“I love my colleagues (….) I love talking to them and they have great ideas, and we do a lot of collaboration. And I get to work with people from all sorts of departments (…) I am leading my camping trip with a counselor and with a science teacher. And you just get to do all sorts of interdisciplinary and outside-of-discipline stuff. So yeah, I love the people I work with. That's a huge part of the context. We have generations at this point—There are multiple teachers who went to school [here]. There are students whose parents went here. And I love that kind rootedness and that history.”
“I went to a (…) traditional large school—you know, with lots of APs and then lots of students who are not AP students, and a kind of tracking system. At my high school it was very college-focused and very like, ‘You are going to the best college you get into, and you're going to get the best job you can out of that college,’ and [this school] is so not like that.”
“We send kids to [elite universities], but that's really not our focus. It's not like, ‘Oh, we do all of this because secretly we just want to get them into a good college,’ right? We actually are trying to create citizens and people who know what they want to do and explore the world. So we have a lot of kids who are like, ‘I'm going to do a gap year’, or ‘I'm going to become an electrician’, or ‘I'm going to do whatever.’ At first I was like, ‘Are we failing them because they're not going to great schools?’ But then I feel like I've totally bought into it.”
“The people who stay and who contribute to the community are so often the people who went to [this school]—They're the musicians, they're the artists, they're the business owners. And there's just sense of purpose and of rootedness that we, I believe, are helping to develop (…) and I love it.”