I hope you all are doing well and enjoying the waning days of summer. This is my annual “grim reaper” back-to-school message. If you can bear it, please read on…

While it is true that the faculty, staff, and I do enjoy the quieter days that summertime brings to 711 St. Christopher’s Road, it is also true that we genuinely love our calling in this incredible community and, in particular, the privilege to work with your sons and to help shape them into young men of honor, integrity, leadership, and service.

So, I say bring on the end of August, and let us begin the 2024-2025 school year with excitement and optimism. We have ample reasons for such enthusiasm, which I will enumerate in partial form, below.

I begin with my sincere gratitude to the Saints community for the manner in which you stepped up, in service and leadership, to my call for support on July 26 seeking host families for our ASSIST Scholar, Eo, from Serbia. Just when we were beginning to lose hope that we could continue our support of the ASSIST Scholar program, this community stepped forward in typical but impressive fashion. We had far more volunteers respond (nearly a dozen!) than we could accommodate this year, but we now have a deep bench of support for future hosting needs. It was another example of the Saints community extending itself in beautiful and generous ways–thank you.

Second, I’d like to offer some thoughts about the school year to come.

I enter this school year with as much pride, excitement, and optimism as I can ever recall having in my 25+ years in independent schools. The St. Christopher’s community is on a roll, hitting its stride in numerous ways and delivering on our mission to “know, love and celebrate boys, promote their pursuit of excellence, and prepare them for lives of honor and integrity, service and leadership.”

After closing the 2023-2024 school year with near-record student retention and record-breaking philanthropy, we open this school year with 1,017 young men of promise, the largest enrollment in school history, made possible through the addition of a fourth section in Kindergarten in response to heightened enrollment demand. Thank you, sincerely, for all of the ways you and your boys help this community excel in new and exciting ways.

We are now just over three years into our implementation of our strategic plan, Momentum 2025, with several student-centered initiatives well underway, with more to come. As we enter this new school year, I am particularly excited about and grateful for our leadership team at St. Christopher’s, which benefits from both great stability and enduring service but also five new members joining our team this year. In addition to the five new members of the School’s Administrative Team, we welcome approximately twenty-five new members of our faculty and staff–please join me in welcoming all new employees and all new families to St. Christopher’s this school year!

As we emerged from the impacts of COVID several years ago, we made a concerted effort–still very much in place today–to focus on the holistic health and wellness of our student body. There is ample evidence, nationally and internationally, that the mental health of young people is under greater strain today than at any point in recent history. As such, at St. Christopher’s, we focus on creating a student-centered environment that works best for boys and their overall wellbeing.

While continuing to provide a challenging academic program that prepares young men for the rigors of college and life beyond, we have also taken steps to limit student use of technology, specifically cell phones, this coming school year. As with everything we do at St. Christopher’s, we must take a nuanced and balanced posture with regard to student use of technology–We cannot be so restrictive as to poorly prepare our students for the academic and professional worlds they will soon inhabit. Laptops and numerous forms of academic technology still have a role in preeminent secondary education today; in our opinion, smart phones do not. 

In addition, we are prioritizing outdoor education and Rites of Passage moments for boys in all three divisions. Our relationship with Camp River’s Bend (CRB) will continue in its third year in 2024-2025, with boys in Grades 5, 8, 9, and 12 enjoying overnight bonding experiences at CRB this year. 

We will also continue to normalize and routinize the topic of mental health among our boys. Too often, boys feel the need to present a stoic front that can belie their authentic feelings. Just as our boys understand the need to occasionally visit the Training Room in our Athletic Center to tend to a physical injury, we will highlight the need to take care of our minds and to process our emotions in a comparable way. We are truly blessed to benefit from a first-rate Health and Wellness team led by Director of Health and Wellness Dr. Ann Vanichkachorn and comprised of three full-time counselors as well as three full-time chaplains, one in each division. 

Finally, following a tumultuous summer of political events and entering a fall that will determine the next president of our country, I want to commit to doing everything we can to help make St. Christopher’s a centering ballast of community and stability for your son and even for your family. We strive to make St. Christopher’s an apolitical institution and organization, focusing instead on the many virtues that unite us as Saints. That said, we must also teach and model for our boys the ability to “lean in” and to engage in the nuanced political issues of our day, to debate and discuss with respect and decorum; to attack and critique issues, not individuals, and to engage in civil discourse both in person and online. We will be discussing the presidential election on our campus, in age-appropriate fashion, up to and through November, modeling for our boys how to do so with respect for all candidates and diverse points of view. 

If you have not already, please carefully review the August 1 newsletters from the Lower School, Middle School, and Upper School, and please be sure to attend to important details and deadlines contained therein. Additionally, please see an exciting announcement, below, regarding our new partnership with SquadLocker for Saints apparel and gear. 

In closing, I will ask you to mark your calendars for our Opening All-School service on the Terraces at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, August 30. During that brief service, open to parents and community members, we will officially commence the 2024-2025 school year. At the beginning of the service, our seniors, the Class of 2025, will escort our Kindergarten boys, the Class of 2037, from the Lower School, across St. Christopher’s Road, and down onto the Terraces where, nine months from now, our seniors will graduate. In just under 13 years, our Class of 2037 will do the same. The journey, the time between our youngest and oldest Saints, is what we care about most here at St. Christopher’s. It is what we should all cherish together. 

If you join us on August 30, you will see the St. Christopher’s brotherhood on display, all 1,017 of our young men of promise gathered in one cherished place, surrounded by dedicated educators who know, love, and celebrate each one of them for exactly who they are and for who they will become.

Happy end-of-summer, and I look forward to seeing you on campus soon.