Summer Newsletter 2023

Like many of you, I smile when I hear or read about Bay School graduates who are continuing to succeed in their educational pursuits. Most recently, I learned that three members of The Bay School’s Class of 2019 earned distinguished honors as part of George Stevens Academy’s 2023 commencement ceremonies. Dell Davis-Batt graduated as GSA’s Valedictorian, with fellow Bay School grad Thea Dunham Crowley honored as class Salutatorian. Azaiah Cole Nanson was selected as GSA’s First Honor Essayist.

Those top three achievements reflect highly on Dell, Thea, and Azaiah. As with so many of their Bay School classmates, they approached their high school years with a curiosity and preparedness that helped them succeed academically and socially. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Bay School graduates consistently appear in disproportionately high numbers on the GSA, Ellsworth High, John Bapst, and other high school honor rolls.

Our alumni routinely transition well from The Bay School’s holistic, experiential approach to learning to the more traditional benchmark-based methods of most public and private high schools. Recently a high school science teacher contacted me to ask what our “secret sauce” was; she noted that Bay School graduates at her school seem to truly enjoy learning for the sake of learning and rise quickly to the top of their classes.

She is one of several high school and college educators who have shared that observation. I believe there are a number of reasons, all interrelated:

• Family members, who play an essential role by staying engaged with teachers while providing the child with consistent love, support, and encouragement

• Students themselves, who provide and receive peer support at school and in social and academic settings

• Faculty members, who strive to actively model engaged and critical thinking, respect for differences, collaboration, and joy in learning

• Our inspired Waldorf curriculum, which is committed to developing in our students inner confidence, responsibility, self-motivation, a love of learning, imagination, creativity, and intellectual clarity

• Our students’ wonderfully unique sense of place and emotional connection to The Bay School, which continues long after their eighth-grade graduation

My list may not be the same as yours, but I suspect there are similarities.

In the following pages, you will see how the seeds of learning and love for education are planted in our children in their earliest years, even before some are toddling in the hallways and still in their caregivers’ arms. Those seeds continue to be fostered and nurtured through early childhood, the grades, and right up until the 8th graders process out the doors of Emlen Hall as graduates each June.

We have much to celebrate as a school community, starting with our students and alumni, of course. The Bay School has come a long way from its beginnings in 1980. However, the most essential elements–those noted above–continue. As always, with your continued help and support, The Bay School experience and student success will continue.

Gratefully yours,

Marcia L. Diamond Head of School

Chances are good that if you have seen a photo of our school in the past five years, Robin O’Connor took it. Her natural ability to tell the story of who we are as a school community is a confluence of so many things. She has been a Bay School parent for fifteen years and a class parent for just as many. She has substituted regularly in Early Childhood classrooms and has never missed a field trip. She is also a student of photography at Maine Media Arts. Her talents and expertise are matched only by her remarkable ability to show tenderness and grace in all situations with her subjects, capturing so much of what we hold dear. There is always a story to be told, and we are so grateful that she continues to volunteer her time to tell ours.

Thank you, Robin.

A Look Inside

The Bay School offers a unique style of education that forms the foundation of our students’ academic, social, and emotional experiences. At The Bay School, much of the educational experience occurs during play and nature-based classroom time in the early years, complementing the lessons and focus of students’ Main Lesson classes as they advance through the grades.

Our faculty provides each child with a thoughtful curriculum intended to instill curiosity, independence, and confidence at every stage of development. Teachers ensure that students are provided the space, time, and mentoring to discover and learn. Whether in the garden, at a desk, or on a stage, students develop the confidence to ask questions, reason, and express themselves. These building blocks of learning and life guide them from their earliest years at The Bay School through the upper grades and beyond.

