Reflections from the Head

A Real Community

As we begin a new academic year, a backward glance at the end of last year can provide a framework for our renewed work. EPGY OHS Graduation Weekend is a remarkable and unique event that sets in relief the essential features of the school. For an instructor who teaches most of the graduating seniors, the culminating commencement and awards ceremony provided further evidence of what I already knew: that the EPGY OHS student body overflows with diversely talented, colorful, and successful students whose lives we are lucky to have a hand in shaping. With a growing group of accomplished, independent, and well prepared graduates matriculating at an array of top schools, the EPGY OHS is already succeeding in its core mission. And the litany of awards and achievements of continuing students, who by graduation will have completed the deep and expanding EPGY OHS curriculum, indicates that these successes will continue.

But to someone who, while still amazed by these students on a daily basis, has grown somewhat accustomed to the exceptional, what is most striking about this annual gathering is its ordinariness. What could be ordinary about forty-five extraordinary students, who attend class and interact virtually, descending on Stanford from around the country and around the world to meet and celebrate in person? To be sure, there's a momentary pause at the opening event, as students (and instructors!) survey one another, compensating for the distortions of the camera and the disjunction between physical cues of identity and the rich knowledge of each other they've developed online. But then voices, quirks, and mannerisms are identified, friends and teachers are recognized, and a community resumes its life in a new medium, in media res.

Anyone observing this phenomenon will have several questions: what is this community like, how does a community like this develop, and how can it be enhanced? The first question is the easiest to answer, though the answer is a little surprising. Remarkably, for so talented and driven a collection of students, the EPGY OHS has developed a culture of mutual support and admiration. Exposed to the reality of others who may be more accomplished than they in certain subjects, EPGY OHS students happily flourish: they are excited to engage these students on difficult issues and material, inspired to demand more of themselves, and moved to share sympathetic assistance with their peers. This ethos pervades the virtual classroom discussions and the general life of the school, and it flows out into the myriad student-initiated contacts and forums that make it possible for the 'first meetings' of the graduation week to be reunions in what may become lifelong friendships.

Clearly, then, the formal interactions of students in a virtual school, or the EPGY OHS in particular, are the basis of a real community. From the classroom discussions and the common core curriculum, to the course webpages, group projects, peer tutoring, and student clubs, elements of daily school life foster substantive interaction that reveals to the students much about the character and abilities of their peers and spurs them to further relationships. And the rigor and self-selecting nature of the EPGY OHS ensures that students will possess the common academic values that can underpin fruitful relationships for talented and motivated students. But in truth, a school only provides the occasion and framework for the community that the EPGY OHS has become; the creative, industrious, and kind students of our pioneering classes deserve the credit for the bonds they have formed.

So as we go forward this year, the administration and staff will be particularly attentive to the question of how we can build on the community that the school and students have so auspiciously begun.

Dr. Jeffery Scarborough
Assistant Headmaster