As of today, we will have completed interviewing candidates for these roles and will be making some decisions on how to proceed over the course of Spring Break. These positions both begin on July 1, 2026.

• I would also like to congratulate all of our winter athletic teams for their hard work and success on the courts, rink and mat all winter long. This mid-November to early March stretch is longer than the fall and spring, and our teams were impressive as they represented the school beautifully all along the way. It was particularly nice to have our basketball teams in New England tournaments with the girls winning in exciting fashion at home on Wednesday afternoon!

• I hope all of you had an opportunity to enjoy The Play That Goes Wrong last week. My trip to Kenya only allowed me to see a part of the show during rehearsal earlier in the week, but all four performances seem to have delighted those in attendance. Congratulations to the cast and crew! My travels also kept me from seeing the Wilder Speaking Prize finals last week and that series of amazing talks is always a highlight in the late winter. It takes a lot of courage to deliver those talks to the whole school and we are all very proud of the participants. Congratulations to Jackson Robbins '28 for delivering the winning speech!

I started working on this letter while flying back to school after spending three days in Nairobi, Kenya, visiting schools in that area we once had exchanges with. I traveled with the President of our Board of Trustees, John Barker '87, P'21, P'23, who was one of the first two participants in an exchange with Alliance High School in Nairobi in 1986. The program ran consecutively through 2012 and we were invited to join the school’s centennial celebration and talk with them about the possibility of restarting this exchange. While I do not have time or space in this letter to do justice to the inspiration I felt while in and around some amazing teachers, students, and alums of these schools, I did feel how vital student exchanges are at a time when seeing and appreciating worlds beyond our own have never been more important.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who supported our Giving Day effort earlier in the month. This is an extremely important day for the school’s Brooks Fund effort and the combination of your participation and encouragement of others played a huge role in making the day a big success. With more than 1,000 individual gifts from all over the country and world, we had a lot of fun and added nearly $500,000 to this year’s total. We could not have done it without you!

I hope you all have a wonderful Spring Break with more time to enjoy your student away from the pace we keep at Brooks. We will look forward to seeing all of you again as students return to the dormitories on Wednesday, March 25, ahead of classes resuming the next morning – free of snow and cold, I hope!

Best,

John R. Packard

Head of School

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