WHAT’S INSIDE...
CONTRIBUTORS
TIM BAKLAND ‘94
CHRIS BRANDT
KB BREISETH
ISABELLE COOKSON ‘15
MARY COOKSON
ELIZABETH GUTTERMAN
GALLAUDET HOWARD
SAVERY KELLEY ‘02
MIKE KERSKER
A very special THANK YOU to the talented Isabelle Cookson ‘15 who designed and created this inaugural issue. Waring is so fortunate to have her capable help.
VICKI LINCOLN
JAN LINDSAY
LESLIE LYMAN
JESS ROSE ‘02
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ‘92
CASEY STEVENS
JILL SULLIVAN
I - HWEI WARNER ‘05
NOTECARD from Tim
TIM BAKLAND (‘94, P’31) HEAD OF SCHOOL
Students and alumni alike are familiar with the art of travaux pratiques (“TPs”). Just ask any Junior Tripper to France about their journal-sketchbookscrapbooks that accompany each traveler through museums and winding roads of Provence before returning to Beverly with pages well-worn, weaving stories of experience. Produced in ateliers or in the field, travaux pratiques in the French tradition are applications of knowledge—bringing theory to life through hands-on engagement with the world.
Notecards from Waring is a continuation and expansion of this tradition: a wider travail pratique that extends into the ever-growing Waring world. Think of it as a community-wide journalsketchbook-scrapbook, weaving together the voices, writings, artwork, and stories of experience— especially from our 833 alumni whose lives continue to inform the spirit of Waring and our 170 current students and their families. Our hope for this magazine is to recapture and engage our alumni; we hope that you will reach out with news and stories; we want your continuing contributions of all kinds!
And so we evolve, as we always have. Like the Warings, who were early adopters of the first Macintosh desktop publishing computers in the 1980s (proudly installed alongside the print shop presses), we continue to expand the toolkits for our travaux pratiques—adding color to our palettes
and voices to our collective story. In this vein, it is inspiring to see how this inaugural magazine has come together through the collaborative efforts of Waring alumni, alumni parents and current faculty members. In particular, I would like to recognize the outstanding work of Isabelle Cookson (‘15) who is responsible for the design and layout of this first Summer Edition of 2025. Grand Merci, Isabelle!
I’ve been fortunate to be part of the Waring community for nearly 40 years—first as a reluctant applicant, then as a student, alumnus, teacher, Head of School, and now as a parent to a rising 7th grader whose French accent already surpasses my own. Our relationships at Waring weave and intersect through a shared journey in the liberal arts, and I remain ever buoyed by the learning and teaching all around us.
You will hear a strong resonance of voices in Notecards from Waring—each an unapologetic testimonial to the enduring power of the liberal arts. One such voice, Jessica Rose (‘02), reminds us that a liberal arts education is not contrary to vocational pursuits, but rather the lifeblood for how we adapt, learn, and grow within them. Hear, hear
It is with joy and gratitude that I share this inaugural issue with you—a new kind of travail pratique and a continuation of our collective learning and experience as a wider Waring community.
Sincerely,
TIM BAKLAND (‘94, P’31) HEAD OF SCHOOL
Deargroup6...
A CASE FOR LIBERAL ARTS
BY JESS ROSE ‘02
The liberal arts provide a foundation from which we can experience the breadth and depth of our world, and compose meaningful, flourishing lives. In my experience as a learner and a teacher, the purpose of a liberal arts education is to help us understand our history, our own dynamic selves, and how we might build a better future. At their very best, the liberal arts can bring us closer to our humanity.
Historically and colloquially the liberal arts are described in distinction to vocational training and, sometimes - though not at Waring, the hard sciences. They are an umbrella that covers disciplines that include History, English, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Languages, to name just a few. This way of viewing the liberal arts sees them as being defined by content areas. In this vein, the “content” of more career-oriented studies is viewed as more valuable than the content of liberal arts.
This orientation puts pressure on students to specialize in career-focused (and potentially higher paying) fields: medicine, law, business, engineering, etc. With a heavy emphasis on coursework’s direct connection to future employment, certain disciplines are valued over those deemed frivolous. The trope is well known: parents worrying what their child is going to do with a $75,000/year degree in philosophy. In a nation that increasingly questions the value of an undergraduate degree in general, and in a country becoming further stratified economically, there is absolutely cause for families and young people to discern the cost-benefit of certain careers, and thus majors and coursework.
To argue that any young person should be able to study any field of their choosing earningsconsequences-be-damned is naive and privileged. However, to myopically think of education in high school and college as purely workforce development would be to ultimately diminish our society and ourselves.
Like other defenders of the liberal arts, I believe that studying Nikki Giovanni’s poetry is as important as studying human anatomy (both teach us how the heart works), and that learning about the history of indigenous boarding schools in the U.S., taking a photography class, learning sign language, or reading the works of American transcendentalists, are just as valuable as—and interconnected with—economics, engineering, or organic chemistry.
