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WELCOME BACK
The St. Johnsbury Academy Faculty and Staff gathered for an In-Service on August 22nd, 2024, in preparation for the school year that has just begun. We had asked Science Department Faculty member and Field Semester teacher Mitchell Jones to offer a reflection on community to start our year in the right spirit, especially given the stresses of the summer of 2024. Mitchell’s reflection, looking back on the “best, worst summer [he] ever had,” managed to find a balance of honesty, wisdom, humor and sincerity that moved us all.
Our theme for the year—which we’ll explore in the coming months—is “Face the World and Make it Better.” As a way to welcome our community back for the 2024-2025 school year, I thought it was worth sharing what Mitchell offered to us–a meditation on the lessons community has to teach us. The sum of these lessons is in some ways how to face the world together—and how even in itself, that simple act of facing the world begins to make it better.
All the best for the new school year,
Dr. Howell
A Reflection on Community
It's late July of 2023, and the Gazebo kit I ordered from Ocean State Job Lot has been sitting in its box unbuilt in our barn for months. My wife Diantha and I decide it's got to be built before school starts, or it will never happen.
I dust off my geometry skills and design and build a hexagonal deck to put the Gazebo on. I mostly finish the deck (I am who I am), then open the box containing the Gazebo kit, which I lay out on the deck and discover is an octagon, not a hexagon. But it's far too late to do anything about that, so we proceed as if we always meant it to be that way.
Once the gazebo was built, we started inviting people in, and kept inviting people in. It became a thing I look forward to every week, and it fills my cup heading into the weekend. Sometimes there are 5 people, sometimes 30. We eat, we drink, and we talk. In this imperfect space, an octagonal Gazebo on a hexagonal deck, we have built one of the most special communities I have ever been a part of. I was riding the high of this community as we entered into the Summer of 2024.
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