May 16, 2025

Dear Parents and Guardians,

With just a few weeks to go in this 2024-2025 school year, I am glad to have this opening to check in with all of you. The challenge and the fun of May is that we have so much impressive work culminating at the same time across the full breadth of the school’s program. With advanced placement exams now behind us, and final tests, papers and projects all coming together, our academic sprint to the finish line is underway. Our athletic teams are moving into tournament play, the spring musical, Hadestown, is currently running in the theater with performances still to come tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m., and our spring evenings have been filled with art shows of all sorts. This adds up to a full plate of activity and we are looking forward to enjoying much of it with all of you ahead of our Lawn Ceremony and Prize Day at the end of the month. We intend to make the most of the time we still have together!

As I look back, there is far too much to highlight from the past month in just one letter, but I do want to try to give you a feel for both the volume and range of events we have enjoyed on campus. Our Cum Laude Induction Ceremony featured a wonderful talk by math teacher, director of rowing, and Prince Charitable Trust Chair recipient, Tote Smith, at the end of April. It was a lot of fun to celebrate academic excellence and the impressive work all of this year’s inductees have realized during their years. This year’s prom followed shortly thereafter and was a huge success. We then enjoyed a Head of School Holiday I announced the morning after the prom with senior prefect, Lydia Tangney, successfully answering a few trivia questions about The Ohio State University where she will be headed in the fall. We then finished April with a “Life After Brooks” panel for the class of 2025 and some sage advice for this group as they get closer to the next step in their lives at the end of the summer.

We ran into May with our Asian Student Alliance leading us through the first Chapel service of the month honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, where we also celebrate with students carrying flags representing the many countries who are part of our school community down a Main Street procession. We welcomed the classes of 1975 and 2020 back to campus for 50th and 5th reunions, respectively, and enjoyed time on campus with all of them. It is a lot of fun to be able to tap into the perspective of those who attended Brooks 50+ years ago when we were still an all-boys school. Similarly, we thoroughly enjoyed hosting the class of 2020 for a reception in our home ahead of a dinner they enjoyed together in the Demoulas Family Boathouse. To my knowledge, this is the only class in the school’s history who did not experience graduation ceremonies on campus with Covid-19 taking that away from them five years ago. To have them back enjoying the campus together was wonderful.

The first annual Brooks School Oscars presentation was a nice way to give the class of 1975 a feel for life on campus in 2025, and featured some really impressive film work by students as part of a friendly competition. We have enjoyed a student art show, Brooks Arts Creative Collaborative Artistic Inquiries, in the Robert Lehman Art Center, and the exhibit will remain up through the end of the year. Sixth formers continue to share wonderful reflections on time spent at Brooks in Chapel and in oratory class speeches delivered over the past week. I am looking forward to the handful still to come. And, Grandparents and Special Friends Day was a great deal of fun, despite some crummy weather complicating the day.

As we continue to move in the direction of Commencement Weekend, there is a lot still to come:

• We will enjoy Advanced History Capstone presentations in the coming week with students talking about an extended piece of research they have been working on all year.
• On Tuesday evening of next week, we will host our alumni induction dinner here on campus with some alums here to enjoy the evening with the class of 2025. A former senior prefect, Zack McCabe ’15, will be the featured speaker in his 10th reunion year and he will be terrific.
• Beloved Community Day follows on Wednesday with a full morning program we will draw a great deal from as a school, and we are looking forward to hosting the class of 2025 for a few Chipotle dinners at our home at the end of next week.
• With the spring concert scheduled for Thursday, May 22 at 7 p.m., we have a full week of dinners, presentations and culminating events that will keep us engaged and impressed.
• Our spring sports schedule will come to a close over Memorial Day weekend and then we will pivot to our final week with the class of 2025 and a full slate of activities leading up to our Donning of the Stoles and Symbols Ceremony and Lawn Ceremony both on Saturday, May 31, followed by Prize Day on Sunday, June 1. If you have any questions at all about these events at the end of the month, this Commencement Weekend page on the school’s website has a number of helpful answers.
• After celebrating the class of 2025’s many accomplishments, we will move through Exhibitions of Learning with the third-, fourth-, and fifth-form, and bring this 2024-2025 school year to a close over the first weekend of June. It is hard to believe we are just a few weeks away from that point!

Before closing, I want to thank all of you who have supported the Brooks Fund over the course of this year. We are now into our final push to realize an ambitious goal we set at the year’s beginning to ensure the school has the resources it needs to deliver for our students in ways we aim for every year. Your participation in our annual giving effort means an enormous amount to us. So, thank you for your support and for considering a gift between now and the end of June.

You may also have heard about the excitement in Chapel yesterday morning. Assistant Head of School Nina Freeman announced a Head’s Holiday for Memorial Day on May 26! I hope your student finds time to enjoy the day with classmates, whether they are a sixth-former preparing for graduation or an underclassman getting ready for finals.

Finally, I do want to also point you in the direction of an event scheduled for Wednesday, June 11, in support of the Preston Settles Memorial Fund. As we continue to remember and hold Preston close in what would have been his graduation year, I have been pleased to be part of an Honorary Committee trying to assist in raising awareness for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. I invite you to explore the website to learn more about the event.

I will look forward to being in touch again at some point in the middle of June when the year has drawn to a close and we are looking ahead to summer plans of all kinds. Between now and then, I will see many of you on campus and certainly welcome any questions or thoughts you would like to share. 

Best,

John R. Packard

Head of School

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