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In the fall of 2008, I came to campus for the first time for a weekend interview. It was this gorgeous autumn afternoon. Bright, streaming sunshine. Crisp fall weather. And in the interstices between my interviews, I asked if I could wander around the campus. I was struck almost instantly — especially since I had been visiting schools all over the country — by the warm, open feel of the campus and how friendly and welcoming people were. I went on the sideline of a soccer game, and people didn’t know who I was but in a kind of charmingly Midwestern fashion, people just came up to me, introduced themselves, asked me who I was, and then almost spontaneously, they shared their excitement about the school and about their kids’ experience. 

I don’t think I ever forgot my first impressions of Seven Hills. Ours is an equally engaging and rigorous curriculum as any school in the country, but there’s also a kind of modesty and sense of balance about the way that the school operates. It’s a matter of feel. Fundamentally, you can see yourself and feel yourself as part of the community.

In numerical terms and quantitative terms, the school is a very different school than when I started. We have a radically different campus footprint. We are much more diverse — probably almost three times as diverse in terms of socioeconomic and racial diversity. Kids are growing up now in a society that’s much more pluralistic — their work experience, their life experience is going to throw them together with collaborators and employees and friends and family from a much wider array of backgrounds, so we’ve tried to make sure that what kids read and study helps them develop a cultural competence.

The demography, beyond ethnicity, has changed, too. When I started here 14 years ago, we weren’t a majority community of two-income parents, and now the vast majority of our families are two-income families. So that has changed the expectation for what a school can provide. We have a 2-year-old program and a robust summer program and 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. days for kids. I’m proud of all that, but what I’m most proud of is how the programmatic offerings of this school have evolved over my time to try to dovetail more with the needs of young people today. What great schools like this do is take the pulse of the world and evolve their program to try to provide experiences which prepare kids for positions of leadership in the world as it actually exists or the world as it will exist when they enter it.

We made a major investment early in my tenure in faculty training and curriculum development. It wasn’t really perceived as a weakness and yet, bluntly, in quantitative terms relative to national benchmarks, we were probably allocating a third as much resources to that area, and we made a major push to triple the size of the faculty training budget. We call them Summer Curriculum Development grants, which incentivize teachers who have ideas percolating but never had the time or the energy to develop them. These are modest amounts of money, but I think it’s been the crucible for the continuing evolution of the school’s program. We probably award 40 of these grants every summer so, in the time I’ve been here, close to 500 now. We’ve developed a process to undergird and to nurture faculty creativity.

Two strategic plans have occurred on my watch, which articulated the importance of global awareness and civic engagement; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and STEM offerings. The thing that gets less attention but arguably is even more important is a focus on the social and emotional development of young people. We’ve made a much more self-conscious effort to build out guidance programs to provide really explicit training in things like how to develop a relationship, how to start a conversation, how to deal with a conflict with somebody.

It’s part of an effort to help kids create balance in their lives. Yes, this is a challenging and rigorous academic institution, and yes, it asks kids to aspire and prepare for the most demanding colleges and universities in the country, but I think fundamentally what we’ve not taken our eye off of is the whole breadth of the human experience. Our mission statement is defined pretty ambitiously. We’re not just a college preparatory school. We believe that it’s our responsibility to prepare kids for life, in all of its aspects. The faculty, as much as they want to challenge kids and prepare them academically, they also want to prepare them to be able to take care of themselves. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

This job evokes that old saw, “Man plans and God laughs.” My days begin with a series of meetings or a list of things that I hope to accomplish, and then life gets in the way. But there are still a lot of days when I have time to wander around the campus and visit classrooms. Particularly, because I didn’t grow up teaching kids this age, I spend a lot of time in elementary school classrooms. It gives me the biggest charge how unabashed kids are about sharing what they’re learning.