Though, I am less interested in equalizing the value of all disciplines as a way to make a case for the value of the liberal arts. Instead, I’m inclined to think along the lines of Mark Taylor’s 2009 Op Ed End the University as We Know It. Taylor describes higher education (and I would argue increasingly high schools) as propagating a siloed approach to learning that results in overly narrow, highly specialized, and disconnected thinking. He proposes doing away with content areas and instead focusing studies on complex and vexing problems that
require interdisciplinary, cross-curricular approaches and that cannot be solved by using scientific, political, economic, philosophical, historical, or artistic methodologies in isolation from one another.
While Taylor’s proposal is radical, I think there is something deeply moving in the act of crossdisciplinary study, and intentionally moving between lenses and practices to deepen our understanding of any question we pursue or problem we aim to solve. Rather than defending each liberal arts content area as singularly worthy, I think the stronger case for the liberal arts is to highlight how they push students to pursue an education that is broad and inter-connected. Rather than silos, this approach believes deep understanding derives from identifying connections and moving between disciplines, across the interconnected web of learning, with intentionality. This folds the sciences, technical, and careerfocused learning into a more expansive liberal arts education.
Approaching learning in this way allows us to “play the whole game” as David Perkins describes in his book Making Learning Whole. Perkins draws the metaphor that in baseball, players attend practices where they focus on honing some discrete skills (hitting, fielding, catching, throwing), but the entire point of those practices is to prepare them for the application of all those small things in an actual game, of which they have many. They constantly disassemble a complex task like baseball into parts, and then build it all back together into a whole. Perkins argues that learning in school should be the same.
By merging Perkins’ and Taylor’s points, one sees that only studying a single thing (like
French medieval troubadours, brain surgery, or constitutional law) and studying it in a siloed way is like working on bunting ad nauseum, or never connecting it to other swings or running bases. If everyone were to specialize so narrowly, baseball— and frankly everything—would be significantly worse than it already is. In a time when serious, concerning trends abound in technology, economy, oppression, and the health of our planet and people, we need to continue working to become better humans. A meaningful liberal arts education—one that includes a broad web of rigorous, purposeful, and connected learning—is our best shot at becoming people who can understand ourselves and others and shape the world we need.
When done well, engaging in a liberal arts education forms us into people who see a world of infinite meaning-making potential and who explore with curiosity and empathy.
While the liberal arts as I’ve described it is a gloriously wide tent, the goal is not to know it all. It is not possible to study everything, to do or be everything; but it is possible to learn how to adopt different perspectives, to move across disciplines, and to bring learning from one area to bear on another. The liberal arts allow us to not merely know things but to experience moments of awe in our humanity, to be lost for a moment in imagination and romantic hope in ways that lead to self-transformation and, potentially, worldtransformation. As we construct and pursue our lives, it seems to me that the liberal arts must be a bedrock for us, so that we can dream audaciously. The world—especially now—needs us to do so.
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT HUMANITIES
BY GALLAUDET HOWARD
1.
2.
You better believe April is the cruelest month. It’s rainy and forty degrees and the Barn is damp and something has died in the walls…but the section has been together for seven months and it’s found a life of its own and is humming with it. Between the winter doldrums and the pre-graduation nostalgia lies the sweet spot, where the class blooms into competence and its own never-to-be-repeated community. It’s like the last weeks with the original cast of a great Broadway show.
Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” Ursula LeGuin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” bell hooks, “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Sappho, “Fragment 31.” Margaret Atwood, “The Female Body.” Tony Morrison, Beloved. Ernestine Hayes, “What Shall We Do With Our Histories?” Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits. Ursula again, The Left Hand of Darkness. Insert your best beloveds here.
3. 4.
Some texts–The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Angels in America, Beowulf, name yours –are caverns you can enter again and again, across days and spans of years, and each time the flickering torch of who you are at this moment will illuminate new art on the walls and your feet will find new footprints on the floor.
So much of the work happens alone, in the quiet hours of the night, when the students write and the teachers read.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
So much of the work happens on the page and in the margins. The conversation between teacher and student builds a kind of sacred space, and no two spaces are the same.
If you teach history and you can neither remember dates nor comprehend geography, your best friend is one of those interactive maps that deploy festive graphics and clever timelines to trace, say, the evolution of the Roman Empire.
Your worst enemy is the tech that will prevent you from using your carefully prepared interactive map once you’ve assembled your section in the Library.
Your colleagues know all the things you don’t and then some, and do they use this knowledge to feel superior, to one-up you, to brag? The hell they do. They take their skills, their quotes, their craft, their chops, and their deeply oddball jokes and weave a magic carpet, then invite you for a ride.
Sometimes the discussions are labored. Sometimes they’re beset by the usual demons: too little prep, too little sleep, too many distractions, too much holding forth and not enough listening. You understand I’m talking about the teacher.