The Bay School gives students the space, time, and mentorship to live deeply in work—all work. Even our play is our work. The reverence the teacher models when the youngest of students earnestly transports dirt from a fort to a garden, gives them the confidence to have the courage to speak up and ask questions about the life cycle of a lone caterpillar making a home in a nearby branch. The time a teacher takes to model how to use a paintbrush helps students begin their independent learning to express themselves on paper for the first time. By the upper grades, when they are asked to delve deeply into their Main Lesson work, students have been gathering the building blocks, one by one, to be focused and informed. When these pieces are put all together, it is easy to see how the lessons in the early years forge a path for success in the upper grades and beyond.

PARENT CHILD PROGRAM (newborns through age 3) Our Parent-Child program serves our youngest Bay Schoolers and their caregivers. Margot Entwistle, our veteran Early Childhood teacher, leads the program. Margot provides a welcoming, inclusive environment in which caregivers share in the joys and challenges of parenting. The program respects each family’s unique circumstances and path while offering support for their child’s healthy growth and development. The Parent-Child program provides an important introduction to a group learning environment and creates a sense of place for both child and caregiver in advance of their eventual journey into our Early Childhood program.

EARLY CHILDHOOD (age 3 to Kindergarten)

The seeds of creativity, social awareness, resilience, and flexibility are best sown when children are given a warm and nurturing environment, loving caregivers, and ample time for self-initiated play. These conditions enhance their cognitive and physical development, whether they are observing, building their physical skills, or modeling what they see from their teachers. This prepares them for the academic adventures and challenges of the grade-school years.

LOWER GRADES (Grades 1 to 4/5)

The lower grades curriculum is designed to help young learners develop foundational language arts and mathematics skills. Emphasis is placed on engaging the young child’s lively imagination through a healthy integration of kinesthetic, auditory, spatial, and visual learning. As with all levels of a Bay School education, students receive care and attention that follows the arc of developmentally appropriate curriculum, differentiated as needed for children’s learning, as they begin their eventual journey into our upper-grade school program.

UPPER GRADES (Grades 5/6 to 8)

The academic experience grows in rigor as students enter The Bay School’s upper grades and prepare for high school and beyond. The curriculum becomes more challenging, reflecting the older child’s readiness to learn and understand more complex material. However, the important teaching and learning approaches they experienced in the lower grades remain. There are still few textbooks (with the exception of math and vocabulary); even the more demanding subject content is delivered through compelling storytelling and direct instruction. All blocks are complemented with printed resources, literature, and computer time. The Main Lesson blocks reflect this advancing curriculum, too, as lessons from the student’s lower-grades experience are enhanced through a multilayered study of science, history, geography, and algebra. We have learned that all of this scaffolding; from the early years through their time in the upper grades, ultimately prepares students well to find great success in high school.

The Developing Child

Students in 3rd and 4th grade seek greater independence, understanding, and meaning from the world around them as they become more self-aware. Each child is in the process of finding their own individuality. They have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for learning, along with quite adventurous spirits for new experiences and challenges. At this age, they want to dig into their work and connect it to the real world. While children can still live deeply in the imaginative realm, facts and information also excite them. To this end, our Waldorf curriculum for 3rd/4th Grade focuses on content blocks that engage children in practical, hands-on learning, informational subjects, and lively, complex stories.

Gardening and Harvesting Block

Class teacher Ms. Woods began the school year with a Gardening and Harvesting block. Partnering with Agricultural Arts instructor Heather Dawn, she guided students as they spent many mornings in the garden

harvesting, tending, and planting fall crops. They learned about the major parts of the plant and what can be eaten from different vegetables. They also experimented with recipes and cooked together several times from the school garden’s bounty. They took a field trip to King Hill Farm to assist in a volunteer gleaning project of a carrot harvest. Students’ writing in this block focused on retelling their experiences, recipe-writing, and creative writing exercises.

GLEAN TEAM

Glean

verb (used with object)

1) to gather slowly and laboriously, bit by bit.

2) to gather small amounts left behind after a harvest, nowadays often for charitable use.

