Putney Post Spring, 2016

Putney PostSpring 2016

Register now for PUTNEY REUNION 2016!

Register and find weekend info: putneyschool.org/reunion

802-387-6273 or [email protected]

Classes of 1946–47, 1956, 1966, 1980–82, 1991–92, 1996–98June 10–12, 2016

<top> LV74 (RED ROOF), BY JANE DICKSON, 2012, OIL ON CANVAS, 48 X 30 INCHES

ON THE COVER: <front> BLUE BRIDGE—GW1, 2007, OIL ON ASTROTURF, 58 X 32 INCHES

<back> PRATER 6, 2010, OIL ON WOOD, 18 X 18 INCHES

2 Message from the Head of School Fostering broad and open minds

4 Cover Artist: Jane Dickson ’70

Taking art to new places via the

anti-craft ethos of the punk rock era

6 News Oxfam Hunger Banquet, blood

drive, student art show, sugaring,

Chard deNiord, new solar array,

winter concert, and more

11 Doing Something Right A recent Putney graduate confirms

that cultural fluency and collaboration

are useful things in real life

13 Graduation Requirements 2.0

Moving from “chair time”

to competency in defining

Putney graduates

23 Alumni News Alumni authors, events,

and more

27 Alumni Notes

48 In Memoriam

Contents

theputneyschool

ThePutneySchoolVT

theputneyschool

The Putney School Network

@putneyschool

2 P U T N E Y P O S T

When Mrs. Hinton founded Putney in 1935, she

was able to staff it partly with Europeans fleeing

the chaos that was overtaking their homelands.

In those first years, the adult population was

considerably more cosmopolitan than was the

student body. In Putney’s middle years, both adults

and students were almost entirely Americans, and

the few foreigners who broke the pattern are well

remembered. Today we are a quite various and

polyglot community, although the diversity of

the faculty and staff lags well behind that of the

students. Students’ homes are in 14 countries, and

they hold passports from 17; these lists often don’t

overlap. Many of our students born and raised in

the U.S. are frequently multi-cultural in one way

or another, born to immigrant parents or two

parents of very different backgrounds. Our adult

community includes only natives of Afghanistan,

China, England, France, Mexico, and the U.S., and

despite our sincere efforts, is much less diverse

than we would wish.

All of this raises inevitable questions about

curriculum. It is hard to identify a “canon”

appropriate to this student body. If it is our

responsibility to be sure that American students

are well-versed in the history of their country,

is it less important for Chinese students to know

their own history? Or is it actually as important

for students to learn each other’s histories? How

can we best teach the habits of mind that will

predispose students to understand other cultures

and to work effectively with different people? We

have terms abroad in China, France, England, and

Mexico, and have recently approved a new one

in Nicaragua. We have written into our new

graduation requirements (see p. 13) that all

students must spend a minimum of one month

living in another culture. This does not mean a

“foreign” country, just somewhere with a culture

that differs significantly from the one they grew

up in. We are gradually finding it easier to persuade

students to spend time away from Putney, and

Emily Jones

Head of School

A Message from the Head of School

EDUCATION IS ABOUT MORE THAN

SEAT TIME. HERE, HENRY ’16, CURRENT

CO-STUDENT HEAD OF SCHOOL AND

CABIN DWELLER, TAKES A BREAK FROM

HIS WORK IN A SCHOOL GREENHOUSE.

Dear Putney alumni, parents, and friends,

Broad-mindedness is related

to tolerance; open-mindedness

is the sibling of peace.

—Salman Rushdie

Sylvie Littledale’s presentation in assembly (see p. 17) provided a

great vision of how opportunities can open up to a prepared mind.

Without an open and at least somewhat educated mind, though,

travelers are just tourists. We hope that with our diverse student

body, our emphasis on inquiry, and our insistence that students

spend time as a “foreigner” in another culture, we will help to

foster genuinely broad and open minds.

—Emily

f o u n d e r :

c a r m e l i t a

h i n t o n

Emily H. Jones, Head of School

2015–2016 TrusteesTonia Wheeler P’99, Chair

Ira T. Wender P’77, ’89, Vice Chair

Randall Smith, Treasurer

Katharina Wolfe, Clerk

Supawat ’16, Student Trustee

Thanh Ha ’17, Student Trustee

Michael Sardinas, Faculty Trustee

Libby Holmes P’15, ’17, Faculty Trustee

Lakshman Achuthan ’84 John Bidwell ’78

Daniel Blood P’15,’18Dinah Buechner-Vischer P’14

Lee Combrinck-Graham ’59 Freddy Friedman P’12

Joshua Rabb Goldberg ’75 Stephen Heyneman ’61

Dana Hokin ’84 Emily H. Jones

Bill Kellett G’02, ’15 Joshua Laughlin ’82

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ’52 Franz Paasche ’79

Peter Pereira ’52 Robert G. Raynolds ’69

Marni Rosner ’69, P’04, ’07 Iris Wang P’16

Trustees EmeritiBarbara Barnes ’41

Kate Ganz Belin ’62Joan Williams Farr ’49

Sarah Gray Gund ’60Kendall Landis ’42, P’73, ’79

Bici Binger Pettit-Barron ’48, P’77, ’79, G’07

The Putney Post is published twice

yearly for the alumni, parents, and friends

of The Putney School. We welcome your

comments and ideas. Please direct your

correspondence to: The Editor, Putney Post,

Elm Lea Farm, 418 Houghton Brook Road,

Putney, VT 05346; 802-387-6213;

email: [email protected]

Editorial Board: John Barrengos,

Don Cuerdon, Alison Frye, Emily Jones,

Hugh Montgomery

Publisher: Don Cuerdon

Director of Communications

Editor: Alison Frye

Alumni Relations Manager

Alumni Relations Manager: Alison Frye

Photographs: Don Cuerdon,

Anne Helen Petersen,

Jeff Woodward,

The Putney School archives

Design: New Ground Creative

Please send address corrections and

new phone numbers to: Alumni Office,

The Putney School, Elm Lea Farm,

418 Houghton Brook Road,

Putney, VT 05346;

phone: 802-387-6213; fax: 802-387-5931;

email: [email protected]

The Putney School

Elm Lea Farm

418 Houghton Brook Road

Putney, VT 05346

802-387-5566

www.putneyschool.org

“TO WORK NOT FOR MARKS, BADGES, HONORS, BUT TO DISCOVER

TRUTH AND TO GROW IN KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE . . . ”

—CARMELITA HINTON, “FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS,” 1954

Putney Post

PHOTOGRAPHY CLASS MEMBERS EVALUATE AND DISCUSS

THEIR WORK.