Sometimes the discussions take wing and fly and every voice chimes in and nobody alone could make something as crunchy and specific, as groovy and idiosyncratic and true, as what you all make together. You understand I’m talking about the students.
People write solemn editorials: Why Teach English; In Defense of Literature; The Death of Humanities. Have no truck with these things. Humanities needs no more defense than gravity does.
But since you ask: to learn to recognize bullshit. To midwife empathy. To find your voice and speak.
And to find the place where the words end, “Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly, By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
FÉLICITATIONS TO OUR 23 NEWEST ALUMNI AND WARING’S 46TH GRADUATING CLASS!
BONNE COURAGE ON YOUR NEXT ADVENTURES AND PLEASE COME BACK TO VISIT ANYTIME!
MOLLY BERNARD : Emerson College (Creative Writing/Communications)
JUNE BOGOCH: Barnard College (Architecture)
PAOLO CALDERARO: WPI (Mechanical Engineering)
HENRY CARLSON - LIER: Salve Regina University* (Undecided)
CHARLIE CARNER: Middlebury College (Physics)
MAX CRAFTON: Bennington College (Art, Design)
SABELA DE HARO BORRAS: Undecided
NATALIA ELLIS: University of North Carolina School of the Arts (Dance)
HANNAH LANDE: University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) (Architecture/Interior Design)
GABRIEL LIU: Fordham University (Business Management)
LUCIA LOGUE - PERRON: Ithaca College* (Communications)
OLIVE LYONS - MCLIN: Oberlin College (English)
CAITLYN MILLER: Wesleyan University (Physics, Art)
ELLIE MILLER: UMass Amherst (Eisenberg) (Business Management/Entrepreneurship)
AMELIA POUND: Thomas Aquinas College* (CA) (Philosophy/Religious Studies)
LOLA PRENDERGAST: St Andrews University (Anthropology)
JOHNNY SHERIDAN: University of Vermont* (Undecided)
LYDA SIMPSON: McGill University (International Relations)
EVAN SMITH: Union College (Engineering/Physics/History)
JOCELYN SPICKARD: Bennington College (Creative Writing, Philosophy)
COLIN VELLANTE: University of the Holy Cross (Business/Sports Management)
SEBBY WELLS: Wesleyan University (Undecided)
* Plans to take a gap year
INTRODUCING GROUP 6
PURPOSE
Group 6 came together in early 2025 to explore new ways to bring Waring alumni closer to the school and to one another. The group shared ideas with the Development and Alumni Task Force on how to build a stronger, more connected alumni network and offered input on a range of efforts from launching a new alumni database (coming soon!), to creating mentorship opportunities, and imagining what a signature annual alumni event could look like. Group 6 is still in its early days and it will continue to grow and evolve.
MEMBERS
Darwin Zook (‘98), I-Hwei Warner (‘05), Nick Geron (‘08), Caitlin Towers (‘12), Hunton Russell (‘18)
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25TH, 2025
*the beginning of annual alumni autumn gatherings*
AARON GREINER ALUMNI PROFILES
What if you could redesign the urban landscape from a user’s perspective? What if you could ask residents what they want and build that for them? What if you could re-engineer how people think and use concrete sidewalks? What if you could close streets once a week to cars?
Aaron Greiner ‘14 asks us all to dream bigger about what urban landscapes can be and who they can serve. His work aims to address many of the current issues of public spaces - loneliness, isolation, community engagement, human scale, public trust, health, and social infrastructure. Through the nonprofit CultureHouse, of which he is the founding Executive Director, he and his team engage in recreating urban spaces and places where people can build and form community.
What does that mean?
CultureHouse takes underutilized city locations and transforms them. Using pop-up venues to test ideas, they work with community members to discover and design new places for public use - think free-to-enter public living rooms, pedestrian plazas, pop-up parks, free saunas, etc…”
How does the process work?
Well, it often begins with research. For example, CultureHouse will negotiate a ninth month tenancy in a vacant storefront and then run test gathering spaces and activities that ask the local community to engage and give feedback on what they see that the neighborhood needs. Aaron relays that people are craving spaces where there is a low barrier to entry. CultureHouse’s work wants engagement that ensures that the community is integral to the reimagining of
their own spaces. After the pop-up has concluded the work continues.
How do these projects get built?
Each project is unique but most involve both public and private funding. CultureHouse puts the pieces together to get the project built.
Where did your interest in this arise?
Much of the initiative Aaron uses he can trace back to Waring and the ‘self-direction in his learning’ that he experienced while here. During high school he was interested in three distinct areas - design, math/ science, and social justice. Once he got to Olin College he saw how these elements could come together. A transitional experience happened when Aaron and a friend identified a need at Olin. There was no student coffee shop. Not only did they start a free shop but they built it in a central location and insisted on no to-go cups which created community as people stayed to drink their coffee. This shop, Acronym, is still operational and run by Olin students today. Its creation showed Aaron what was possible.