Bay School students spent the day at King Hill Farm. With guidance from their Agricultural Arts teacher Heather Dawn Jones, they harvested and processed excess carrots that were then collected by Emily Shanahan from Healthy Acadia. Students learned what is involved from farm to food kitchens in our community.

This April, our community lost a dear friend, Lisa Looke. First and foremost, with her husband Loriman, Lisa was the parent of three Bay School alumni –Loriman B ’10, Garrison ’13, and Caroline ’15. Lisa’s Bay School tenure overlapped a period of tremendous growth, much like the School is experiencing now. New were Emlen Hall, the forge, the math building, the now-gone yurt, the greenhouse, the Kindergarten playground, the vegetable gardens, and North Cottage. Lisa played a part in all of it.

Before Amazon made daily visits to our doorsteps, you had to wait until Winter Faire or order from catalogs to get handworks supplies. With some funding and a large basement storage closet at her disposal, Lisa opened the one and only Bay School Store. She painted the floor salmon pink, wrangled some unused shelving from the Co-op, and offered an array of nifty craft supplies and books, her beautiful, light handwriting gracing every tag in the place. People came, and kept coming!

Versatile and talented, Lisa was an early master of needle felting, a new handworks rage. Hundreds of beautifully made, lifelike animals poured from her hands: crashes of rhinos, herds of elephants, drifts of pigs, sleuths of bears, and, of course, litter upon litter of jolly felt puppies. She taught beginners craft classes to Morning Garden parents and hosted drop-in lessons on open days.

The store shared its space with the assorted and sundry saved over years – rascally puppets, a surfeit of knight costumes, and even an oversized papier-mâché ham. On occasion, a big, bright eye of the Bay School dragon – who for 364 days a year quietly occupied her lair atop a tower of plastic totes, until her annual breakout on Michaelmas – might be seen peering over the storeroom curtain. It was fantastic! Later, needing more space, the store moved to Mainescape (Lisa’s pink door can still be seen on the yellow house).

Lisa excelled in bigger-than-a-breadbox projects. She could decipher instructions on how to reset the scary electrical panel on the stage, assemble just about anything, climb the super tall ladder, and make the Winter Faire’s Bay School table appear overnight. She commandeered rented trucks to make one-day swoops down to IKEA to supply classrooms with much needed bookcases, outfit the new faculty room (another miraculous conversion of a storeroom into a quiet, lovely space), and get all the small bowls, cups, and the like for soon-to-open North Cottage. She was a mainstay for a lot of “firsts” such as Grandparents Day. It poured that inaugural Friday, the picnic abandoned, and Lisa’s bowls of vichyssoise teetering on grandparents’ laps as they huddled soaked in classrooms. Happily, the event endures.

A master of time, Lisa lent a hand in almost everything and never appeared rushed or bothered. She painted a dozen theatrical sets, big sets, and helped backstage too. Noteworthy is that half the time she didn’t have a child in the production but rolled up her sleeves anyway. She read grants from beginning to end, and tested their financial assumptions; these resulted in new programs like Agricultural Arts and Practical Arts, and funding for the renovation of Emlen Hall’s outdoor entrance.

Festivals, concerts, plays, a lot of sports, and The Circle Game…and it was time to leave the parking lot; our children went to high school, and then college. Lisa and her family moved to Camden, but she always had a foot on the Blue Hill Peninsula, singing with the Bagaduce Chorale and continuing her great friendships, many formed at The Bay School.

A gifted photographer, her pictures appeared in school publications year after year. Later, with her children grown, she expanded her photography, contributing to websites and books as well as managing a photo library.

In the last year of her life, when time was her most precious commodity, she managed to add hours to the day. “If there’s a can, I’m going to kick it down the street.” She expanded her garden…worked feverishly on a new kitchen…made plans, lots of plans. She travelled. To Paris! To Hawaii! Her photographer’s eye never failed to miss a moment no matter how bittersweet. “If the light is shining just right I can see these baby eyelashes… sometimes it’s the littlest things.”