WWe caught up with Jane Dickson

’70 by phone in mid-February.

She was in New Orleans starting

an artist’s residency at the Joan

Mitchell Foundation, which

is good news all by itself. She

was also celebrating the sale of

her Fab 5 Freddy (the original

Yo! MTV Raps veejay) portrait

to the Smithsonian’s National

Portrait Gallery, negotiating a

122x20-foot mural in Brook-

lyn for this summer, and had

a show going entitled Pump

Up the Volume, a two-person

exhibition at Sacramento State

featuring other hip-hop artists

Jane had painted “back in the

day.” Jane’s work has been shown

from the Whitney to New York’s

42nd Street MTA station. See

her website for a more complete

list, but plan to be there a while.

Jane’s first medium was paint, but

her work encompasses printing,

drawing, murals, mosaics, public

installations, and more. The

anti-craft ethos of the early New

York City punk-rock era drove

her from the fine art of oil-on-

canvas to seeking ways to expand

the medium. It all started with

a painting of the World Trade

Center on plastic garbage bags,

which she also showed recently.

The meaning in that bit of art

had also expanded, as we all

now know. The following are

Jane’s own words about her

work, her exploration of paint

and texture, and other details

of telling stories visually.

I am a storyteller. I love

weaving stories, hearing stories,

so I guess I am telling stories

by another means.

I so appreciated Bill Hunt.

Doing art at Putney was

really, I think, crucial to my

becoming an artist—just for

the freedom that he gave

us. Afterwards, I first went to

art school for a year. I drew

from a model every morning,

and then I’d go out to lunch

with my friends. Sometimes,

I’d get back to my studio in

the afternoon, sometimes I

wouldn’t, and I thought to

myself, “Oh, I must not be

serious enough to be an artist.

I’m hanging out a lot, I’m

not working all the time.”

So I thought, “I must not

really be an artist. I’d better

go to university.”

I applied to Harvard and

I got in. I told them I was

going to be an anthropologist.

I thought, “I’ll be Margaret

Mead. It will be really fun,

and I’ll be naked on a tropical

island.” I discovered that’s

not exactly what you do

as an anthropologist. You really

spend your life at the library. I

thought, “Ehhh, I don’t want to

spend my life at the library,” so

I ended up being an art major.

After my years at Putney,

I thought, “I want to go to

the city.” I needed to see what

our culture was doing. I felt like

I wanted to get in the middle of

it and respond to it and document

it. I’ve always gone for the urban

dark side. I got a job working

on the first computer billboard—

digital light board—in Times

Square in 1978. I worked or

lived in Times Square, which

really is the belly of the beast,

for 30 years.

My first anthropology

course was at Putney.

The idea in anthropology is

to look for the key issues in

a culture—the key behaviors—

that tell you about the shared

values of the people. That’s

an understanding that I took

into painting.

Jane Dickson ’70janedickson.com | By Don Cuerdon


<top> COVER ARTIST JANE DICKSON ’70, BY THE CONEY ISLAND

FERRIS WHEEL THAT INSPIRED SEVERAL OF HER PAINTINGS

<bottom> “REVELERS 52,” 2008, MOSAIC: A SAMPLE OF JANE’S REVELERS

MTA MOSAICS, A 2007 PUBLIC PROJECT IN WHICH OVER 60 MOSAICS

WERE INSTALLED IN NEW YORK CITY’S TIMES SQUARE SUBWAY STATION

P U T N E Y P O S T 5

Whatever I’m struggling

with in my own life, I look

for to paint. For example,

the paintings of Times

Square are all people alone

and waiting—because I was

young and I was alone, and I

was waiting to find out what

my life was going to be, and

who I was going to be with.

Now, I find aging rappers

who still shake it riveting.

When I first came to New

York, I joined with this

fledgling artists’ group called

Collaborative Projects. I got

to be good friends with a lot

of artists who went on to do

amazing things, such as Kiki

Smith, Tom Otterness, and

Jenny Holzer. And I knew Nan

Goldin from Boston. The great

thing for me about Colab was

a lot of the people had gone to

the Whitney program, which is

really a great intro to the serious

art world. So people would

make these shows and say,

maybe, “I’m going to make a

show about doctors and dentists

in my loft.” Anybody could

submit anything they wanted

on that theme, and they were

free-for-alls, so you’d try and

do things that would stand out.

I started by painting on

garbage bags and other

industrial materials in the

’70s. The punk era was anti-

craft. It was “let’s try anything.”

I painted an early piece of

the World Trade Center in

’78 on garbage bags, which

I exhibited again recently.

Of course, it has a totally different

reference now, because it’s

gone. At the time that I did it,

I thought, “Well, this building

is so imposing.” Every time I

looked at it, I felt like throwing

myself on my knees and saying,

“Yes, you are Oz, the Great and

Terrible, and you dwarf me and

make me humble.” The twin

towers were made to domineer

everything, and make you feel

small. I thought, “I’m going to

paint them on garbage bags so

they’ll be trashy.”

In the ’90s, I did all these

New Year’s Eve revelers—

on one level, they’re about

groups of people pushing

each other and pulling

each other, falling on each

other—and they’re really

about relationships. This

was a time when I had little

kids—and I was experiencing

the charge of family and the

pushing and pulling and being

torn apart, and jostling together

and all that.

I went to art school in

Paris for a year after Putney,

and the French were like,

“Quoi, quoi, mademoiselle?

Painting is dead. We did

it. It’s finished.” They were

on to conceptual art. And the

attitude was, “You must be

crazy to think you can pick

up a paintbrush and describe

the world now. We did it. The

story’s over.” I said, “Well, I’m a

painting addict. I can’t stop, and

I want to go home and paint

what’s American.” I thought,

okay, maybe if I do it on garbage

bags, they’ll stop me at the

door and say, “What? You can’t

do that.”

Picasso, and his early

sculptural experiments in

the early 20th century,

started using all kinds of

industrial materials. Sculpture

had moved away from clay and

bronze 100 years earlier. Painting

has been really slow to let go

of its traditional materials. I also

thought, “I really want to shed

some of the historical baggage

of the same materials as Rem-

brandt, asking to be referencing

that tradition and compared to

that.” That’s a heavy burden.

I’m not particularly

interested in the quirky

individual/eccentric. I’m

looking at, “What am I interested

in that says something about

our culture—our time—and

my personal experience?”