Aaron lives and works in Somerville, MA -
CultureHouse finds spaces and needs in a number of local cities. Stay tuned for their brand new site in Harvard Square where they have transformed the Out of Town news location into the Cambridge KiOSK
LEAH HAYES
Leah Hayes ‘99 describes herself as an illustrator at heart, but through our conversations it came to light how expansive her talents are. She moved back to her hometown, Newburyport, in 2018 and lives there with her husband Peter Brant, son Beau (6) and daughter Anna (4) close to her parents and twin sister Vanessa (Hayes) Rossi (‘99) and her family. Vanessa’s son Theo will be starting in CORE’s 7th grade this fall!
After graduating from Waring, Leah attended Parsons School of Design where she majored in Editorial Illustration. Her first job was editorial work for the New York Times prior to graduation. She lived in NYC for 16 years and taught in Parsons Illustration department for many of them while she continued illustration work for the Times and major publications like the New Yorker as well as songwriting. She describes Waring as encouraging her to follow her passion for playing music and
attributes her time in the Madrigals as profound for developing confidence. She often took advantage of the abundance of pianos around campus at quieter times throughout her day.
Her love for music then led her to Los Angeles for seven years where she continued songwriting, put out several albums of her own music and began Music Production. In LA she worked with hip-hop and pop artists like Lil Wayne and Katy Perry, writing songs for them as well as singing on Lil Wayne’s album. Leah found the lifestyle there not sustainable.
While living in LA she published her fourth graphic novel, Not Funny HA-HA , which follows the story of two women through the abortion process and was voted one of Forbes Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2015. Her graphic novel work continues in MA: she published her first children’s book in 2023,
I Touched the Sun, with Enchanted Lion Books and is currently working on a new children’s book as well as a YA novel which is in the proposal phase looking for a publisher. She is currently in the editing process and will be for the next few months for a long epic graphic novel about twins, Identical, which has a publishing date of February, 2026. This is her first time depicting her experience as a twin. When we spoke in early June, she was also getting ready to attend the Emmy Awards this month as My Body to Love, a documentary film series she animated with San-Francisco based director, Preeti Deb, is nominated for several awards!
Leah says she is grateful she gets to draw everyday for a living. She continues teaching too and is Adjunct at Lesley University in Cambridge. For a number of years she was full-time faculty there, but with all of her individual projects she has shifted to one course a semester and is on campus one
CONGRATULATIONS TO LEAH ON WINNING AN EMMY THIS PAST JUNE FOR HER FILM MY BODY TO LOVE!
full day a week. She teaches a course she designed: “Artist As Author” on how to write graphic novels and children’s books and get them published. She has been teaching for twenty years and still to this day uses former Waring Art Department Chair Rob Logan’s technique for drawing the figure and environments, which shows universal tools for drawing the face and figure that are understandable and broken down in a way that is not daunting. She witnesses the same aha moment for a lot of her students that she felt while learning this technique in the Atelier at Waring. Leah was passionate about art from a young age, but Waring made a real difference in how she felt about herself as an artist. She says the support she was provided at Waring lifted her up and her later education does not compare, “Waring ruins you…in a good way.”
KIMBALL STEWART
I caught up with Kimball Stewart, ‘11 for a FaceTime visit in the cozy Flagstaff AZ home he shares with his partner Sam Woodside.
Kimmy is a nurse in the Emergency Department at Flagstaff Medical Center.
How did an Appalachian Mountain Club hut crew member and Yosemite backpacking guide end up in nursing? He’d actually planned a career in the outdoors, but he couldn’t manage to merge seasonal outdoor work with viable financial stability.
Kimmy loves helping people, and he loved his EMT work with AMC. Which drew him to nursing and the flexibility a shift work schedule affords. He currently puts in three 12 hour shifts a week, giving him four days off to feed his other passion, mountain biking.
He loves his job.
“”It’s a privilege to work with people at their most vulnerable. To be a small positive force in a system where people often get lost in the shuffle, to soften their pain, to know they feel seen, is extremely rewarding. I feel like I’m part therapist.
The work is intense, fast paced and stimulating. “You see everything in the ED. I learn something new every day.” And it’s exciting. “It’s the hospital’s ground zero.”
Kimmy credits Waring with his confidence and approach in the ED. Waring supported and cultivated students’ unique qualities. Rather than asking them to fit in, students were encouraged to believe in their gifts and put themselves out there. “It affected how I live my life. And I developed a strong sense of self. In the ED, I don’t have to be who I’m not: I can be myself.”
When asked if his compassionate approach inspires colleagues who chose nursing strictly for the schedule, he smiles and says: “Show, don’t tell.”
And mountain biking? ‘It’s my passion. Your Mountain Biking elective with Dan Streeter P ‘06 got me started riding.”