I usually enter a classroom unannounced, greet the teacher, and try to give them a sort of inquisitive look to make sure that I’m not arriving at a time when they don’t want me there. For the most part, I try to restrain my impulse to participate. I’m fascinated by how much interest very young kids expect you to take in the minutia of their lives. I’ll go into a classroom at snack time, and if one child shares something with you, all the others in the group feel that they need to share something on that same topic. There’s this charming openness to life. These kids are so lucky to be surrounded by adults who love them and care about them, and they don’t see rank.

I’ve certainly learned in my years at Seven Hills about what the teachers of young children do. Basically, the miracle is that they are preparing kids in all kinds of ways to be learners in a way that I just didn’t fully get before. I’d never taught a child younger than fifth grade. Having the kind of habits of mind and self-discipline and flexibility and attention span that makes learning possible — that’s what the school’s amazing teachers of young children do.

I love the milestone moments in kids’ lives. I’m a sucker for graduation ceremonies and moving up ceremonies because life is crazy busy, and how often do you get to stand back and see the arc of someone’s life? The kids who are graduating now were kindergartners when I started. So, I’ve known them, some of them, through the whole arc of their life. I’m also a big sucker for what educational theorists call “demonstrations of learning,” those moments when there’s a culminating project. I think maybe the purest distillation of this is arts productions. I love to go to Middle School concerts, where the kids have been playing the saxophone for three months. They just take such pride in what is fundamentally a collaborative enterprise. They’ve all learned how to do this thing together, and they are all palpably excited by what they can now do that they couldn’t do three months ago.

I was at a gathering of teachers who teach in different divisions recently, and one of the faculty members who has been here a long time shared that they’d gotten a letter from a recent alum updating the teacher on what he was doing. It prompted this discussion in the faculty workroom about all of their collective memories of that student. It was somebody who’d had a real struggle in elementary school, academically and socially and behaviorally. The school had done all kinds of interventions with the family and surrounded the child with support, and what I came away with — if you extrapolate that one conversation out — is what a tremendous sense of pride teachers here take in how their collective efforts have altered the arc of students’ lives.

Some families might think the school dines out on its AP scores or its SAT scores or its college placement list. It’s actually weirdly the opposite. It seems to me that the greatest source of pride is kids who didn’t start with huge amounts of ability. In unvarnished moments, when teachers are sitting in a room together talking about kids, what they stressed was their pride in kids where frankly the teachers worried if the student would graduate from the school, and the student ended up not only graduating but also excelling in the world. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t show up on the list of best schools in the country that use only measurable indices, but that’s what makes Seven Hills Seven Hills.

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I started at Seven Hills right off the bat in pre-k. My mom worked at Doherty as the school counselor and before that had been a Unit II teacher, and my older sister Julia was also at the school. I left to go to another school for fourth through sixth grade and then came back to Seven Hills in seventh grade.

Reading comprehension had always been a struggle for me. In seventh grade, I remember having Mrs. Hayes as my English teacher and my adviser, and she helped me to access the books we read in a way I hadn’t been able to before. She also really taught me about patience — patience with others and with myself. In high school, my chemistry teacher, Ms. Utah, like Mrs. Hayes, is just very understanding about what we’re going through as students. She appreciates that school is hard, not every subject might be our favorite or assignment will be easy for us, but she still tries to make it as enjoyable as possible.

Two of my favorite things in Upper School have been the Club Fair and the time when seniors present their Challenge Projects. Both of those events really show the range of students’ interests. The Club Fair happens during lunch every fall, and the upperclassmen all try to get you involved in the clubs that they’re part of: Vintage Video Game Club; Operation Smile Club, a club for students who think they want to be future healthcare workers; and so many others to choose from. Most are low maintenance, and it’s a great way to make friends with students who are older than you. One that I joined is the Jewelry Club. We just paired up with the Be The Match Club, which supports marrow and blood stem cell donations. We made bracelets that we sold at school and then that money — around $400 — went to Be The Match.

For the Challenge Project showcase, the seniors fill the school’s hallway and you can walk around and hear their presentations. You get to see what opportunities the students have access to and how they’re supported in doing things that they find interesting and are passionate about. For her Challenge, my sister Julia has worked on building a car from scratch with my dad. They started with a frame and a bunch of pieces, and they’ve been working on it for over a year now, so it has way exceeded the required number of hours.

