A Legacy of Leadership
At Winchester Thurston, the seeds of leadership are planted early, nurtured diligently, and designed to flourish far into each student’s future. Here is a look at some of the different ways that leadership is instilled and cultivated—uniquely and authentically — across the divisions.
Lessons in Leadership
Built on a foundation of courage, foresight, and vision, it is WT’s teachers who ensure that such a legacy of leadership in education continues to be a hallmark of the WT experience. Here we share an example from each division of this passionate and imaginative approach and its impact on creating the leaders of tomorrow.
Courage and Intention: A Moral Imperative
Last winter, Winchester Thurston’s deeply-held commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) was violated by a racist act on campus. School leaders, in concert with the full community, reflected, acted, and committed as they forged a path toward concrete institutional change.
Commencement 2022
The 61 members of the Class of 2022 celebrated the school’s 135th Commencement exercises on June 2, 2022 at Carnegie Music Hall. As a result of student advocacy and leadership, the student body wore caps and gowns during the ceremony as a way to live the WT credo, “Think also of the comfort and the rights of others” and to create equity in this final event.
Inside the Cover
In Multicultural America,
a grade 9 history class, teacher Callie Gropp ’03 combines project-based learning and a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion to provide students with the opportunity to contextualize the world around them, explore the conditions of their own lives, articulate connections between the past and present, and create spaces where students can see themselves and one another as having an important voice in the communities of which they are a part.
This year, the course culminated in an oral history project featuring alum interviews and student stories. Students interviewed sixteen alums who shared their experiences at Winchester Thurston, the impact of current events on their lives, and their hopes for the future. Working alongside City as Our CampusSM partners, students linked together voices of the recent past with their own stories to create a composite documentary.
Telling Tales: The Stories That Make Our Community is a place-based storytelling project founded on the premise that to “Think also,” we must first listen. To create the documentary, students conducted research, composed interview questions, and selected film segments. The community screening and student presentations took place in May.
About the cover: Molly Smith ’22 performs “Mossy Cobblestone” by Bears in Trees at the Senior Cabaret. The proceeds of this annual event, first imagined by Christina Vlachos ’19, benefit the senior gift. Members of the senior class flex their leadership skills, from creating the program of acts, to hosting and performing, to managing lights and sound.