Now he does long Bikepacking camping trips. Kimmy and Sam are planning a 2800 mile, 35 day gravel trail ride; “The Tour Divide”, following the Continental Divide, from Banff to the Mexican border next August. “We’ll use about 4,000-5,000 calories a day. We’ll eat a lot of junk food, be uncomfortable and operate at a calorie deficit. Suffering’s great because it makes me appreciate my vast creature comforts. We’re going to love it.”
THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Denise Clinton Mary Cookson
Denise has a BA in English and Communications from Boston College. She is currently a Managing Editor at Aspen Publishing and has spent her career in the publishing arena. Her three sons, Aidan Wood ‘16, Jared Wood ‘18 and Ethan Wood ‘22 all attended Waring. During those years Denise could always be found at her boys’ soccer and lacrosse games as well as their soirées and plays. She loves to travel, read, bike, hike, likes a well staged theatre production and cheesy Broadway tunes. She is a voracious consumer of local, national and global news, particularly concerning issues related to environmental justice and equitable social progress.
Mary has a B.A. in Communications and an M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology. She spent her professional career in higher education administration positions at B.U., Northeastern and Babson Graduate School of Business. Her two daughters, Isabelle Cookson ‘15 and Hattie Cookson ‘17 both graduated from Waring. During their school years Mary was an uber volunteer, including several Class Parent stints and 2 1/2 years as Parent Group Chair. She loves any sport that involves a racquet, chipping away at her garden and traveling just about anywhere!
Mary has been on the board for 8 years and chaired the Advisory Committee for two years and the Trustee Committee for 5 years.
Liz Gibbons
Liz Gibbons joined the Waring Board of Trustees in 2023. She is an instructor at the F x B Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, where she participates in F x B initiatives which leverage her expertise in advancing the human rights of children and adolescents. Previously, she led F x B’s development of the cross-disciplinary child protection curriculum for Harvard graduate students, and an Executive Education course for child protection professionals.
Prior to her academic appointment at Harvard F x B, Liz enjoyed a lengthy career with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), during which she lived and worked in Togo, Kenya and Zimbabwe, and served as head of UNICEF’s offices in Haiti and in Guatemala, in addition to several NY headquarters postings. A graduate of Smith College and Columbia University, Liz’s association with Waring School includes the 20 years her mother served on the judge’s panel for the annual Concours de Poésie, and her son David’s enrollment from 2010 to 2013.
Jonathan Grabowski
Jonathan has B.S. degrees in Biology and Economics as well as a Ph.D. in Ecology. He is a professor at Northeastern University where he studies fisheries and coastal habitat restoration. His daughter, Gigi Grabowski, attended Waring 2019-2023, and he currently hosts a Waring international student set to graduate in 2026. He has previously served as a Class Parent rep and was the Parent Group Chair from 2022-2024. He enjoys gardening, biking, and cross-country skiing.
Joe Jutras
Joe has been on the board since 2015 and Chair since July 2023. He is a parent of two Waring graduates, Jacqui Jutras ’17 and Maddie Jutras ’20. Joe’s business background is in accounting and real estate. Joe enjoys spending time with family, golfing, mountain biking, skiing and listening to podcasts and books. Joe has been on the Board of Creative Education and Riverwoods at Exeter.
Cindy Keegan
Cindy is Vice Chair of the Waring Board of Trustees and an alumni parent of Collin ‘23. She’s the Director of Environmental, Health and Safety and Facilities at Analogic. Her interests include sustainability, renewable energy, STEM energy, robotics, and native food forest gardening.
Jan Lindsay
Jan has a BA in Experiential Education from Evergreen State College and is a nurse. The favorite part of her entire career was at Waring, first as Athletic Director in 2001 and then establishing the School Nurse position in 2008. Her two children, Jack Lindsay ‘05 and Barrie Lindsay ‘07 graduated from Waring. Jan is a big fan of mountain biking and dogs.
Peter Pound
Peter, a father of four - two of whom are Waring graduates Charlie Pound ’24 and Amelia Pound ’25 - resides in Beverly, MA with his wife Kerry. Peter is a partner in the securities enforcement and litigation practice area at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. Peter represents brokerdealers, financial services firms, and individuals in investigations and enforcement proceedings brought by the SEC, FINRA, and state regulators, and in arbitrations and civil litigations relating to securities issues. Peter attended McGill University (BA, 1997), and has a law degree from the University of Oxford (Wadham College, 1999) and common law (LL.B) and civil law (B.C.L) degrees from McGill Law (2001). Peter, a wine enthusiast who enjoys playing squash, serves on the Advancement Committee of the Building Minds Scholarship Fund for the Catholic Schools Foundation, volunteers as a track and field coach, and is the coordinator and lead instructor for Beverly Youth Hockey’s Learn-toSkate program.
