From the Rector: What a Time to be a Teenager

Rector Kathy Giles (c.), along with Dean of Studies Lori Bohan and Vice Rector for Faculty Michael Spencer, prepares for a virtual session.

Dear Alumni, As I write this introduction for the spring/summer Alumni Horae, the COVID-19 pandemic is testing our resilience and resolve in all imaginable ways.

Across the nation, in quiet conversations and deafeningly loud protests, we are questioning race and class and the social structures that leave our black and brown fellow citizens vulnerable to disease, disenfranchisement, and abuse. We are confused and angered by lack of the information we need to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities. We have been “shut down” economically and socially; and in enforced isolation that is loaded with emotion and anxiety, we are engaging with each other in all kinds of ways – and with a special intensity – that were never before possible. And we have suffered terrible national casualties, especially among our most vulnerable.

What a time to be a teenager.

While school has “gone remote,” our community and our world has never demanded more from us. Over these past months, in the face of numerous challenges, we are trying, both within the SPS community and in our larger communities, to develop the language of legacy – language to describe a complex legacy that includes the best and worst of human experience, language that we need to articulate ourselves so that we can understand, take responsibility, empathize, apologize, improve, forgive, and strengthen.

The absence of students on the grounds this spring has brought these issues into sharp relief as we have done the work to reimagine a safe, healthy way to come back together in the fall and be the school these students chose when they said “Yes to SPS,” left their families, and came to the grounds to learn by living and learning together. As we continue to work through how to be and do St. Paul’s School in COVID-19 times – how to have Seated Meals with appropriate personal distance; how to have competitive athletics or choir performances or even Chapel without spreading “droplets” – we’re also confronting the hard questions about who we are, why we have done what we have done, and how we must, going forward, serve our students better.

It is policies, protocols, and procedures – and it is soul-searching – as we confront the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves, in quiet conversations and in some deafeningly loud protests that have everything to do with our school and our community being a safe, healthy place to be a teenager. We’re at work on developing that language of legacy that is honest, generous, rigorous, responsible, and fair. Our teenagers need to see us do it; they need the experience of knowing adults who collaborate and come together, hold each other accountable to truth, and really do exhibit kindness and unselfishness in their eagerness to bear the burdens of others.

It is my great hope that in doing this work – always remembering that teenagers listen to 10 percent of what we say and watch 90 percent of what we actually do – we can help make it a truly amazing time to be a teenager, after all. Sincerely,

Kathleen C. Giles