Those are almost always things

that I have mixed feelings

about. I know of it. It’s great.

I’m interested in the things

where I set up a scene and you

fill in the blanks—where it’s

not clear.

I do a whole lot of paintings

of highways. The open road—

it’s part of the American Dream.

But usually, really, when you

get in your car, you’re just

stuck in traffic, right? You went

to experience the country,

but the country’s gone by as

a blur. You’re out in the open,

but you’re really just trapped

in your car—yet for a lot of

people, it’s your meditative spot,

especially if you live in a city.

So it’s not all bad. It’s not all

good. It’s complicated.

<above> “FRED, ” 40 X 50 INCHES, ACRYLIC ON VINYL, 1983, WHICH

JANE RECENTLY SOLD TO THE SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL

PORTRAIT GALLERY.

<above> “GOD TRUCK,” OIL ON ASTROTURF, 37 X 36 INCHES, IS A GOOD

EXAMPLE OF JANE’S DESIRE TO SHOW US THE OPEN ROAD ON

PUNK-ROCK SURFACES


NewsSTUDENTS HOST OXFAM HUNGER BANQUET BENEFIT

At this interactive event, the place

where you sat, and the meal that you

ate, were determined by the luck of the

draw—just as in real life some of us

are born into relative prosperity and

others into poverty. Putney students

and volunteers at the Putney Foodshelf

organized an Oxfam Hunger Banquet

that took place at the Putney Central

School last December. Mary Starkey,

program support coordinator for Oxfam

America in Boston, was the keynote

speaker and master of ceremonies.

The Hunger Banquet can be an

effective way to simulate the imbalanced

distribution of food in our world.

Participants represented various countries

around the globe and received a meal

that corresponds to that country’s economic status. The Hunger Banquet was an opportunity for our

community to actively express solidarity with the poor around the world.

The banquet was a fundraising event for Oxfam America and the Putney Foodshelf. Oxfam is an

international confederation of 17 organizations working in approximately 94 countries worldwide

to find solutions to poverty and injustice. The Putney Foodshelf provides supplemental healthy food

for area people in need.

Miye ’17 and Maeve ’16 coordinated the event with The Putney School’s executive chef, Marty Brennan-Sawyer,

and the Putney Foodshelf ’s Susan Kochinskas as projects stemming from their classes at Putney.


Blood DriveThe first-ever* Putney School blood drive took

place in January in Calder Hall thanks to Lili ’16,

community service activity leader Rachel Mason,

and a slew of student and adult volunteers.

Twenty-nine people made it as far as the health

interview stage. Twenty-two were approved to

donate, resulting in 19 units of “whole blood” and

3 units of “double red.” And no one passed out! The

KDU provided recovery food and beverages and

the Red Cross was grateful for our assistance and level

of organization. It says a lot about the validity of

student work and student agency at Putney.

* This is the first blood drive as far as anyone can remember.

If you have knowledge of a previous one hosted at

The Putney School, please let us know!


Vermont

Poet Laureate

Visits Putney

Chard deNiord, former Putney School faculty

member, spent time with us recently to tell us about

himself and to read his work aloud for the assembled

school community. Chard taught here from 1989 to

1998 before moving on to Providence College in

Rhode Island. He was installed as Vermont’s eighth

poet laureate last fall and is charged with promoting

and encouraging poetry throughout the state. He was

more than successful in that mission in our presence,

reading from his collected work, then hammering

home the relevance of his art by requesting topics

from the audience including cows, Work Day, and

parenthood. And he left us thirsty for more, which

is the goal.

Farm Manager and History Teacher Pete Stickney reports as of March 22, “We’re done. Short and sweet, over 100 gallons.” It was a strange season with many Vermont maple sugarers collecting sap as early as January. The students pictured stayed on campus for part of March break to help with collection and boiling.

Sugaring Season

So much student art is generated every trimester at

The Putney School that is only makes sense to have

an opening and show in one of the finest gallery

spaces in New England, the Michael S. Currier

Center Gallery. The first was held this year on

November 21. On display was student work from

painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and other

visual art classes and Evening Arts activities. These

are only the pieces that came to fruition for the show

and many were first attempts at a particular medium

by students who may or may not have previously

identified themselves as artists. Creating art is

an important aspect of every adolescent’s brain

development and useful in fostering creativity

across all educational disciplines, which is why

we have always done so much of it at The Putney

School. Search “Student Art Show” on our website

to see images of the art that was on display.

You will be awed.


Student Art Show


Namasté Solar, an employee-owned cooperative and leading engineering, procurement, and construction

provider of solar electric systems for commercial, non-profit, government, and residential customers throughout

the U.S., and solar power developer The Atmosphere Conservancy (TAC), principals of which include Alex

Blackmer ’75 and Putney board member Bob Raynolds ’69, have partnered with The Putney School to

install a solar array at Lower Farm that will supply about half of the school’s present electricity needs.

“Namasté Solar is proud to be a partner in The Putney School’s efforts to bring clean energy to their

Net-Zero Energy Campus Master Plan,” said Cynthia Christensen, Namasté Solar’s commercial sales

director. TAC is funding and managing the project, while Namasté Solar has been contracted for the

creation of the array. Some of Namasté Solar’s most notable solar projects include the Denver Housing

Authority, New Belgium Brewing Company, the Colorado Convention Center, the Denver Museum of

Nature & Science, Boulder Community Hospital, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National

Renewable Energy Laboratory. Putney will pay TAC for the clean energy drawn from the array over the

first six years (the point at which other economic advantages end for TAC), then purchase the array at a

much lower cost than the original construction, at which point the electricity drawn belongs to the school.

In the Net-Zero Energy Campus Master Plan, the array is sufficient to provide all of the school’s electricity

needs not already supplied by solar arrays. All of the required permits have been approved and

construction is slated for this spring.

SOLAR ARRAY


Winter Concert 2015The Putney School orchestra and madrigals took the show on the road in December with three performances of Music of the French

Cathedrals with the Bennington County Choral Society, reveling in the rich and diverse choral and orchestral tradition of French Romantic and post-Romantic composers. Music of the

French Cathedrals included “Phèdre Overture” by Jules Massenet, Francis Poulenc’s evocative “Gloria” and Gabriel Fauré’s gorgeous “Requiem.” See images and two videos from the final performance at The Putney School on December 12, 2015 on our website.