COVID, of course, changed so much about being a student. I think the school did an amazing job navigating it and taking appropriate measures to make everyone feel safe, but the pandemic was still an up-and-down roller coaster. The latter part of my eighth grade year, when we were online, was very tough for everybody. Nearly halfway through my high school experience, there were some teachers whose faces I’d never fully seen. As teenagers, that took away a lot — not seeing people’s faces. The social aspect was the hardest.

Some parts of how abnormal it was kind of make you laugh. In my first two years of high school, we only had one school dance. It was for Homecoming, which happens in October. The dance was outside in the courtyard-lawn area. It was really cold, and the girls were in little dresses. We tried to go into the bathroom just to warm up, but the teachers didn’t want us in a small, enclosed indoor area. Some of the seniors tried to start a mosh pit and that didn’t go over well either. So, it was not a normal high school dance, but, hey, it got to happen. It makes you better appreciate school spirit opportunities, because they are not a given.

Whether it’s been the pandemic or the killing of George Floyd or the Capitol riot, I think the school has done a good job of addressing these things head on — not just having them be in the news but go unaddressed at school. When George Floyd was killed, class was already happening online because of the pandemic, so we weren’t physically at the school. When we came back in the fall and school was in-person again, there were panel discussions of students from different race and faith backgrounds, where they would share their experiences and tell their stories. I remember sitting and hearing from people whom I’d passed in the halls but not interacted with, and for me, it helped to take this big, national reckoning that was going on and make it more concrete. I remember one student saying they didn’t feel like they could really be themselves at school. That stuck with me, because that’s a burden on top of the stress we all have keeping up with school and extracurriculars and everything else going on in our lives.

Having students share these experiences and having the school tackle these issues head on is important because diversity is a special part of Seven Hills. I might be sitting at lunch and a student will naturally bring up how over a holiday break they went to India to visit their grandparents or say how over the weekend they talked on the phone to their Greek relatives who live in Europe. At lunch, some students might bring in a sandwich but others will bring in leftovers from last night’s dinner, and you’ll smell aromas from around the world.

A defining part of Seven Hills is that, as students, we’re given so much trust. That trust and respect have made me so much more responsible than I would be at another school, where the attitude is, “We’re going to puppy-guard you and look over you, then send you off to college and hope you can survive.” Because of how Seven Hills integrates trust, freedom, and responsibility, as someone who’s a teenager, I already feel very independent.

Last year, I broke a rule by leaving school during a free bell to go get food off-campus with a friend. My mom found out and she made me tell the school. I emailed Mr. Brott, the dean of students, and let him know that I’d broken this rule and was extremely sorry. It felt like a mess at the time, but I was able to own up, and the conversation I had with Mr. Brott is what really stuck with me. He said, “Riley, I’ve had you as a student. I believe you’re a good kid and that this will be just a blip in your record — but our school gives you its trust, and now that’s going to take some rebuilding.” It was a great learning moment for me about owning up to my mistake and seeing how valuable that trust is and how much I didn’t want to lose it again.

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I came to Lotspeich in first grade, and then my younger brother and younger sister started there after me. My earliest memory is of the first assembly I ever went to. It was in the Lotspeich library. Head of Lotspeich Mrs. Fox talked to the students, and other teachers made announcements. As first graders, we were sitting up front with the older kids behind us. It felt exciting to have the whole elementary school together in one place. Later, when I was a fifth grader, I liked sitting in the back because we could lean against the bookshelves.

One of my favorite teachers was Ms. Steller, who I had in fifth grade. She was full of energy. In her classrooms, she had little llama stuffed animals, and she called them emotional support llamas. She would tell us, “I know some tests and quizzes can be stressful. Having something to hold on to that’s soft can help.” I remember using one for a difficult math test and a spelling quiz. At the beginning of the year, there were two or three llamas, then students brought more in, so by the end of the year, there were 10 or 15. It shows how kind our teachers are.