Juanita Prescod
Juanita Prescod holds a B.S. in Biology with a minor in Chemistry and an M.S. in Clinical Investigation. With over 20 years of experience in healthcare, she currently serves as an Infection Preventionist and sits on the Board of Directors for New England Association of Healthcare Quality.
Juanita has been a dedicated member of Waring School’s Board of Trustees for eight years, including past leadership roles as Chair of both the Advisory Committee and the Diversity Committee.
She is the proud mother of two sons—Keanu Prescod ‘22 and Teagan Prescod ‘27. Outside of her professional and volunteer work, Juanita enjoys sports, traveling, word and board games, and cherishes time spent with her family.
Jess Rose
Jess Rose ‘02 has worked in public education for nearly 20 years at the school, district, and state level. Previously she was a middle and high school teacher and an Assistant Superintendent. Now, she works for the Barr Foundation, leading a portfolio of grantmaking and supports to public high schools across New England who seek to transform themselves to be more excellent and equitable. She earned a B.A. in Education Studies from Brown University, and an M.Ed. in Arts and Education and a Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Jess loves spending time with her husband and young daughter, hosting friends for dinner, vegetable gardening, and is happiest when curled up on the couch under a blanket reading a book.
I-Hwei Warner ‘05 is a veteran, business leader, and Ipswich resident. As a former Army officer, he led soldiers in training exercises in the U.S. and during a deployment to the Middle East. After his service, he worked in financial services and went on to lead operations teams at an aerospace startup and a publicly traded cybersecurity company. A 2005 Waring graduate, I-Hwei is also the older brother of Sarah Warner ‘07. He holds a B.A. from Bates College and an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management.
I-Hwei Warner Ann Weeks
Ann Weeks, P ’14, is the mother of two former Waring students, Eleanor Lustig ‘14, and James Lustig, who left Waring after Core and Group 1 in 2014 , graduating from Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School in 2018. Ann holds engineering, public policy, and law degrees, and is currently of Counsel to the Clean Air Task Force, a non-profit climate and clean air organization. Ann serves on several boards and committees in her home community of Wenham, MA, and also enjoys anything outdoors, including hiking, sculling and other activities on the water, and simply being in nature.
John Wigglesworth
John is a lifelong mariner and teacher. He taught math and science at Waring School for many years and now serves on the Waring Board of Trustees as treasurer and a member of the financial sustainability committee. He is the parent of Waring Alums, Rosie Wigglesworth ‘14 and Nick Wigglesworth ‘16. John lives in Ipswich and continues to pursue an active life-style.
WARING HAPPENINGS
WARING DEBATE
BY CASEY STEVENS
With the retirement of longtime and beloved coach Timothy Averill, Waring Debate entered a new chapter this past season. Casey Stevens, Waring’s new debate coach, stepped into the role with enthusiasm and began rebuilding the team with a fresh cohort of students. Over ten students participated in tournaments this year, forming a promising and engaged roster eager to sharpen their critical thinking and public speaking skills.
Looking ahead, debate captain Micah ByronSmarra ‘26 and Casey are working to shape next season’s schedule and curriculum. A key focus will be on developing Lincoln-Douglas Debate, offering both returning and new team members a chance to deepen their argumentative techniques and philosophical reasoning.
The Winter season promises excitement, with tournaments at Yale, Harvard, and Emory already on the horizon. Waring Debate is back— and ready to make its mark. Let’s go, Waring!
WARING ROBOTICS
BY FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ‘92
As the school inaugurates its new Alumni magazine, it is exciting to get to tell my fellow Waring Alumni about how Waring’s robotics teams have done this year. This year Waring has 4 robotics teams, two FIRST LEGO League (FLL) teams, for our middle schoolers, and two FIRST Tech Challenge teams for our high schoolers. We had 37 students on our competitive robotics teams, that’s about 23% of the school. Also, all of Waring’s 6th and 7th graders take a robotics class each year.
Both of our FLL teams performed well, and one team in particular—the TechnoWolves, made up of six 6th and 7th graders—received some special recognition. At the qualifier, they were among a select few teams invited to present their innovation project to the entire audience. They also won the third place Core Values Award and earned a spot at the FLL State Championship, where they once again received the third place Core Values Award. We were incredibly proud of their outstanding performance!
Waring also had a very successful FTC season. Both of Waring’s FTC teams qualified for the state Championship. At the state championship our JV team, consisting almost entirely of 9th graders new to robotics, came in 11th place. Our varsity team, Wolfpack Machina placed in the top teams and, in so doing, won a coveted slot to the FTC world Championship. At the world championship, they placed 79th out of the 256 teams present, and secured a season record that puts them in the top 150 teams in the world, out of all 8,800 FTC teams. Wolfpack also won the Control Award, the top software prize at the World Championship. If you want to see one of their matches at worlds, watch this linked video (Wolfpack’s robot starts in the top left of the field). Little old Waring punches way above its weight in world robotics.
