Marie Bissell Prentice Award for Excellence Awardee 2022

Monica Roberts

Established in 2019, the Marie Bissell Prentice Award for Excellence in International Education recognizes individual staff’s outstanding contributions to teaching and learning at Woodstock School.

Marie Bissell Prentice loved India and was an inspired teacher in the New York Public School System. In addition to being a teacher, she was a potter, a singer, a poet, and a powerful social advocate for the causes she believed in. These same qualities are present in so many of the men and women who make Woodstock’s academics, enrichment, and residential life a transformative and holistic experience.

This award is given to Individuals or teams of individuals who have:

– Improved learning and life at Woodstock

– Consistently led academics, residential, or enrichment life at Woodstock

– Exemplified the school’s Guiding Principles, Desired Learning Outcomes, and International Mindedness

– Initiated or significantly improved opportunities for students to grow

Nominations are taken from the entire Woodstock community each year which are then reviewed by a committee including student, staff, and faculty representatives from different areas across campus.

Awardees to date include former CFI Director Ms Amy Seefeldt and Current Woodstock School Music Department Head Mr Ravi Arthur.

This year’s award was bestowed on Mrs Monica Roberts. The text of the speech given by Dr Cook announcing Mrs Roberts as the 2022 awardee at the Spring 2022 All Staff Banquet is being shared here.

Several of the 2022 nominees have contributed significantly to the areas specified by the award, and the selection process was not an easy one. However, the committee agreed on one person whose work seemed to touch lives in each one of their professional, living, and learning areas at Woodstock.

The 2022 awardee has impressively and consistently demonstrated and cultivated the three ever-enduring things I spoke to at the 2022 Baccalaureate Ceremony: faith, hope, and love. Faith, hope, and love were the foundation of this person’s long-serving role at Woodstock School.

Although not a classroom teacher, our awardee has done extraordinary work improving learning and life at Woodstock School in her numerous roles, especially as a dorm parent, student advisor, homeroom head, and Development and Alumni Office administrator. She has exemplified the school’s Guiding Principles, Desired Learning Outcomes, and International Mindedness while consistently identifying and supporting opportunities for students, alumni, and fellow staff members and employees to grow. Employees deserve special mention here as many may not be aware our nominee has supported fundraising for and administration of funds providing emergency medical and education funding for Woodstock’s employees and their families. She remains strongly committed to supporting Woodstock’s efforts to further assist its employees and help them achieve ever better knowledge and quality of life through the generations.

Our awardee has relied on faith, proudly supporting Woodstock’s Christian valuesbased education. She has shown hope in ever brighter tomorrows for Woodstock School and for its students – especially the naughtier ones! And she has shown great and vast love, especially for our students, both during their time at Woodstock and as they traveled, grew, and lived around the world. She continued to share in their joys and sorrows and serve the entire alumni community with this love.

This love-based work has taken place around the world; as editor of the Quadrangle and as a traveling representative of the school, she has brought Woodstock to our alumni no matter where they may be. She has also managed innumerable alumni visits and milestone reunions bringing alumni to Woodstock. She has been a true lynchpin of our global community of alumni, parents, and former staff. The greatest of these is love: and these were our awardee’s own words when she came before the upper years students to bid them farewell at their final assembly. After 43 years of service to the community, she said to the students, “All I can say is that I love you very much. Thank you, Woodstock.”

We thank Mrs Monica Roberts for sharing her love and supporting and transforming thousands of Woodstockers around the world. We’re pleased and honored to present her with this year’s Marie Bissell Prentice Award for Excellence in International Education.

Woodstock would like to give special thanks to our donor for establishing this award in memory of his aunt, which allows us to incentivise and celebrate educational excellence in our community. Woodstock is seeking to create more such funds to help us bring highly talented and diverse educators to Woodstock via endowed faculty chair positions. If you would like to fund or help fund an endowed faculty chair position in a subject area you care about, please email us at: advancement@woodstock.ac.in