CLENNON L. KING ’78 SHOWS CIVIL RIGHTS FILMAs part of our MLK day events in February, we

watched the documentary Passage at St. Augustine

by Clennon L. King ’78. The film focuses on the

turbulent civil rights campaign in the nation’s oldest

city in 1963 and 1964 that was pivotal in the passage

of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A question and answer

session followed the screening. “I’m excited to be

sharing this story with students at my old boarding

school,” said Clennon, a former TV reporter and

anchor and Putney School major gifts officer, now of

Boston. “In the racially-charged atmosphere America

now finds itself in, this film is both timely and relevant—

giving us a chance to mark history, so as not to repeat

it.” Some years ago Clennon shared a rough cut of the

film with us, so it was a double treat to see how the

film had progressed into the powerful piece it is today.


FIRST-TIMER WINS

MOUNTAIN BIKE RACE

Senior class members, Ben and Anna (center, with

sap bucket), participated in a mountain bike race

at nearby Vermont Academy last fall with more than

200 racers from around New England. Although

both were taking part in their first races, they both

performed extremely well and Anna won her

division, earning a coveted sap bucket! We don’t

currently have a mountain bike racing team. This

was just an exploratory adventure that manifested

from our mountain biking afternoon activity, which

is among our current recreational sports offerings.

Matt Dall, one of our Center for Teaching and

Learning tutors, is the faculty member who oversees

the mountain biking activity. He has plenty of riding

and racing experience and is prone to inciting

enthusiasm among his students, regardless of the

topic at hand.

Putney Chef Featured on Food Network

JD Mellowship, chef

and assistant manager

of our kitchen, was

on the Food Network

show, Cutthroat Kitchen,

last fall. It’s a crazy

competition among

chefs from all over the

U.S. in which they

have limited time to

gather ingredients and

prepare specific dishes.

There is also an option in which they can use their

potential winnings to buy obstacles to impose on

their fellow competitors. Crazy, yes, but at the core

you really need to know your way around cuisine.

All of our chefs have that, but JD can also talk smack

as he chops, dices, and sautés. If you missed the episode,

you might still be able to find it on the internet. The

show was recorded in January 2015 and part of JD’s

contract required that he not reveal the outcome

before the show aired. It was a tough secret to keep,

as you’ll see. We won’t spoil it for you here, but rest

assured there are more TV show possibilities thanks

to JD’s outgoing personality and positive attitude.

We’ll see if we can get him to wear a Putney School

logo next time!

Nearly five years ago, it came to light that

The Putney School’s graduation requirements

were defined in terms of seat time, but had

much more to do with the acquisition of skills,

or competencies. As a result, some students

were graduating not knowing some of the

things we felt they should know. In hopes

of changing that, the Educational Program

Committee (EPC) began exploring other ways

of looking at our graduation requirements that

had more to do with competencies than credits.

The challenge of creating a new list of require-

ments was soon brought to the full faculty. Half

a decade later, we’ve learned that this is harder

to do than to state. By the time you read this,

we will be implementing the new system, and

the Class of 2017 will be the first to graduate

under this new paradigm.

The idea of considering competencies over

course goals that don’t correlate exactly with

graduation requirements is not a new one in the

education world, but finding a model that has

been successfully implemented is rare. We hope,

as always, to help pave the way for other secondary

schools to reconsider how we decide what it

takes to be a high school graduate in this country.

As always, we don’t know for sure how changing

the graduation requirements will influence student

outcomes, but something needs to change, or

the outcomes will remain as they are. Our best

minds think this is a smart place to start.

Putney Academic Dean Kevin Feal-Staub,

Dean of Faculty Kate Knopp, and science

teacher Glenn Littledale recently sat down to

discuss with us the story arc and details of this

initiative. Kevin and Glenn have been at Putney

long enough to witness the entire process, from

inception to implementation, while Kate has

seen the evolution with fresh eyes as a faculty

member and administrator over the past two

years. No one individual is responsible for any

of the change. They agreed to comment only

as observers and participants in an effort that

the entire faculty has brought to the fore.

THE DOMINANT PARADIGM

Leadership Briefings on Proficiency, a document

from the New England Secondary School

Consortium, says the current paradigm of “seat

time” graduation requirements “. . . dates back

to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when America

was struggling to create a formal public education

system and standardize teaching across the

country.” The current course credit system is


LIBBY HOLMES, LEFT,

DIRECTOR OF INTERNA-

TIONAL PROGRAMS, HELPS

SHAPE THE COMMUNITY

THROUGH HER WORK WITH

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

FROM THEIR APPLICATION

TO GRADUATION DAY. HERE,

SHE WORKS HAPPILY WITH

FRANCIS DU ’15.

GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS 2.0: Moving from “Chair Time” to Competency in Defining Putney Graduates by Don Cuerdon


based on the Carnegie Unit, “. . . a time-based

measurement promoted by industrialist Andrew

Carnegie.” One credit equals approximately 120

hours of contact time with a teacher (one hour/

day x five days/week x 24 weeks). In other

words, the creation of the credit system had

very little to do with learning.

The desire to standardize education has not

faded, but it has begun to evolve.

Vermont’s Framework of Standards and Learning

Opportunities, the guideline source for public

schooling in Vermont (which therefore excludes

Putney), in the section titled “Definitions of

Standards and Evidence,” states, “Standards

identify the essential knowledge and skills that

should be taught and learned in school. Essential

knowledge is what students should know. It

includes the most important and enduring ideas,

issues, dilemmas, principles, and concepts from

the disciplines. Essential skills are what students

should be able to do. Skills are ways of thinking,

working, communicating, and investigating.

Standards also identify behaviors and attitudes

related to success in and outside of school.

These include (but are not limited to) providing

evidence to back up assertions and developing

productive, satisfying relationships with others.

Frequently, standards are accompanied by

evidence. The evidence is an indicator by which

it can be determined whether or not the student

has met the standards.”

Though based more on what students have

upon exiting high school, these standards are

hard to define as requirements, and harder still

to assess. Even in places where the theory of

proficiency-based graduation requirements exist,

they look more like the Carnegie Unit with a

new paint job than a remodeling of a century-old

educational program structure. The work is in

designing the requirements in such a way that

they can be assessed and implemented in a world

where that hasn’t happened yet. This work

involves knocking down a few walls and extending

a few rooflines, which is exactly what The Putney

School’s faculty has been doing these past five years.

