As year-end reflections from 2025 start filling our social media feeds, we are reminded of just how much has transpired during the past 365 days. We navigated profound joy, loss, and the ups and downs that come with living in a community of teenagers. We welcomed a new Head of School, bid farewell to the Wilkins and their interim year of leadership, were given the largest single gift in Proctor’s history, and launched a health and well-being initiative that will transform both student lives and Proctor’s impact in the world of education. Check out our top viewed stories from 2025!
#1 Amy Smucker Becomes Head of School
Proctor knows who it is, with a clarity of mission and values that is rare among independent schools. I chose to come to Proctor because I believe this community understands the power of relationships, the importance of meeting students where they are, and the impact of learning by doing. This is a school that leans into human connection and isn’t afraid to do things differently. These are the qualities that define the kind of school I want to lead.
#2 Celebrating the Class of 2025’s Graduation
A Proctor graduation is unlike any other in its full embrace of a complete spectrum of emotions. Perhaps we feel these emotions more acutely at Commencement than we do at other times of the year because we are all exhausted as the year comes to a close. More likely it is because we care so deeply about our students and the jagged path toward adulthood we have walked with them.
#3 Proctor Receives $10M Estate Gift
Head of School Amy Smucker notes, “This gift reflects decades of care, dedication and belief that has been poured into our students by teachers, advisors, coaches, dorm parents, and an extended Proctor family. It is a testament to the way that this community sees the possibility that lies within each and every Proctor student.”
#4 Proctor Launches Health and Well-Being Initiative
Our students carry significant burdens: the same global stressors we feel, but layered with a digital reality that shapes their journey in countless ways. Their lives play out online and constantly, with thousands of direct and indirect messages coming at them every day through their devices. What gives me immense hope and inspiration is Proctor itself: its model, its mission, and especially its faculty and students. Our students and faculty are eager to understand themselves.
#5 Learning Skills - The Work of Learning How to Learn
Through intentional practice and scaffolding within a student's zone of proximal development – that sweet spot where work is neither too easy nor impossibly hard – neural pathways strengthen and new connections form. Students learn how they learn and we see metacognition in action.
#6 Ocean Classroom - Students Take the Helm
Days are shaped by watch rotations, science deployments, and the constant work of sailing a 134-foot vessel – taking helm in the pre-dawn darkness, standing lookout beneath a canopy of stars, processing neuston tows and measuring eel larvae in the lab. But beyond the routines, students stepped into new levels of responsibility.
#7 Seeing and Being Seen: Nurturing the Soul of Community
We talk often about the power of the Proctor community, but the forming of a community takes time. David Brooks writes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”
#8 Accepted Students and the Start of Something Great
During the 1990s, Proctor adopted an informal motto: Attitude is Everything. Our Admissions Team believes firmly, as do the rest of us, that a community is only as strong as those who embrace it as their own. We have identified those students we believe will help us thrive as a community, and now the responsibility now falls on each accepted student and their family to make sure Proctor is the right fit for them.
#9 The Proctor/Parent Partnership - Raising Adults
Too often, today’s high schoolers can tell you what they've done, what they’ve achieved, the courses they’ve taken and the accolades they’ve achieved, but they struggle to tell you who they are. Proctor’s gift to each family is that our educational model provides students the time, space, and skills necessary to figure out who they are; not who we want them to be, or who their parents or guardians want them to be.
#10 Introducing Proctor’s New Faculty for 2025-2026
Life as a boarding school teacher is largely irrational. You are asked to work long hours, be on call all the time, live alongside disorganized, smelly, complicated teenagers, all while seeking to raise your own family, cultivate your own passions, and have your own life. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. Who would sign up for this job? It turns out some pretty amazing people! We are so excited about this group of educators who joined the Proctor community for the 2025-2026 school year because they “get it”, they understand they are not starting a job, but a life here at Proctor.
- Community and Relationships