FEATURE
John Liggett celebrates 11 years of community at CDS
MORE THAN A DECADE OF MAGICAL DEVELOPMENTS
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BY SUZANNE BOWNESS
he occasion may have happened over a decade ago, but Head of School John Liggett still recalls the night that he and executive director of advancement Brent Johnston dreamed up The Country Day School’s new tradition of hosting dinners with CDS families. “We were having dinner in the 1883 schoolhouse, and it was a night of conversation and dreaming,” recalls John. “We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could meet parents like this?’ And so that first year, we actually invited everyone for dinner, 25 families at a time. About 400 families came, and it was a really wonderful insight for me into this community: where it was headed, what parents wanted to see happen, and what they were already proud of.” The exercise also helped him to really fall in love with the school and his role, in which he recently passed the 11-year mark. “The school got right under my skin and became a part of me because I literally sat down to dinner with everybody.” It was through those meetings with the community that John heard again and again about the first major project of his tenure. “Nine times out of 10, the response was that we needed a lunch program,” he says. Especially urgent was the need for a proper dining hall, given that students were eating at tables assembled and taken down in multipurpose spaces every day. The school launched a campaign that raised just under $11 million toward a $20 million rejuvenated Senior School and Dining Hall. And just like that, lunch at CDS was transformed. “We built this wonderful building and added wonderful spaces. Now we unabashedly have the best lunch program,” says John. Of course, John left the specifics of the lunch program to the experts: dieticians to plan the meals and chefs to execute them. Major decisions included installing a real pizza oven but not a deep fryer and offering multiple options generally made from scratch, a challenge when feeding 1,000 people daily. John (continued on page 8)
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SUMMER 2022 THE LINK