CREATING THE NEW PARADIGM

Here is what Kate, Kevin, and Glenn told us about

the process of creating a new set of graduation

requirements that have more to do with pro-

ficiency than seat time in a group interview in

late February. You may be surprised at some of

the conclusions made near the end of this long,

thorough, exhaustive, and collaborative exercise.

Putney Post: What led us to all this work

to establish proficiency-based graduation

requirements?

Glenn Littledale: I think the original ideas came

from the notion that, while the current graduation

requirements might be producing the desired result,

a number of kids were highly developed in some

areas, and not so developed in others. And that

their time spent here wasn’t optimized, because

the way our graduation requirements were

written required them to spend X amount

of time in this seat, and Y amount of time in that

seat, and Z amount of time in some other seat.

PP: And how does a school go about changing that?

Kate Knopp: It’s really just having the courage

to describe what learning looks like, and throwing

out a system of grading and measuring education

by the amount of time you spend with a subject.

How to do it? Therein lies the rub.

Kevin Feal-Staub: There’s a set of learning

goals that are standardized, but we’re trying to

un-standardize the way a kid can arrive at the

same learning—or, at least, much of the same

learning. It’s not all the same learning for

every kid. What we had in place before

was a standardized system of how you work

toward an end result, and we’re trying to

un-standardize the system of how you get

to the standard goals.

PP: Who here has been working to rewrite

our graduation requirements?

GRADUATION DAY

CELEBRATES THE

COMMUNITY, THE

COUNTLESS WAYS THE

GRADUATES HAVE SHAPED

PUTNEY, AND THE SCHOOL’S

EXPANSION OF STUDENTS’

KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING,

AND WORLD VIEW.

KF-S: The entire faculty, spearheaded through

the EPC, and then broken out from there into

working groups at department levels. It started

there in the 2011 time frame. I think we said

something like, “Let’s look at our graduation

requirements. They’re not serving us.” Two

years after that, we had a faculty vote to say,

“Alright. Do we want to change it from

a seat-time, course-based list of requirements

to outcome-based requirements?” We got

full faculty buy-in, via a vote, that we were

all willing to go.

PP: What concerns have arisen in this process?

GL: How do you measure this stuff? The logical

framework is portfolio assessment. So, one of the

things we’ve been looking at is other schools that

are doing portfolio assessment. My big concern

is that portfolio assessment has been closely

correlated with grade promotion—promotion

by grade rather than promotion by portfolio. In

very rare circumstances has the portfolio been

used as the promotion tool. And it’s been really,

really hard for institutions to decouple these

things. When you really do what we’re proposing

in its purest form, you don’t have “classes”

anymore—there’s no freshman, sophomore, etc.

class. The institutions that have maintained their

classes, while maintaining portfolio assessment

structure, find themselves, I think, at an impasse.

PP: And has the goal changed at all since the

inception of this work?

GL: The original vision hasn’t changed enormously.

PP: What has the faculty done to turn that

vision into something tangible that makes

sense: that seriously restructures the secondary

school environment, but doesn’t scare off the

rest of the educational world by being too

radical to assimilate?

KF-S: It started by our saying, “Alright, we

want to change to a system of proficiency-based

requirements rather than seat time-based

requirements.” There was a coalescing moment

when we realized that there were a lot of seat

time-based things that we really valued here,

like working in the barn, participating in the

work program, evening arts, being exposed

to a lot of art—that’s not a proficiency,

that’s a thing that happens to you.

GL: These are the experience-based points.

KF-S: We define it in two sections. There’s the

proficiency section, and the experience section.

PP: Will the rollout of these new graduation

requirements necessitate some new areas of

faculty professional development?

KK: The development is in the art of teaching.

We’re not talking about “Here’s a course, and

how do I differentiate the structure for this

child and for that child?” We’re saying, “Here’s

a Putney education. How are you going to

navigate through? You can take some standard

courses, still, to meet these graduation require-

ments.” We have a lot of quirky kids at The

Putney School who can get really excited and

excel in one direction, but can’t get out of a

cardboard box in another direction. I think that

this is a more accurate way of saying, “That’s

mostly okay with us. Be who you are. Pursue

your intellectual curiosity in a way that makes

sense to your growth.” [See sidebar: The Animal

School: A Fable.]

GL: With the caveat that you’ve got to be very,

very careful about defining what it is that is

non-negotiable in that education. And that’s

what we’re doing.

KF-S: I think having well-articulated,

well-defined learning goals makes everything

easier in terms of being a good teacher. One

of our big goals is to serve a wide range of

students—artsy students, outdoorsy students,

kinesthetic students—all these different types

of students. And if we have well-defined learning

goals, that makes it really easy to provide different

avenues for these different kinds of kids to reach

the same outcome.

PP: When will all of this hard work become

a reality?

KF-S: We hope to have the overall language agreed

upon this spring—April— so we can go to press

for admissions needs in the next admissions cycle,

’16-’17. The incoming ninth-grade class, in the

fall of ’17, will enter with these new graduation

requirements in place.

KK: I imagine the actual execution, the

implementation, the use of them to credit

work, will be a work in progress.

GL: It will have to be done with such a subtle

and practiced eye, and that doesn’t exist yet.

PP: What additional questions have arisen

through this process? What outcomes?



KF-S: Some open questions are: What’s

a transcript going to look like? How

are we going to present this to colleges?

Once we write our set of graduation

requirements, is it 100% set? Are we

going to look at a kid who’s got 87 out

of 89 graduation requirements and say,

“No, you didn’t meet our requirements?”

GL: That would be an A+! [Whole

room chuckles uncomfortably.]

GL: Historically, the students here have

owned the work program. And, strangely,

they have not owned their academics.

The idea is that this is a move toward

student agency and ownership of the

academics. That’s one of the expected

outcomes.

PP: Is there still a place for letter grades

in this brave new world?

KF-S: At the moment, they are totally

separate discussions. The issuing of grades

is on the table as part of this discussion.

They are going to stay in place for now.

We’re going to have maps, keys, what-

ever you want to call them, that say,

“In English 10, we address this, this,

this, and this graduation requirement.”

Meeting all those graduation require-

ments while you take that class will

not equate with passing the class, and

passing the class will not equate with

meeting all those graduation requirements.

They’re different things altogether.

GL: The logical extension of this is

that passing the class really doesn’t have

meaning. It’s how the student progresses

toward meeting graduation requirements.

When you look at the portfolio assessment

based upon these rubrics, the notion of

the A, B, C, D, or F is irrelevant, and it

becomes an artifact. And yet it may be

an artifact that we’re stuck with for

a little while. I don’t know.

