The Buzz

We have a choice how we handle the winter months. We can retreat indoors and curse the cold, or we can embrace the amazing outdoor recreation opportunities available to us. At Proctor, we choose the latter. 

Faculty members Alan McIntyre, Lynne Bartlett, and Jeffrey Prado sit at the heart of our environmental stewardship efforts, bringing students along for the journey with them each day through their teaching and leadership of our Woods Team activity.

For us, as educators, our 9th graders play just as important a role in shaping our school's culture as the most veteran of faculty members. We all have a responsibility to steward this chapter of Proctor and today provided a powerful opportunity for our 9th graders to come together, have some fun, and grow stronger as a group. 

Since 1971, Proctor has understood something essential about building culture – immediately following registration day, Wilderness Orientation is the most effective way to start the school year and welcome new students into the Proctor community.

In Proctor's Earth Day celebration, students and faculty embraced a bias toward action through hands-on environmental stewardship, immersive outdoor excursions, and collaborative on-campus projects – moving beyond eco-paralysis toward meaningful engagement with our changing planet.

As these beautiful fall days transition to full blown stick season, and then winter, our goal is to continue to immerse ourselves and our students in the healing, inspiring, energizing surroundings of the woodlands. 

After phones were collected, peak foliage and crisp fall weather greeted our 64 freshmen as a stream of spry young legs bounded their way beyond Johnson House and into the Proctor Woodlands to the Cabin.

Wilderness Orientation is hard. It challenges even the most experienced, rugged individuals because it asks us to live in close community with each other, to embrace our flaws, to appreciate our strengths, and to understand that any living community will have its natural ebbs and flows of energy and emotions. 

We have never been more connected to each other (digitally), yet we have never been more disconnected from the world around us which is why celebrating Earth Day the Proctor way always comes as an exhausting, refreshing change of pace.