It’s honestly hard for me to think of much that I would change about Seven Hills. Maybe one thing would be a little bit longer lunch period. It’s only 30 minutes, and I spend the first 20 minutes eating with my friends, and then we go play foursquare or basketball in the gym for the last 10 minutes. For the first part of the pandemic, I didn’t like wearing a mask while we played sports because it made breathing harder, and it was tough missing some of my favorite events, like May Fete, but I know someday, it’s something we’ll tell our grandchildren about and be like, “I made it through this!”

Sports are my main extracurricular, but in Middle School, I’ve also really liked being in the instrumental ensemble, where I play the violin. Every year, we have a big recital and we get to show off the pieces that we’ve learned and all the hard work that we’ve put in. Right now, we’re learning the Mission Impossible theme music, which is really cool.

I think when I was in elementary school and going into Middle School, I wanted to be a Lego engineer or a basketball player when I grew up. But now, I’m not sure what I want to do because being a student at Seven Hills, I’ve seen a broader range of what I can choose from. My original plan was also to go to Walnut Hills for high school, because two of my close friends were going there. Now, I have my sights set on staying at Seven Hills all the way through because of the friends I have made here.

In the years I’ve been at the school, I think it’s changed a lot. They put a lot of focus into making sure the curriculum is relevant and geared toward what feels current in today’s world. There have been big facilities changes, including the new Field House, which has four basketball courts, and the new Middle School building. I think it shows how the school is looking to create a better and better experience for students, not just keep what’s already there or keep doing things the same way.

I also think the school does a very good job and keeps getting better on issues of diversity. When I started, I was one of the only African American students in my grade. Now there are five other African American boys in my class, and five African American girls. I have other classmates whose families are from all over the world. I like getting to have all kinds of different friends, and that diversity matters so that you can also have friends whose experiences are relatable to your own. I know that Seven Hills wants everyone to be comfortable in their own skin.

The same thing that I liked at that very first Lotspeich assembly, the feeling of community, is still one of my favorite things. It feels like we’re all connected. Even though I’m in Middle School now, during the day, I’ll sometimes cross paths with my little siblings in elementary school. I’ll stop to give them a hug, and they’re glad to see me.

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By the time I started at Seven Hills in seventh grade, I had lived in Japan, Singapore, and China. My parents are both from India, and their careers at P&G took them around the world until they were assigned to Cincinnati. I didn’t have a chance to visit Seven Hills before enrolling, but even from a distance, the school seemed to have more of an international feel than any other school in Cincinnati, and it seemed like a welcoming place. It was important to our family to know that there were many different cultures represented at the school and that it was an environment where people were willing to learn from other people’s backgrounds.

My first day of school there was a solar eclipse, and I remember everyone going out onto the deck, where we were all given special glasses to be able to look up at the eclipse. What I remember most, though, was my experience at lunch that first day. I had brought my lunch to school and put it in my locker, but then I forgot where my locker was. I thought, okay, I guess I’ll go to the cafeteria. I went there and bought myself a pizza, but had no idea where I was going to sit. I had seen a lot of American TV and movies depicting that first day of school when you don’t know anyone and how scary it can be. I found a bunch of girls who looked like seventh graders, sat down, and said, “Hi, I’m Shanaya. I’m new here.” They didn’t even blink an eye, they were like, “Sure, sit down,” and just kept chatting and included me in the conversation. And it wasn’t like they were interviewing me, like, “Oh, where’d you come from?” It was all just really friendly.

On my second day at Seven Hills, this time I found my locker and was walking outside during lunch, saw a different group of kids sitting on benches, and was like, I guess I’ll go sit with them. I ate my entire lunch with them, had a lot of fun, and then realized they were all sixth graders, which hadn’t come up at all. By the third day, I’d already made a friend in my math class, Erin Finn. I’m now a senior and I think Erin and I have had lunch together the majority of my days at Seven Hills. From the beginning, she seemed very happy to be at Seven Hills, and she made me feel happy about it, too.

