October 25, 2023

Dear Parents and Guardians,

As we move into the final week of October following a terrific Family Weekend with all of you, I am glad to have this opportunity to touch base. With less than four weeks to go until we all depart for Thanksgiving Break, we have certainly found our stride and are moving at a good clip with the fall season closing in on the finish line. The school and your children have accomplished a great deal since we got underway on September 1 and we have a lot to look forward to ahead of taking an extended break for Thanksgiving. 

While we were all hoping for better weather than we experienced over Family Weekend, it was really wonderful to have time with so many of you between Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon last week. Each year, we try to put together a program that allows you to get a more in-depth look at the school and all the work we are doing with your child or children, as the case may be. Aside from getting a chance to connect with advisors and take a look at first quarter course comments, effort marks and grades, we try to take advantage of the time we have together in ways that are informative and share with you the good work our faculty and your children are doing together. Between classroom visits, our mini-class program on Saturday morning and informational sessions aimed at illuminating various programs and processes we are engaged in with your children, the hope is that you left at the end of the weekend with a better feel for how the year is going.

I particularly enjoyed having a chance on Saturday to share some extended thinking with you about this school year we are in, our overall state and some of what we are thinking about and hoping to advance as the year and years move along. Throughout my tenure as head of school, I have always felt incredibly fortunate to arrive at Family Weekend with so many impressive experiences already in hand. The challenge is finding a way to adequately convey my good feeling about the work your children are doing in and out of classrooms with faculty members who wear so many different hats on a daily basis. While touching on everything would be an impossible task, I enjoyed reflecting on how well your children have poured themselves into their lives and interests with one another. Between clubs and affinity groups taking shape, team experiences gaining momentum, dormitories coalescing, and music and theater ensembles, casts and crews all humming along impressively, there has been a lot to feel good about. It was fun to share some thoughts about the time we spend together as a school in Ashburn Chapel, along with some images of this year’s Brooks Clean and Chipotle Challenge events. 

In addition, the opportunity to share the school’s thinking about initiatives we are excited to be pursuing with our 100th year now just three years away was also fun. With our mission leading the way, we are now well into sharing our thinking and aspirations about deepening immersive learning opportunities, further embedding a culture of exploration at Brooks and working in directions that ensure genuine belonging. These pillars have led us in the direction of pursuing initiatives aimed at improving both the volume and quality of student and faculty housing, taking a substantive first step at addressing academic space constraints and reaching for endowment goals that will bolster our signature programs and increase our financial aid and faculty support capacity. In seeking to earn support for these initiatives, we look forward to spelling out these plans in greater detail during the course of the year.

In the few weeks that remain prior to Thanksgiving, we do hope all of you will have lots of time to enjoy the balance of the fall athletics season with some of our teams pushing for postseason tournament berths. The sneak preview of Footloose that the cast and crew shared with all of us attending Friday night’s art performances provided all the inspiration any of us would need to attend the show scheduled to run on November 9, 10 and 11 at 7:30 p.m., in the Center for the Arts. If you can also fold in a visit to the Robert Lehman Art Center to see the current exhibit, SILENCIOS, by Juan Manuel Echavarría ’66, you will not be disappointed. Finally, we are closing in on making our final Winter Term course assignments known to all students by the end of October. The wide array of courses offer a rich assortment of possibilities for our students, which I know our faculty are excited to pursue during the nearly three weeks in January when we engage in this learning mode together. In sum, there is a lot to take in here at school over the next few weeks!

Where is your student's favorite place on campus?

Earlier this month, the aforementioned Brooks Clean event was a highlight on the first Friday in October. Assistant Head of School Nina Hanlon and I started with this year’s day student group, who cleaned a common area beautifully and turned the space into a nail salon where yours truly had his nails painted. We then moved on to Whitney and Merriman Houses, which students had turned into Barbie-themed Ken and Barbie spaces, respectively. Lots of pink was on full display! Gardner House happened to have a number of residents nursing injuries and enthusiastically fashioned themselves as a hospital. Thorne House transformed itself into an impressive haunted house and had me jumping more than once as I made my way through the building - the scary masks are emblazoned in my mind! Blake House was next and its beach party theme was impressive only to be spoiled by far too many New York Giants flags in dormitory rooms. P.B.A. Hall was an enchanted castle requiring Nina and me to beat back a dragon in order to gain entry. Chace House took us through a boxing scene from a film that I am still trying to figure out. Hett East cleaned up beautifully and students there welcomed us to a tea party with all of them dressed accordingly and sporting British accents that had to have been practiced ahead of time. Hett West had a whole series of card games going in different rooms that were all in tip-top shape. And, finally, we landed in Jurassic Peabody with dinosaurs and park rangers patrolling the dormitory in ways that had us feeling like we were in the park itself. While determining the winners was difficult, Hett East (bronze medal), Peabody (silver medal) and Thorne (gold medal) took home the hardware. We had a super time.

Before closing, it is important that you know that we have been thinking a great deal here at school about the loss of life in the Middle East since the terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7. When terrible things happen in the world that affect members of our school community in ways seen and unseen, our priority is doing all we can to tend to the physical and emotional safety of our students and one another. We are proud that we have in place, all the time, Chapel gatherings, classroom conversations, affinity group spaces, advisor group meetings, school counselors and opportunities to hold discussions, as needed, to support anyone in our community experiencing difficulty. As we hope for peaceful solutions during an especially trying time for so many, we remain confident in our community’s commitment to taking good care of one another. If you have any specific concerns about your child, please be in touch with their advisor and know that we would welcome a conversation with you.



Again, it was wonderful to spend time with so many of you over Family Weekend. We are excited to have a strong finish to our fall season and I will look forward to being in touch again when Thanksgiving Break is upon us.

Best,

John R. Packard

Head of School 

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