KK: Over time, kids will come to not

paying attention to grades; the need for

grades will dissolve.

GL: One of the things this is going to

do is clarify our assessment, if we’re

paying attention. As that becomes better

and better, the need for grades is going

to evaporate as an in-house story, but

whether or not to dispense with them

altogether—I’m kind of suspecting

we won’t.

PP: We don’t work for badges and

honors here. What would happen if

we actually didn’t give grades?

KK: We’re a school that believes in

experience and failure. We say that in

our publications. If you really believe

that in the classroom, it means you need

to have some colossal failures. And why

would you average the failures in with

the others? It confounds us, but there

are teachers out there who do think

of it that way. They’re thinking about

trying to measure who that kid is over

their five hours every week.

GL: Who cares if that kid can write

a mathematical model for a thing on

October 14 or December 3? What you

care about, when they walk away, is that

they can mathematically model something.

KF-S: We are a progressive school—well,

progressive in terms of education—

and that, I think, means teaching for

citizenship rather than “workership.” It is

also to progress rather than stay stagnant,

and I recognize that there are a lot of

problems that arise from teaching a

Carnegie course-based system rather than

an outcome-based system. The Carnegie

Unit system standardized the time that

kids spent learning, and left what kids

actually learned as the variable. What

we’re trying to do is standardize what

kids learn, and let time be the variable.

GL: With one caveat: a standard for what

kids learn—a minimum standard. We’re

not trying to standardize what they learn.

We’re trying to set a threshold.

Look for an update in the next issue with news

of the exciting first iteration of The Putney

School’s revised graduation requirements.

THE ANIMAL SCHOOL: A Fable

by George Reavis

Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “new world,” so they orga-nized a school. They had adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming, and flying. To make it easier to

administer the curriculum, all of the animals took all of the subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming—in fact, better than his instructor—but he made only passing grades in flying, and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn, and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that . . . except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up work in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class, where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He also developed a charley horse from overexertion, and then got a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was a problem child, and was disciplined severely. In climbing class, he beat all of the others to the top of the tree, but insisted upon using his own way to get there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well, and also run, climb, and fly a little, had the highest average and was valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy, because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to a badger, and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

Does this fable have a moral?

Note: This story was written when George Reavis was assistant superintendent of Cincinnati Public Schools back in the 1940s! This content is in the public domain, and free to copy, duplicate, and distribute. If you would prefer a full-color, illustrated book, one is currently available from Crystal Springs Books at 800-321-0401 or 603-924-9621 (fax 603-924-6688).


Dear Putney,

I want to talk to you about something many

of you are already doing. Among you are

students who have left their homes and cultures

to come see what Putney has to offer. They

have integrated themselves into this community,

and have brought bits of their home to mix in.

This is exactly the environment that initially

sparked my interest in language study and cultural

exploration. I grew up about five minutes down

the road from campus, and, as we all know,

Vermont is not known for its diversity.

When I came to Putney as a student, it was

the first international community I had ever

been a part of, and this had a great impact. I

got interested in languages, beginning with my

Spanish classes, and later Chinese. This was

before Putney offered Chinese classes, so I found

a Rosetta Stone language software program for

Mandarin, and worked with that on the side.

During my sophomore year, Putney launched its

first Cuernavaca program. At that time, it was a

ten-day trip over spring break. You can imagine

a girl from rural Vermont touching down in

Mexico City . . . it was very different. That trip

showed me just how difficult it is to take yourself

out of a place where you feel completely

comfortable, and put yourself somewhere where

you are totally disoriented. But it also showed

me how important it is to do just that.

Putney extended the program to a full trimester

my senior year, and I was able to go back. At

the end of that trimester, I noticed a transforma-

tion in my Spanish. I had gone in at an awkward,

cautious, stuttering, classroom level, and came

back with something akin to comfortable,

conversational Spanish.

I went on to college with the idea of looking

for more opportunities to study abroad. During

the spring of my first year, I took a class with

about 160 people. On the first day, the professor

began by giving a little background about

himself. He said that he ran an archaeological

dig in Peru, and that sometimes he took students

down, and then he moved on to other things.

I don’t think I heard a single thing he said after

that, and after class, I elbowed my way through

the group of students waiting to talk to him.

Overly enthusiastically, I introduced myself

and expressed interest in the project.

Doing Something Right

A recent Putney graduate

confirms that cultural fluency

and collaboration are useful

things in real life

Sylvie Littledale ’14 returned to Putney recently to read the following letter to the school at assembly one

January morning. We think it’s full of experiences and observations that, at least anecdotally, support a lot of

what we embrace in our curriculum and academic infrastructure here. And we thought you would like to know

what Sylvie told us.


Now, as a freshman at a big university, I

was expecting his response to be something

like, “Okay, take a few more of my

classes, and we’ll see where you are your

senior year. Maybe we can talk about

your coming down then.” Instead, he

said, “Great,” and told me to come to

his office to talk more about it. I showed

up, and he told me that he basically had

two criteria for students who go to work

on the project. One: that they do well

in his class. And two: that they have a

rudimentary level of Spanish, because the

project is entirely in Spanish, and they

would need to keep up. Halfway through

the conversation, he switched, and started

speaking Spanish. Apparently he thought

that I could, in fact, keep up, so after

that, I sold my soul to his class and ended

up on a plane to Peru that summer.

We were working on the northern coast

of Peru, in the middle of the desert.

The team consisted almost entirely of

Peruvian archaeologists, and the boss of

my unit didn’t speak a word of English.

I had no prior experience in archaeol-

ogy, and was at a language disadvantage

because I was working with a bunch of

native speakers. However, the team

discovered some surprising ways in

which I was able to contribute.

We first discovered this when we were

working in a colonial area, where we

were not supposed to find any evidence

that horses had been there; but we were

finding some suspicious manure samples.

We realized that almost everyone on

the team was from the city of Lima, and

that my background growing up in rural

Vermont on a farm, and my time at The

Putney School, gave me this intimate and

unique knowledge of livestock manure.

After that, I became the shit consultant

on the project. Every time someone

found a piece of manure, I would run

over and help them differentiate between

donkey shit and horse shit. Another

situation similar to this occurred when

we were classifying ceramic shards in the

lab. The group I was working with had

extensive knowledge of the time period

we were looking at, but I realized that

none of them had ever actually worked

with clay before. My time in the Putney

ceramics studio gave me a whole differ-

ent angle for looking at the techniques,

different types of clay, glazes, etc., and

allowed me to contribute a unique

perspective to the analysis. Both of

these cases really crystallized the benefits

of bringing a bunch of different

backgrounds together to collaborate.

