From my office window overlooking Maxwell Savage, Main Street, the Stone Chapel, and the Wilkins Meeting House in the distance, I am able to watch as daily life at Proctor unfolds. Adolescents and adults stream out of buildings and hustle to their next commitment - whether that is boat building with Hunter in the wood shop, Spanish in Maxwell Savage, a meeting with a colleague, assembly, or a date with a breakfast sandwich from JJs.
This second floor vantage point in Proctor Block allows me to see the giant amoeba of Proctor pulse and flex and shift over the course of the day as each individual plays a pivotal role in our whole. And yet the visible actions from my window are only a fraction of the interactions across campus on any given day. The conversations and emails, the cleaning and cooking and fixing and bill paying, the individual support of students and adults, the coaching in the gym, on the ice, and on the ski hill all play a critical role in Proctor functioning as it does. When we are in the midst of our daily lives as students, employees, or parents, we are immersed in proximate interactions with others. We are focused on the immediate, and forget that we are part of something pretty remarkable.
Over the course of the fall, we have welcomed nearly 400 prospective families to campus for tours and interviews. This past Saturday, we welcomed an additional 30 prospective families to campus for our second Admissions Open House. As we watched our students tour these families around campus and sit on panels for student life, academics, and off-campus programs, we were able to zoom out from our immediate to-do lists to see the impact of Proctor through both our students’ and prospective families’ eyes, and it was amazing.
The frustratingly beautiful thing about working in education is that we rarely see transformational micro moments. Instead, it is over the long run - the course of the trimester, season, year, or decade - that we see the impact of our work. It is when we see a student return from Ocean Classroom a new version of themselves. It is when we see our Learning Skills students matriculate out of our integrated support program because of growth in their self-advocacy, executive functioning, and self-awareness skills. It is when we see a team gel after a season of challenges. It is when dorms gather for holiday parties and share laughs and smiles and hugs. It is that moment at graduation when we watch with such deep pride as our advisees walk across the stage. And then it is at alumni reunions 5, 10, 15, or 20 years down the road when our former students return to campus with their partners and families to share the impact of the Proctor-chapter of their lives.
In the marketing and communications world, we are focused on communicating the “value proposition” of the Proctor experience to our customers. Why would prospective families invest considerable resources in a Proctor education? Why would generous donors commit money and resources to supporting our educational model? While some schools tout immediate outcomes (an immediate return on investment), we make no such claims.
Proctor is a long-term investment in creating good humans. Period. It takes time, messiness, and turbulence for Proctor’s educational model to work, and so when we see our students sit on panels for visiting families, we are not asking for perfection, but for honesty. We believe with all our hearts that Proctor changes the trajectory of young people’s lives. We also believe that the process of growth and change and evolution for teenagers takes considerable time.
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