Arriving here not just from another school, but from another country, I think my transition to Seven Hills says a lot about the school — the fact that I never found it to be cliquey, that it always felt like a diverse and open culture, and that there were always people looking out for me.

No one looks out for the student more than the teachers. I’ve been in classes when the teacher overhears students talking about having several tests in different subjects on the same day, and then volunteers to move the test they had scheduled that same day so the students won’t be as stressed. The teachers know that students at Seven Hills have a lot on our plates, and they try to meet us where we are.

The teachers are also unbelievably generous, giving us so much of their free time. I’m in Mock Trial with Mr. Polifka, who teaches AP History, and our Sunday practices are already a two hour commitment for him many weekends. On top of that, he invites us to send him the opening and closing statements we’ve written for Mock Trial and says he’s glad to give us any feedback. This is all for an extracurricular club where he’s not even giving us a grade!

In the leadup to our AP Chemistry exam, our teacher, Ms. Torline, dedicated so many extra lunchtime and weekend sessions to helping make sure we were prepared for the AP exam. Our teachers are constantly willing to go above and beyond. It shows that this isn’t just a job for them; they really care about us learning.

Seven Hills has the strongest sense of community of any school or group I’ve ever been a part of. At the start of this year, we had our Senior Sunrise, which is a newer tradition where a bunch of parents wake up before dawn and bring food and equipment over to the school’s big hillside and start cooking for us. The seniors all sat on blankets, ate breakfast, and watched the sun rise. It was a Midwestern sunrise, so it wasn’t quite like the sun coming up over the horizon of the ocean, but more importantly, there was a real sense of togetherness.

That sense of togetherness has been there even when you’d think it might be hard to achieve. My older brother Kayzad graduated from Seven Hills during that first year of COVID. The school couldn’t have a normal graduation ceremony, but I’ll always remember buying special markers and scribbling a bunch of congratulatory messages on our family’s Subaru the night before graduation. Then, the next day, our whole family and our dog Toffee drove together in this big celebratory procession while all the teachers were lined up along the high-school drop-off semi-circle waving and holding signs and coming up to our car to give my brother his graduation flowers. It’s times like that when you’re really glad to be part of a school community that knows how to make the most of a challenging situation.

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My very first day at Doherty is one of my earliest life memories. I was only 2 ½ -years-old, and I remember, at first, I cried a lot because I didn’t want to leave my parents, but then I remember my preschool teachers, Ms. Brackett and Mrs. Pietroski, being super comforting and making me feel very safe. As a Seven Hills lifer, I have now felt comfortable, safe, and happy here for 16 years.

One of my favorite rituals in Lower School was when two students from the senior class would visit the Doherty Campus and lead a Homecoming pep rally with the younger kids. The seniors would get us all hyped up and tell us about the sports they played. This year, my experience came full-circle when I was asked to be one of those two seniors. I went with my classmate, Will Wiles, and we hula-hooped, jump roped, and danced with the younger kids. We also told them about all of the activities that happen as part of Homecoming weekend. I saw so many of the same teachers I’d had in elementary school. It was a special moment for me, and I think it shows how much continuity there is to the Seven Hills experience.

I’ve loved and really benefited from the smaller size of the school. You have the opportunity to develop real relationships with your teachers. You are able to participate in all these different extracurricular clubs, where anyone who wants to join can — you’re not getting cut or excluded. And I’ve been able to play three sports — soccer, basketball, and lacrosse — which I wouldn’t have at a larger school. These opportunities have definitely made me a more well-rounded person and helped me build character.

My Middle School soccer coach, Hannah Hanley, who was also my PE teacher, had a big impact on me. She always got me fired up for games, and she taught me how to be a good teammate as well as a leader. In seventh grade, we played Mariemont in the semifinals of the tournament. The game went to penalty kicks, I missed my PK, and we ended up losing the game. I was really upset and felt so defeated. A year later, in eighth grade, we played Mariemont again in the semifinals of the tournament, and once again, the game went to penalty kicks. Even though I’d missed my penalty kick in the tournament the year before, Coach Hanley made the decision for me to be one of the kickers again. The fact that she had that faith in me was a big deal to me. This time, I made the penalty kick, and we won the game.