After three months of working in Peru,

I went back to college. My boss from the

dig, after noting my enthusiasm for horse

shit, invited me to start a separate research

project on the role of horses in colonial

Peru, and he started emailing me resources.

These were Spanish documents from

the 1500s. When I first started looking

at them, I felt overwhelmed, and didn’t

know how it was going to go. But after

about two weeks, I realized that I could

actually read and use the material.

This was the first time that I really saw

just how far my Spanish had come since

ninth grade at Putney in Spanish 1. I

had gone to Mexico and developed a

conversational level of Spanish. This had

allowed me to go to Peru, where I was

able to build on that and develop a more

specialized vocabulary in an academic

and professional setting. These combined

allowed me to engage with this material

that I would never have had access to if I

hadn’t invested the time in this language

or had the opportunities that I did.

Moving forward, it is pretty clear that I

want language study and study abroad

to be the focal point of my education,

so I am heading off again. In a few

days, I am flying out to Spain to study

for the semester. I will be studying in

Argentina in the fall, and will be

finishing off by studying in China the

following spring. As I was designing

this three-semester-abroad curriculum,

it was not particularly conventional

and I had to jump through a few hoops.

After going through the equivalent of

Putney’s EPC committee to get this

approved, I found that system was

actually very flexible, and that it was

possible for me to make this work.

—Sylvie Littledale ’14

“. . . my

background

growing up in

rural Vermont

on a farm, and

my time at The

Putney School,

gave me this

intimate and

unique knowledge

of livestock

manure.”


Please let us know when you have (or plan to have) your work published. Please consider donating

a copy to our school library. Contact Alison Frye at 802-387-6273 or [email protected].

We wish these and other present and future alumni authors well in their endeavors.

Alumni News

EPISODES IN

MY LIFE: THE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF JAN CAREW

Jan Carew and Joy Gleason Carew ‘65

Peepal Tree Press, 2015

RETURN TO

STREETS OF

ETERNITY

Jan Carew and Joy Gleason Carew ‘65

Smokestack Books, 2015

Joy Gleason Carew ’65 recently

celebrated the release of two

books by her husband, Jan Carew,

which she helped see to fruition

after his death in 2012. Episodes

In My Life: The Autobiography

of Jan Carew, which takes in his

political awakening in colonial

British Guiana, his sojourns in

communist Eastern Europe, his

life as a writer, his return to the

Caribbean in the nationalist 1960s

and his presence as a reporter in

Cuba at the time of the revolution,

his years in Africa and role as an

advisor to Nkrumah in Ghana

and his restless coming to rest in

North American academia and the

struggle for black self-definition.

Sadly, as Carew grew older his

original plans for writing this book

could not be realized without

the assistance of his wife, Joy

Gleason Carew. As well as what

Jan Carew was able to write, the

memoir was constructed from

taped, transcribed material. Where

there are gaps, Joy Gleason Carew

goes back to some of the vivid,

eye-witness journalism Jan Carew

wrote in those heady days of hope

and struggle.

Return to Streets of Eternity brings

together, for the first time, poems

written during a life-time of pas-

sionate engagement in anti-colonial,

civil rights, black power, and

liberation movements, including

many previously unpublished

tributes to nineteenth and

twentieth-century revolutionary

leaders and to writers like Martin

Carter, Dennis Brutus, Agostinho

Neto, Andrew Salkey, Alejo

Carpentier, and Mumia Abu-Jamal.

STAIRWAY

TO PARADISE:

GROWING UP

GERSHWIN

Nadia Natali ’63

Rare Bird Books, 2015

Her father invented Kodachrome,

and her mother—who sang and

danced professionally—was the

sister of George and Ira Gershwin.

Growing up in Westport,

Connecticut amidst great privilege

and uncommon fame, Nadia Natali

might have chosen a life of comfort

and celebrity; but from an early age,

she was driven to create one of great

consequence instead, one in which

she could seek her true purpose and

life’s deepest meanings.

When she met photographer Enrico

Natali, the two embarked on a

shared quest: not simply for adven-

ture, but also to discover how their

lives could most profoundly unfold.

Their yearnings for lives fully-lived

took them to a wild and wonderful

piece of property surrounded by

the Los Padres National Forest in

the coastal mountains of Southern

California—a place where they

lived in a teepee, started a family,

and carved out rich satisfaction as

they transformed their beautiful

piece of earth into Blue Heron

Ranch. The 40 years between then

have been filled with unimaginable

adventures, the kind of tragedy

that can utterly destroy the lives

of those who must endure it

and go on, deep introspection

and personal growth, and joy and

gratitude as bounteous as the

natural world surrounding them.

Alumni Books


Stairway to Paradise is a memoir of

uncommon honesty and clarity—the

story of one woman’s determina-

tion to make the most of the gifts

her family heritage has offered her,

and to live wisely and honorably

in every way. This is a book to

savor, one that will make you

marvel at how essential it is for

all of us to bring a commitment

to truth and openhearted honesty

to all of our challenges, as well

as our many blessings.

GREENPEACE

CAPTAIN: MY

ADVENTURES IN

PROTECTING THE

FUTURE OF OUR

PLANET

Peter Willcox ’72

Thomas Dunne Books, 2016

Peter Willcox has been a captain

for Greenpeace for over 30 years.

He would never call himself a

hero, but he is recognized on every

ocean and continent for devoting

his entire life to saving the planet.

He has led the most compelling

and dangerous Greenpeace actions

to bring international attention to

the destruction of our environment.

From the globally-televised impris-

onment of his crew, the Arctic

30, by Russian commandos, to

international conspiracies involving

diamond-smuggling, gun-trading,

and al Qaeda, Willcox has braved

the unimaginable and triumphed.

This is his story, which begins

when he was a young man sailing

with Pete Seeger, and continues

right up to his becoming the iconic

environmentalist he is today. His

daring adventures and courageous

determination will inspire readers

everywhere.

ONE MAN AGAINST

THE WORLD: THE

TRAGEDY OF

RICHARD NIXON

Tim Weiner ’73

Henry Holt and Company, 2015

Based largely upon documents

declassified only in the last few

years, One Man Against the World

paints a devastating portrait of a

tortured yet brilliant man who

led the country according to

deep-seated insecurity and

distrust: not only of his cabinet

and Congress, but also of the

American population at large.

