From the Head of School

Dear Pingry Community,

The feature article for this edition of The Pingry Review focuses on the Lower School at our Short Hills Campus.

The minute you step foot on the Short Hills Campus, a friendly, welcoming community greets you. This starts at the front door and extends all the way through the hallways and classrooms to outside with the vast grounds that adorn the campus. As many of you will recall, the campus went through a significant modernization process in 2014 and most recently, we installed a state-of-theart turf field to enable year-round use for athletics and physical education. In each nook of the building, different grade levels occupy homes that spill in and out of the classroom to allow for multiple learning configurations in the hands of dedicated, talented teachers who do everything in their power to create a stimulating, engaging learning environment. At the start of the 2020-2021 school year, we inaugurated an Associate Teacher program to help further personalize and differentiate learning for our students, as 13 Associate Teachers partner with and support classroom teachers and Lower School students.

The strong sense of community that permeates Short Hills starts at the top, under the positive, unwavering, and enthusiastic leadership of Dr. Thu-Nga Morris, who assumed the leadership of the Short Hills Campus in the summer of 2020. She started in the midst of the pandemic and quickly built trusting relationships with students, faculty, staff, and families. In the feature story, you will hear anecdotes from different community members about the strong sense of teamwork, collaboration, and communication that enables the Short Hills community to function at such a high level. Most recently, upon the return from Winter Break, different faculty and staff members stood outside on a freezing cold day on January 4, 2022 to hand out school supplies and receive COVID-19 test kits from Lower School students and families, all in an effort to ensure a smooth start to 2022, amidst the Omicron variant surge. There is a wonderful, uplifting can-do mindset, and the feature story captures the indomitable spirit of community that exists at Short Hills.

I hope you will enjoy reading about our inspiring Lower School community in the pages ahead, and reach out and congratulate our faculty and staff on their heroic efforts to educate Pingry’s youngest students.

Sincerely,

Matt Levinson Head of School In each nook of the building, different grade levels occupy homes that ‘‘ spill in and out of the classroom to allow for multiple learning configurations in the hands of dedicated, talented teachers who do everything in their power to create a stimulating, engaging learning environment. ‘‘