Hi Future Beaver Community!

All schools have made adjustments due to the impact of COVID-19 in our communities and across the globe. Starting with your virtual revisit day, a historic event, you are entering school under unusual circumstances to say the least. Fortunately, as an innovative community, Beaver teachers enthusiastically embrace figuring out how to do things differently and better. The move to Expanded Learning this spring is another opportunity for our teachers and students to explore a wide variety of tools and develop cutting edge skills. Keeping students at the center of the learning experience, they will continue to make school relevant by deepening engagement with real-world problem solving in what are challenging times for us all.

I am very much looking forward to the start of the 2020-2021 school year to kick off my new role as the Head of School at Beaver. I have been busy preparing for this new role by immersing myself in the community, making regular visits to campus, getting to know Beaver students and faculty, as well as spending time with Peter Hutton and the board in order to ensure a smooth transition.

Each phone call and visit provides another opportunity for me to learn more, and builds my enthusiasm for this tremendous opportunity. Beaver teachers and students are innovators in education and I am deeply honored to have been chosen to lead the community in this important work. The people I’ve met, the school’s publications and other materials, are both enormously impressive and refreshingly authentic – expressing a shared mission of expanding the nature of school.

Beaver is an exciting place with so many things happening at any one time. There is much for me to learn and I want to get up to speed swiftly and thoroughly. The guiding principles and practices in a new era of education correlate with those that have framed my work for the last decade. Redesigning school by staying focused on the core principles upon which this school was founded is helping us build the path forward for all schools. This work is inspirational because there is no option to fail. Will we make excellent mistakes? Certainly. But we are morally obligated to use the freedoms of our independent school and its resources in order to move this work forward. Unfortunately, many similar schools are not doing this work because they are too afraid of change; but change is precisely what is necessary for improving the educational system in the United States. I am committed to providing strong and effective leadership as we do great things with our students, ultimately contributing substantively to the dialogue about the future of education.

I will continue to meet with a wide variety of people, learn about signature programs and think strategically about what lies ahead. My transition will be fully successful if community members are able to continue doing what they do best as they inspire and mentor young people. There are many great things going on at Beaver and there are exciting plans in the works.

I am confident that next year will be terrific and that it will be the first of many wonderful years leading this community. I hope you enjoy your revisit to campus this week, and know how thrilled we will all be to welcome you onto campus next fall. In the meantime, be well.

Sincerely,

Kim Samson
Future Head of School