A lot of people work two jobs. I’m one of them. During the school year, I work as a high school Humanities teacher at Waring School. During weekends and vacations, I work as a Family Nurse Practitioner in Lynn Community Health Center’s Urgent Care department. I go back and forth, physically and mentally: now I’m a teacher immersed in correcting student essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved or facilitating a class on the Marias River Massacre, now I’m a nurse practitioner racing to keep up with the press of patients on a winter weekend or listening for the faint wheeze of asthma in a child’s lungs. I love what I do at both jobs, and they teach me constantly about everything from decoding narrative to the value of being still and listening. 

Every spring Waring eighth graders pen fictional—often outlandish and whimsical—tales about members of the senior class. During the final week of school, they share them during All-School Meeting. Check out this year's excellent "Senior Pieces" below (including a special tale about two long-time Waring teachers who announced their retirement this spring).

The juniors and their families at my school are feeling anxious about how the college application process will unfold next fall. The fact is that no one really knows what the fall will look like. The colleges with which I have had conversations all plan to open as usual in September and expect to host campus visits, group information sessions, tours, and to offer interviews. They also readily acknowledge that in spite of their best efforts to plan for a return to normalcy, no one really knows what our world will look like next fall.

A strong sense of togetherness has always defined the Waring community. While we shouldn't share a common space now, we can always share the Waring experience. Below are eight free online resources inspired by our curriculum. Please stay connected and try a few at home.

Monday, February 24, was an historic day for Waring School as we broke ground on our new school building. The journey up to this point has been a community effort, from concept through design, and is worth celebrating. We would never have reached this stage without the generosity of our community, the philanthropy of some 375 donors, and the participation of our students, faculty, trustees, and many others.

In Asbury Park, New Jersey, in  May of 1988, I was part of a group of teachers hired to grade the essay portion of the National Teacher Examination for the Educational Testing Service, the test creation-arm of the College Board. Asbury Park is best known for the Stone Pony, a music venue that hosted New Jersey native, “The Boss,” Bruce Springsteen, and also for its now dilapidated Boardwalk. Asbury Park also has the dubious distinction of being the second most dangerous city in New Jersey.

With the prospect of a fully certified Passive House school building now only months away, no one is owning our school building project more than our students themselves. This week in All-School Meeting, several members of the FIRST LEGO Robotics Team, led by Francis Schaeffer and Sarah Carlson-Lier, presented a first run of their upcoming FLL competition material. As part of their stellar work, the team told us about a programming creation of theirs: an “SCC” or “School Carbon Calculator,” a digital module that will allow Waring (and other schools and institutions) to track the energy performance of their buildings. The FLL team has worked closely with Tim Lock, Opal’s principal architect on our passive house project, who is sharing with the team some of the firm’s carefully researched “secret sauce” formulas for energy calculations. This student-driven project is a great example of the new building already becoming a part of who we are and who we aspire to be.

*All-School Meeting Transcript - April 19, 2019*

Toni Rose: Social Justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson has said, “You can’t demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth; people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.”

Gabe: On March 25, 25 Group 1 students and six chaperones journeyed to Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama to hear, see, and feel the truth of the Civil Rights Era and its ongoing legacy.

According to mindful.org, mindfulness “is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” At Waring School, we promote a mindful approach to college counseling.

Mindfulness, in this context, means being fully engaged in the things that really matter during the college admissions process. We encourage our students to think expansively and to imagine that anything is possible. At the same time, we ask them to identify and then focus on what is truly important to them -- what values define them and which ones are evolving.