In riveting, tick-tock prose,

Weiner illuminates how the

Vietnam War and the Watergate

controversy that brought about

Nixon’s demise were inextricably

linked. From the hail of garbage

and curses that awaited Nixon

upon his arrival at the White

House, when he became the

president of a nation as deeply

divided as it had been since the

end of the Civil War; to the

unprecedented action Nixon took

against American citizens, whom

he considered as traitorous as the

army of North Vietnam; to the

infamous break-in and the tapes

that bear remarkable record of

the most intimate and damning

conversations between the

president and his confidants,

Weiner narrates the history of

Nixon’s anguished presidency

in fascinating and fresh detail.

A crucial new look at the greatest

political suicide in history, One

Man Against the World leaves us

with new insight, not only into

this tumultuous period, but also

into the motivations and demons

of an American president who

saw enemies everywhere; and,

thinking the world was against

him, undermined the foundations

of the country he had hoped

to lead.

ORPHEUS, TURNING

Faith Shearin ’87

Broadkill River Press, 2015

“If Orpheus, Turning doesn’t

make you ache with the love of

poetry, please have your vital

signs checked as soon as possible,”

is how reviewer Grace Cavalieri

describes Faith Shearin’s latest book.

Faith’s other books include The

Owl Question, The Empty House,

Moving the Piano, and Telling the

Bees. She is the recipient of awards

from the Fine Arts Work Center,

the National Endowment for the

Arts, and the Barbara Deming

Memorial Fund. Her recent work

appears in Poetry East and Alaska

Quarterly Review. Faith’s poems

can also be found in The Autumn

House Anthology of Contemporary

American Poetry and in Garrison

Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places.

ETHAN MURROW

Ethan Murrow ’93

Hatje Cantz, 2016

A man caught in and behind

wallpaper, a chimpanzee in a

lifeboat, mountain climbers and

hikers in the middle of a polar sea

à la Caspar David Friedrich: Ethan

Murrow plays with the dimensions

with which we are familiar and

tells a scarcely-conceivable story

with each of his pictures. Their

references lie in personal experi-

ences, historical sources, and

the romanticized landscapes

of the Hudson River School,

from which his fantasy springs.

At first glance, one believes one

is looking at edited black-and-white

photographs, until it quickly

becomes apparent that these are

meticulously-prepared pencil

drawings. Murrow examines

the boundary between the artist’s

fiction and depicted reality, and

this volume deals with more than

his pencil drawings: for the first

time, one can also marvel at the

extensive works he magically

conjures on walls with a ballpoint

pen. [Editor’s note: Find online by

searching “Ethan Murrow Artbook.”

You’ll see a different cover image for

this book on the Artbook website.]

Alumni News


ALUMNI EVENTSIt’s been a busy winter and spring, with three Putney events happening around the country. Small gatherings

happened in Washington, DC, and San Francisco, and then a roomful of Putney alumni, parents, friends, and

summer program students and faculty gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to sing Putney songs for two

hours on a warm March evening. It’s a joy to see alumni connect with current parents, and the young

connect with the not-so-young. Thank you all for joining us and for staying in touch.

<clockwise> JOHN BERLINGER, SARAH PARROTT BERLINGER ’95,

JESSE KURLANCHEEK ’95, AND EMILY BUCKBEE CAREY ’95 AT THE PUTNEY SING IN CAMBRIDGE

SUNDARA ZIEGLER ’14, MADDY PARRASCH ’14,

AND FLANNERY MCDONNELL ’14 ENJOYING AN

EVENING TOGETHER AT PUTNEY’S CAMBRIDGE SING

JANE GOTTSCHALK ’56 AND CHRISTIE POINDEXTER DENNIS ’49

AT THE PUTNEY SING


TYLER RASCH ’06 VISITS CAMPUS WITH KOREAN REALITY TV SHOWDuring his time as a student at the University of Chicago, Tyler Rasch ’06 spent three months studying Korean

in Seoul. He returned in 2011 as a participant in the Korean Government Scholarship Program, and began

a master’s degree in international relations there in 2012. Spurred by an interest in cross-cultural understanding,

he started, with other non-Korean students, a webzine meant to bring Koreans and foreigners together.

Since 2014, Tyler has been a mainstay on Korean television. He participates on the talk/variety show Non-Summit,

which features non-Korean men living in Korea and discusses topics of Korean and other cultures. In the last year,

Tyler has been a regular member of the show Where is my Friend’s Home, in which Non-Summit cast members visit

their home countries and broaden the multicultural aspect of the two programs. In March, Where is my Friend’s

Home filmed on location at The Putney School, with trips to the barn, the KDU, the art buildings, and more.

It was great to welcome Tyler back to campus; we can’t wait to see the episode!

THE WHERE IS MY FRIEND’S HOME CREW

FILMING IN THE KDU

TYLER RASCH ’06, LEFT, SHOWS THE

CREW FROM KOREA AROUND CAMPUS

Alumni News


HARVEST FESTIVALWe see alumni with their young children, faces painted and caramel apples in hand. We watch young alumni

return, embrace, play Frisbee, and sing their hearts out. We laugh with the families who dance together. We

wish we had the time to head into the trails with the Red Leaf Ramble 5K. And we thank the many alumni

and friends who make the trip to campus every fall to join us in this special celebration.

Harvest Festival 2016 is Sunday, October 9.

<clockwise> ALUMNI GATHERED FOR THE GROUP PHOTO AT HARVEST

FESTIVAL 2015 (NOT PICTURED: PARENTS WITH YOUNG CHILDREN

WHO REFUSED TO LEAVE THE BOUNCE HOUSES)

KATHERINE LEE ’75 BROWSES THE GOODS AT THE HARVEST FESTIVAL FARM STAND

RUNNERS TAKE OFF AT THE START OF THE HARVEST FESTIVAL RED LEAF RAMBLE 5K

Bob for apples l Swing from trees l Pet the cows

Toss the hay l Linger on the lawn with old friends

Harvest Festival 2016Sunday, October 9

Fun for the whole family!

Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to your son or daughter who no longer maintains a

permanent address at home, please notify the Alumni Office of his or her new mailing address. Thank you.

The Putney School

Elm Lea Farm

418 Houghton Brook Road

Putney, VT 05346-8675

802-387-5566

www.putneyschool.org

Nonprofit Org.

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Putney, VT

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Putney Post Spring, 2016