Recently, I made my first visit back to The Bay School in a number of years. Children’s voices were everywhere, a chorus, past, present, future. When touring the new 7/8 grade classroom, what should I see but an IKEA bookcase, one of the very same which barreled up 95 in the back of Lisa’s truck long ago. Each of us makes an imprint on the School, and it on us. Sometimes it’s the littlest things.

-Kathryn Dillon

Kathryn Dillon’s children attended the Bay School from 1995 to 2013. She served as Development Director for seven years.

2005

Katie Herklotz ’05

Katie is back in Maine after living in warm climates for nearly 15 years (Florida, Spain, Australia, and Southern California), and no one is more surprised than her that she actually LOVES the seasons, even winter! She now lives in Portland and works in insurance, and stays busy with reading, cooking, volunteering, networking, training for her first triathlon, and planning a wedding! One of her coping strategies during the early days of the pandemic was reconnecting with her ’05 Bay School classmates Summer Plouffe-Vogel, Georgia Zildjian, Acadia Jacob, and Kelly Cutler over Zoom every Tuesday, which has now morphed into a weekly Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Katie also gets together

regularly with her new neighbor, Lilian Thorpe ’05, to reminisce on their magical youth and watch horror movies. The Bay School has given Katie so many gifts, and she is thankful for the lasting impact of the education she received and the friendships she made.

2013

Garrison Looke ’13

For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been living and working in Boston. I graduated in 2021 from Davidson College in NC with a degree in Political Science and English. A COVID-shorted junior year abroad in Amsterdam fostered a travel bug, and I focus much of my free time scheming up my next adventures.

I’m fortunate to have adventurous siblings as well. Last July my sister and I visited Norway, France, and Iceland, and this spring my brother and I will be traveling to Ireland and Scotland. One of the things I particularly enjoy about these trips is seeing in person many of the places, pieces of art, and artifacts that I learned about during Main Lesson.

I remain immensely grateful for the Bay School community.

2014

Zeya Lorio ’14

The last time Zeya spent any real time in the gardens at The Bay School, or tramped through the woods identifying different plant species, she was a student following a program designed by then Agricultural Arts teacher Heather McCargo and after Heather, Jasmine Smith.

These days, Zeya is putting together her own program as she prepares for this fall when she begins her position as The Bay School’s newest Agricultural Arts Teacher for grades 1-8.

Zeya graduated from the College of Atlantic and has a Bachelor of Arts in Human Ecology with a focus on education, and is a certified Maine elementary school teacher. She has been serving as the longterm sub this spring while Ms. Woods is on maternity leave. Zeya has worked at King Hill Farm in Penobscot since 2015 and has assisted teacher Heather Dawn Jones this year in the Ag Arts program. Zeya and her partner are building a house in Brooksville. We welcome you back and we welcome you forward, Zeya!

“I chose to become a teacher in part because of my experience in The Bay School Agricultural Arts program, it feels full circle to be stepping into this role.”

-Zeya ’14

P.O. Box 950 Blue Hill, Maine 04614

On March 28th, we crushed our goal of 100 gifts to unlock the $5,000 contribution! And then there was the twist: halfway through the day, we received a call from a generous alumnx offering an additional $5,000 if we reached 200 donations. Thanks to the incredible generosity of our matching donors and the 254 supporters of The Bay School, we raised $32,254.43 in one day! Every gift counted – from a $3 student donation to our matching $5,000 donations. It was so good to hear from so many of you. It is clear that our school means something to a great deal of people. We thank you so much for your support and friendship, your videos, and for sharing on social media and urging others to give. Your generosity will have a real impact on our wonderful school.

If this is the first you are hearing about this exciting day, it might mean we don’t have your email contact! Please send us an email to advancement@bayschool.org so you can join in next year and get other information we send through email. Another way to stay connected is to follow us here: bayschoolmaine