Lessons Learned
Excerpts from Rich Schellhas’ presentation at the Philadelphia Alumni Regional Event in March 2022.
of our favorite traditions and to invent some new ones. We had our very first GA/PC pep rally outside at Carey Stadium in 2021.You didn’t get that reverberating “my ears hurt” moment in the Big Gym, but you did get decorated golf cart floats, a fantastic Lower School dance, crazy seniors, as they always are, and it was really a wonderful time. I have learned so many things over the last few years. The first is that the GA motto, “By persevering, we shall see the fruits,” is more true than ever. We had literally only three days of downtime when Covid hit, before, miraculously, our teachers turned our entire school into a virtual learning environment, GA@Home. Our faculty and administration worked equally hard to get everyone back into the classrooms, and last year, we had students on campus nearly every day. We were the only school I know of that didn’t have any teachers working from home on a semi-permanent basis. They were all in the building every single day taking care of the kids. It’s a lot to be proud of, honestly. Our intrepid faculty and staff showed exactly what GA was capable of when we put our minds to it. And we certainly did see the fruits, but we also had an opportunity to reinvent some 10 GERMANTOWN ACADEMY
Not surprisingly, the Class of 2020 took the hardest hit because their last quarter of senior year was spent mostly off campus. Their prom was canceled; their graduation postponed. And so we tried once again to reinvent things. We took Prize Day and the Senior Send Off Celebration and we turned them into an outdoor drive-in movie theater at Temple University in Ambler. I learned, of course, that nothing matters more than having happy, healthy, whole people in your school. I also learned that you can have a SWAT team of superhero nurses who turn your Field House into an extraordinary hub for public health. And you can do tens of thousands of vaccines and boosters and nose swabs just with the goodwill of one independent school community; we served relatives, former faculty and staff, and several hundred people from the region.