News & Weekly Letters

As I sat down at my computer this morning, I realized that this is my last real letter of the year—I’ll wish you a happy summer break on Wednesday, the last day of school, but that will be a brief message. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your positive feedback about these letters. I truly enjoy writing them, then reading Andria’s translation, and I’m glad to hear that, for at least some of you, they’ve become an important weekly rendezvous.

The weeks leading up to the end of the school year are packed with celebrations that we love. Ahead of the graduations, shows, and tonight’s traditional Splash of Summer party, we enjoyed two evenings of After-School recitals this week. Students from 1st to 8th Grade, who take individual music lessons as part of our After-School program, took to the stage to play a piece they had learned and put their heart and soul into.

With this week of shows coming to an end, and only the 5th graders left to perform next week when they return from the AEFE-UNSS sports tournament, a chapter is also closing. When I arrived in 2020, the corridors were still humming with the rapturous applause from the end-of-year shows orchestrated by Julien Budrino and Vincent Pauchon. For a long time after, people sang the praises of the children’s talent, the beauty of the choreography, and the wonderful things they had seen. COVID brought all of that to a halt.

This week was punctuated by events that were, to say the least, antinomic: our 3rd to 8th graders completed the Terra Nova tests to demonstrate how robust our curriculum is to the authorities, while in Maternelle, Pre-Nursery to Kindergarten celebrated Fun Day—a new tradition inaugurated this time last year (which incidentally finished under glorious sunshine in Madison Square Park); the FDNY completed the first inspection of our new building kickstarting the countdown to moving day for our Elementary and Middle School classes, while our younger students created a new rooftop mural with the artist Antoine Wagner (aka Daphne from Kindergarten’s dad), symbolically reaffirming our love for our Maternelle Building.

I’m often asked where I find the inspiration to write a letter every Friday. Each week is a little different: sometimes I see something that triggers an idea, sometimes it’s a conversation with one of you, sometimes it’s an article I read or a podcast I listen to, and other times—like last week with the Substantial Equivalency Law—it’s a necessity dictated by current events at the school. This week, for a change, it’s a photo that got me thinking. And a photo of me to boot!