WARING ART
BY KB BREISETH
The Art Department continued to ask students to work primarily in black and white – and hone skills for and comfort with traditional observational drawing – through Group 2, with color exploding onto the creative scene in Group 3. Groups 4+5 had to choose their course, and this year classes included Darkroom Photography, Playing with Paint (an experimental painting class), Architecture, and Portraction (a mash-up of portraiture and abstraction). Monday afternoons saw lots of creative action, with an Open Studio, Ceramics, and the AP Studio Art classes all convening under the electives umbrella.
The Art Department sent student work to the Crane Estate Student Art Show & Sale as well as to an online gallery sponsored by the Massachusetts
Art Education Association. Special Day allowed the time and space for 15 student artists to create portraits for children in Honduras through the Memory Project, and May saw 7 students submit AP portfolios to the College Board for scoring. Students used sketchbooks during their travels to Montréal (Core), Alabama (Group 1), and France (Group 2, Orléans and Group 4, Paris, Bordeaux, & Provence), and Look meetings held during All School Meeting continued the conversations about visual culture that started in the studios.
And finally, there will be a major shift in the Art Department as Stéphanie Williams moves on after 23 years at Waring. She will be missed, and I am sure that many of you have formative memories of time in the Waring studios and classrooms with her.
BY JILL SULLIVAN
Waring Writing
Writing at Waring continues to thrive as we just tip past the half-century mark. Over the past few years, we have begun to meld our tried and true Waring writing class traditions with new pedagogies that offer our students a well-rounded and dynamic approach to writing. Yes, writers of all ages still go out into the woods to write from their senses; they still interview classmates and teachers to write profiles; and they still sit around seminar tables and workshop work together. To this heady mix, we have added some more explicit skills and rhetorical awareness instruction as well as lots of 21st century genres to experiment with and explore. The year is rife with poems, short stories, retold fairy tales, podcasts, stage and screen plays, elevator pitches, reviews, rhetorical analyses, personal essays, and, of course, senior pieces. Stop by any Waring writing class - from Core and Group 1 with their Junior Teachers (4-5 Students) to the upper level classes on Poetry, Playwriting, Fiction, and Rhetoric/Commentary, and you will encounter joyous students experiencing the thrill of learning how to best express themselves in writing. It is no wonder that recent graduates routinely seek their “old” writing teachers out to tell them how well we prepared them for writing in college and beyond. Two other fabulous Waring Writing Department traditions have been thoroughly revitalized in recent years, as we invited 45 writers from area schools to Campus for the 34th Annual North Shore Young Writers Conference, and as we have seen a very, very enthusiastic group of students reinvigorate our beloved Le Temps Retrouvé.
The Writing Department continues to make it our mission to get our students’ writing out into the world. They write letters to the editor, recite their work in All School Meetings, and send pieces off to online magazines. Waring Writing students continue to be recognized for their work. In the fall, The Scholastic Writing Awards recognized High School Students Noah Calderaro (Sliver Key), Jack Fawcett (Honorable Mention), Sorelle Indrisano (Honorable Mention), Abigail Peabody (Honorable Mention), Katherine Steinmetz (Gold Key) and You Zhang (Silver Key, Honorable Mention). In addition, Group 3 student, Ella Wanstall won the HamiltonWenham Library “Start a Story” Contest. In the spring, Waring once again fared well at the Beverly Teen Poetry competition. In the Middle School Division, 6th grader Ella Barker won third place and Violet Acheson, Johan Carlson-Lier, and Miya Tsuji were recognized with Honorable Mentions. In the High School Division, Ruo- xian Chan won first place and Lola Prendergast won second place. Addison Park, Juliette Hale, Sorelle Indrisano, Isabella Scherbath, Yishine Shi, and Katherine Steinmetz received Honorable Mentions. All these accolades are wonderful, but the love of writing our students exhibit day in and day out and their wild and abandoned application of their creativity to the endeavor - those are the best rewards for our Writing faculty.
WARING THEATRE
BY ELIZABETH GUTTERMAN
Waring has had a very busy and exciting 2024-2025 Theatre season! We began with Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, a collection of multiple short plays all linked by the themes of technology and human connection. For this show, our students transformed our stage into an evidence locker and created a filebox with props that actors unpacked for each play.
For our annual musical, we produced the beloved, iconic, fan-favorite Footloose. Students threw themselves not only into Molly Bernard’s ‘25 fantastic choreography, but also, into the timeless themes of coming of age and finding your place in the world, and of course the 80’s. Just on the heels of Footloose, our Core students impressed us with their production of The Pack, by Stef Smith. Under the direction of Theatre Faculty member Lyn Towne-Smith, they explored many complex themes including loneliness and learning to forge connections.
