MAKE A GIFT
PREPARE A MIND Each year our students come to campus with open minds and hearts, prepared to be inspired. We work to prepare them on their way to what comes next.
BUT THEIR SUCCESS DEPENDS ON YOU. www.williston.com/give
19 Payson Avenue, Easthampton, MA 01027 (800) 469-4559
new building, but former and current fac-brats all say that childhood feeling of security and support remains constant. Cameron Hill ’15 has spent the majority of her life at a boarding school; she was born at the Westminster School in Simsbury, CT, and grew up at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH. During a brief three-year stint, her parents took jobs at a day school in North Carolina and the family moved away from a school campus. Ms. Hill remembers the experience as unsettling. “We had to drive places and go to the grocery store. I was so unused to living off-campus that it was shock to me,” said Ms. Hill, adding that she was relieved when her parents, Robert W. Hill III and Kathryn Hill, returned to New England to become Williston Northampton’s head of school and math teacher, respectively. Ms. Hill and her brother Robby ’19 have lived in the head of school’s house ever since. Now in her senior year, Ms. Hill is looking forward to college life, but describes the Williston Northampton campus the way other people might talk about their hometown. “It’s the people who are always here. The history teacher who lives next door and I babysit her kids, and my English teacher, who is also my advisor. I give her daughter piano lessons,” she said. “That’s home to me.” Like most faculty children, Calvin Ticknor-Swanson ’16 spends each Reunion listening to alumni telling him how big he’s grown or how they changed his diapers. As a tiny towhead, Mr. Ticknor-Swanson ran through the hallways in the Reed Campus Center, riding up and down the elevator with other faculty children, hiding from, and spying on, the students. When advisees came to dinner at the Williston Birthplace, where he’s lived all his life, he and his sister, Persis ’14 (Barnard ’18), would show off for them. Even as an elementary school student, Mr. Ticknor-Swanson would attend class with his father, history and global studies teacher Glenn “Swanee” Swanson ’64. And although being a faculty child has its perks, it also comes with additional pressures. “You don’t want to let anyone down,” said Mr. Ticknor-Swanson. “As the son of a faculty member on campus, I have to be a role model.” Mr. Ticknor-Swanson has taken such a responsibility seriously, and like other fac-brats on campus, has grown into his role. He was the lead in the fall play, All My Sons, is a stand-out member of the dance ensemble, and regularly makes the honor roll. Still, during meals at Birch Dining Commons, the junior will spot the young faculty kids climbing a gnarled tree near the dining hall and have a moment of nostalgia. “It’s very reminiscent of when I was their age,” he said. “That tree has been passed down by generations of faculty kids.” Williston Northampton is home, but he, like other students who have grown up on campus, looks forward to the next adventure—going on to an unfamiliar college where he’s not immediately recognized as Swanee’s son. “It will be weird,” said Mr. Ticknor-Swanson, “to be in a place where I don’t know the lay of the land or everybody there.”