I know I’ve gotten a great education at Seven Hills and that I’m well prepared for college, and I also know that what we are taught is bigger than our GPAs, AP scores, and college acceptances. We’re being taught how to be good citizens and how to connect what we learn in class to current events and to what’s happening in our own lives. For example, in AP U.S. History with Mrs. Driehaus, we studied immigration and how America is this big melting pot. I then got to connect that to how all four of my grandparents immigrated here from Greece. We also talked in class about historical patterns of who has and hasn’t been welcomed in the United States as immigrants, which helped me realize how fortunate my family is that my grandparents were able to come here and build a life.

Besides connecting what I’ve learned to my own life, I have also been able to connect what I’ve learned to global current events. When the war in Ukraine began, the history department offered lunchtime discussions for students to ask questions, follow new developments, and learn a lot about the historical context of Russia and Ukraine to better understand why events were playing out as they were. Those conversations then extended into classes and around our dinner table at night.

The school has always encouraged us to try to make sense of the world around us and then to try and make it better. Commitment to Community is one of the school’s core values and service is part of the education. At Doherty, we would do toiletry drives for Open Door. In Middle School, we had bowl-a-thons to raise money for The Caring Place. In Upper School, we’d do sandwich-making, food drives, and other community service projects. Even when I’m no longer a student, because of my time at Seven Hills, I’ll keep thinking about what it means to be part of a community and how to be of service to the world.

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ANNA: I didn’t know it at the time, but kindergarten at Seven Hills launched what would become some of my lifelong and closest friendships. It’s now been 40 years, and we all just went on a trip together a few weekends ago.

Part of what Seven Hills has always done well is matching the right teachers and the right experiences with the right age. I think about Mrs. Vitz, who is exactly the person you want your first grade teacher to be. Mrs. Driscoll also stands out. She had a kind of a Julia Childs quality about her, which I say as someone who loves Julia Childs. Mrs. Driscoll would lead the charge during our weekly Monday morning assemblies enthusiastically singing the “Lotspeich Song,” drumming up our excitement for the great week ahead. We’d pile into her office, drape ourselves on and under her furniture, and she would read to us, books like “Where The Red Fern Grows” and “Charlotte’s Web.”

Because so many Seven Hills teachers taught at the school for a very long time, it made you excited, years in advance, about having them as your teacher when you got older. You’d look ahead and think, “Someday I’m going to get to do this tradition in that teacher’s classroom” . . . like Pioneer Day with Mrs. Blocksom, the sixth grade play in the Red Barn, and the dunking booth at May Fete.

Later on, I think about Mrs. Beaver, who was so tender and loving with all of her students; and Mrs. Sittenfeld, who I can picture with her slide projector bringing art history to life; and crowding into Patty Flanigan’s tiny office with her two dogs while she smoked menthol cigarette after cigarette preaching about performing theater the way the Greeks would have done. I was also lucky enough to have Tim Drew as my tennis coach for four years, as well as adviser and science teacher. I would call him a friend to this day.

My mom didn’t start teaching at the school until after I’d already graduated from Lotspeich, but I can vividly picture the arts and language building she shared with Mrs. Clajus and Mrs. Knoop. Her idea for teaching elementary school French was to hook children with culture, the food, the cafe lifestyle, the artwork. If you’re able to hook a student with the culture, they’re going to want to learn the language.

My mom would also arrange cultural assemblies at Lotspeich. After she died, it was very touching that the faculty put together a fund to keep those assemblies going in her honor. They’re now called “The Bonnie Binkley Assembly” and take place annually to this day. All of her grandchildren attend and it’s very special for them as most didn’t have the chance to know her. They’ve had everything from musicians to plays and puppet shows, and it’s a beautiful celebration of her teaching and parenting style, creating memories, laughter, and interest through exciting, new experiences.