We concluded our season with two final productions. Lyn Towne-Smith directed Alison Carr’s Tuesday about a group of British students who are
pulled into unexpected and frightening scenarios, and how they band together to navigate them and come out stronger on the other side. Our Honors play, Adam Szymkowicz’s Kodachrome, a modern take on Our Town, was an emotionally complex play that allowed our students to explore the mundanity and profundity in daily life.
Our design programs, including sound, lights, props, costumes and set are flourishing under the direction of our Technical Director, Tiffany Soucy. And Playwriting is taught in our Writing curriculum in multiple grades, so our students are fully exploring all aspects of theatrical experience at Waring.
There are multiple ways for our alumni to participate. Needless-to-say, we would love to see you at productions - no reservations, necessary. Additionally, you could arrange to stop by a rehearsal, to say hello, and tell our students what you are up to. Whether your endeavors are theatrically related or not, our students are always excited to hear about professional possibilities.
WARING MUSIC
BY CHRIS BRANDT
Musical performances at Waring run from Convocation to Graduation. There are always concerts in the works and the past academic year felt unusually busy and rich in talent and variety. It was a year of discoveries: A new Core 6 student, Lyla Bagley, playing the trumpet at Convocation and giving an exceptionally assured performance of Adele’s Someone Like You at our Music for Food Soirée and Evan Smith bursting on the scene as a vocalist in his Senior Year from Camping Trip onwards. He later turned in a sensational performance as Chuck Cranston in our production of Footloose. It was a year of campus bands: Permission to Mosh and Probably Not Flammable performed in nearly every soirée and Cabaret, and a new Core Band is emerging as well. It was a great year for Cabaret: Our performers reached new heights this year and the spirit of Cabaret was truly upon our community during the month of April. A cabaret is truly a cabaret when a poetry-spouting unicyclist performs. A new student-run a cappella group formed in the first semester of the year and has already performed to wide acclaim.
Three Waring students attended Districts and AllState this past season. Edie Bakland performed with the All-State Treble Choir in Worcester, Juliannah Hernandez sang in the Junior District Choir in Wakefield, and You Zhang again played in the Senior District and All-State orchestras. The level was high and it was a great experience to hear the rehearsals and performances.
The Winter and Spring concerts were festive and celebratory. Our students especially enjoy performing at The Cabot in the spring. We heard from all of our ensembles: from the choruses and Madrigals to our jazz ensembles and the Waring Orchestra.
It was a great year for music at Waring and congratulations to all performers in our soirées, the two end-of-semester concerts, Footloose, the coffeehouses, Cabaret, as well as Convocation, Baccalaureate, and Graduation. Bravi tutti!
WARING ATHLETICS
BY MIKE KERSKER
Waring’s athletics continue to thrive in ways that other schools might only dream about. For a school of one hundred sixty-ish students, we enhance the student body experience by offering all students an opportunity to play a role and compete in interscholastic athletics.
Graduating seniors at any high school have an impact on their teams each year, but the senior mentoring and leadership modeling that happens here at Waring leaves a legacy, a type of gift if you will, for our rising Student athletes. This model of leadership shows its face in a myriad of ways. Last year our boys lacrosse team lost a Boston Globe All-Scholastic goalkeeper to graduation. This spring, with one competitive game under his belt, we watched a sophomore step into that role, taking a risk and tackling the adversity his team was facing with such a big hole to fill.
Four out of the five captains of our girls lacrosse team had never played lacrosse before coming to Waring. Their sharing of advice before games and after practice was essential to our team’s culture this season. While they have all played different roles
on our team throughout their time in our program, their belief in who they have become as athletes has been paramount in their ability to share these stories.
A faculty member shared the following excerpt at graduation about our cross country team captain,
So wise, with an unbreakable spirit; learning to overcome challenges by meeting them head on. You fill others’ cups with joy, because you care. Your non- judgmental and emotionally intelligent ways of speaking truth and honesty have changed lives here on our campus. You remind us that leading is not always about being in front, but about taking care of the team in front of you.
Being outcome aware and process focused has always been a theme for Waring teams. Watching our varsity ultimate frisbee team go from not having a full varsity squad last year to competing each time they took the field is a great example of the importance of process being the focus for our student athletes.
Thank you to all of our alums who helped create and sustain this culture, where moral character attributes like integrity, cultured communication, empathy, belief in oneself were and still are a large part of the fabric that binds our teams together.
To our Waring Alumni and Families,
We’re still here...but where did YOU go??! We never lost you on the French Trip or during Endterm, but we’ve lost track of you since. Please let us know where you live nowadays, what you do for work and for fun, what other Waring alums you see out there in the world, what’s on your mind. Please reach out via this link to tell us what you’re up to!
Every issue of Notecards from Waring School will pose a question for you to ponder. For this inaugural issue, we’re hoping you’ll share your favorite book from your Waring years. Please submit your answer via this link and we will publish responses in future issues (which come out twice a year). We can’t wait to hear from you!