It sounds cliche to say, but Seven Hills really was like a second home. We spent so much time there. The teachers felt like an extension of our own parents. My parents also became good friends with my friends’ parents. Everything was very happily intertwined.

LAIR: I think the decision about what school our kids would go to was made when I decided to marry Anna — before we even had kids! I understood very quickly what Seven Hills meant to her family.

I had attended a pretty homogenous elementary school in Indianapolis, so for me, the diversity and inclusion and acceptance that Seven Hills represents is pretty awesome. I’m so glad that’s the environment that my kids are growing up in — one that allows kids to be who they are. The more that they embrace it and grow with it, the more it’s going to equip them for life.  

I also marvel at the transformation in facilities over a really short period of time here: The Schiff Center, the Early Childhood Center, the new Middle School, the Field House, all new tennis courts, better parking. That’s an unbelievable amount of building and improvements. And yet, while that’s what has happened with the physical campus, one of my observations is also about the good ways in which the school hasn’t changed, the positive continuity that’s been maintained.

Head of School Chris Garten has been such a steady leader for so long, and the entire time I’ve been involved as a Board member, as well as a parent, he’s made it look easy. He’s remained ambitious every step of the way, constantly pushing the Board, pushing the community, pushing the faculty to keep improving. Being a Head of School is one of the hardest jobs in the city. You have alumni, students, parents, faculty, and the Board, and they each have a lot of power. His ability to keep all those people happy, while at the same time moving the institution forward is spectacular.

The journey we’ve been through during COVID is such a reflection of our community. There was not the tension, the animosity, and the division you saw so many other places. Everyone came together, got comfortable with rules that kept each other safe, respected each other’s boundaries, and the Seven Hills community came out stronger. You see it in our enrollment numbers; the school is thriving.

As I’ve gone through the journey of being a parent, and you’re trying to understand your kids and mold them and support them, you spend so much time on the campuses, and you watch the faculty and administration who are dedicating their lives to doing that alongside you. Like watching Head of Middle School Bill Waskowitz, for example, and seeing his love and appreciation for Middle School kids. The passion and appreciation and understanding that Bill and the Middle School faculty and staff bring to those kids is inspiring. One of the most important things to us in life is to be good parents, and to have the school and the faculty be such devoted partners in that effort means a lot.

ANNA: On Beatrice’s first day at Lotspeich, we ran into Harold Boyd, who has been an amazing part of the school’s maintenance staff since the time I was a student. I introduced my daughter to Harold and thanked him for looking out for her. All these years later, Harold immediately remembered that he and I have the same birthday! That’s the continuity Lair is talking about — people join this institution, and they stay a part of it.

LAIR: Two nights ago, I was standing under the Pavilion watching our daughter Grace in a lacrosse game. At the same time, Bea was down on the lower fields having lacrosse practice. The food stand was open, kids were playing on the Lotspeich playground, there was a track practice going on, and people were coming and going from the Field House. I looked around and thought, “What a beautiful thoroughfare of community.”

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I remember being a young teacher at Seven Hills, and former Middle School P.E. teacher Beth Leonard was receiving a recognition for hitting a milestone number of years teaching at the school. At the time, I thought, “I don’t think I could stay in the same place for even five years.” Here I am almost 30 years later. It speaks to how our school keeps things fresh and stimulating, not just for the students, but also for the teachers. At so many schools, that isn’t the case. Seven Hills has let me remain a student as much as a teacher.

After teaching biology, chemistry, and environmental science in Middle and Upper School, about eight years ago, Bill Waskowitz tapped me to teach a course for seventh graders, where the initial idea was that maybe students would invent something. It evolved from there, with me saying, “I need a dedicated room for this, I need all these different materials.” The idea continued to grow and ultimately turned into the Innovation Lab, which I led starting at its inception.

In the beginning, the Innovation Lab was mostly just a room where students could build or take things apart at lunch, and where parents would come in to do special engineering activities with the students. Over time, it grew to cover all three Middle School grades. Now, sixth graders take a class called introduction to innovation lab, seventh graders take exploring engineering and design, and eighth graders take exploring computer science.

One of my favorite projects, which we would do with the sixth graders, is called puzzles for a purpose. The students would make puzzles for other people, which some years we would donate to the Alzheimer’s Association. I loved that project because it pulled so many different learnings together. The students learned to use tools like scroll saws and nail guns. They learned about Alzheimer’s and neurons and the brain. And then they also learned about empathy-based thinking and design. We would talk as a class about perspectives and whose perspectives are important and what kind of things would you think about when designing for someone with Alzheimer’s, puzzle piece size and shape, and what images would you include and why.

In seventh grade, students in the Innovation Lab do more engineering challenges, while still practicing empathy-based thinking in design. Students would build dog showers, which might sound like a silly project, but it required a surprising amount of problem-solving. For that one, our “clients” were faculty members with dogs, whom the students would interview to develop empathy with their client, and then design the product to incorporate the clients’ wants and needs.

In eighth grade, as students learn about functions, loops, variables, and conditionals in computer science, they program these little softball-sized robots for the first part of the semester, and, by the end of the year, they’re building and designing their own robots.

The students learn and grow so much. I remember one sixth grade girl telling me about how her mom was trying to drill something at home, but it wasn’t working, and the little girl said, “Don’t worry, mom, I’ve got this!” because of what she’d learned in the Innovation Lab. I remember another pair of students who built and designed their own pinball machine using a 3D printer and coding all of the various lights and sounds — a really impressive feat of engineering.

During the years I’ve been at the school, we’ve seen a big increase in our focus on STEM education. When I started teaching here, we barely had computers. A big part of what the Innovation Lab tries to accomplish is to give students a sense of agency, especially technological agency. We live in such a different world now, and if students don’t have an understanding of these massive changes and the technologies behind those changes, they’re going to feel like they don’t have much control and can’t make informed decisions. The Innovation Lab also reaches a subset of students where more traditional academic classes might not be their thing, but you watch them in this engineering and design setting, and you’re floored by the things they can do.

I’ve always been struck by how much freedom students and teachers have here. That freedom breeds trust, which manifests itself as a closeness, almost a collegiality, between teachers and students. When I was a student decades ago, we walked from room to room in orderly lines and kept quiet. At Seven Hills, the attitude is, “We trust you; we trust you to get from here to there; we trust you to do the right thing.”

The freedom is not just for the students but also for the faculty. I’m given these courses and told, “Go teach!” That’s amazing. I’ve had the academic freedom to design courses, to choose what and how to teach, and it allows us as teachers to be so responsive to the students and what they need and what they’re interested in and how things need to be paced. That translates into the students feeling like the teachers are really in it for them.

Being a parent here when my two sons, Elliot and Michael, were students has also been such a gift. Elliot graduated in 2016 and his historical and emotional ties to the school run deep. He attended his first prom at six months old when I was chaperoning, and after being a lifer, he works at the school to this day, developing and running summer camps and the Counselor in Training program, and leading After The Bell for Middle School. Around campus, I am more often introduced as “Elliot’s mom” than as “Mrs. Glum.”

Michael graduated from the school in 2019, and there was a group of boys in his class, many of whom had been together since kindergarten and played basketball together for years. I’ll always remember sitting in the stands as a parent when they were in high school and watching these boys have their arms around each other every game for the whole game. They had this amazing, visible love for each other that still gives me chills picturing it.

Michael was on the basketball team, and he didn’t get a ton of playing time but loved being part of the group. His senior year, in the last game, every other senior had scored, and they put Michael in. He ended up making a buzzer-beater, and the cheering section was screaming and going crazy, and his teammates, this brotherhood of friends, were all bouncing up and down like bunnies. That moment showed me who those boys were, who our students are, and what our school is about — it’s not about one, it’s about all.

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