This was another wonderful year at Scattergood. We concluded the year with a beautiful commencement ceremony on June 1, 2008. Eighteen seniors graduated and have since scattered in search of new experiences. They included Angelis Shropshire, Chang Woo Hong, Lionel Musoni, Christopher HarrKuhn, Shamra Williams-Hussein, Eric Tjossem, Taylor Friese, Joel O’Brien, Lindsey Holderness, Liam Landoll, Pyong Landoll, Emma Carson, Miriam Medina, Stacy Roth, Sally Risk, Trina Van Mell, Syndi Love, and Paul Gilliam. All graduates have been accepted into accredited colleges and universities. Our post-graduate student from Mexico, Miriam Medina, has returned to Mexico to study nursing. Angelis Shropshire has been accepted to several four year colleges and plans to attend Kirkwood Community College for two years before transferring to Cornell College. Chaz Hong will be attending the Illinois Institute of Technology to study architecture. Liam Landoll will also be attending the Illinois Institute of Technology. Lionel Musoni has been accepted at Earlham College and Augustana College but has not decided which he will attend to study business and foreign languages. Emma Carson will attend the University of Iowa this fall. Chris HarrKuhn will be heading off to Warren Wilson College in the fall to explore a number of interests, including Peace and Global Studies, Photography, Outdoor Leadership and Political Science. Eric Tjossem has also been accepted to several liberal arts colleges and has yet to choose where he will study in the realm of humanities, though he has additional interests in politics and computer science. Shamra Williams-Hussein is taking a semester off to help her family move back to Texas, and plans to attend Houston University and eventually Cairo University in Egypt, where she plans to study Egyptology and Biology. Paul Gilliam will be finishing credits over the summer but has been accepted to the University of Northern Iowa. Taylor Friese will defer for one year to work on a farm making yarn, and following that she will be attending Cornell College. Lindsey Holderness will attend community college for two years before going on to study Criminology at William Penn and has additional interests in zoology and wildlife conservation. Stacy Roth will head straight to Earlham College this fall and plans to study linguistics or religion. Pyong Landoll will also be attending Earlham this fall. Joel O’Brien will take some time off before choosing where he will attend college. Sally Risk has been accepted to the University of the Redlands and the University of the Pacific but will be taking some time off to visit Sweden. Trina Van Mell will be attending Clark University. Syndi Love will be in Florida working on an Americorps job for one year, then returning to go to college in Iowa and study nursing. Congratulations and best wishes to each of these 2008 Scattergood graduates.
Congratulations also to rising seniors Meghan Maynard, who was named the Bob and Sara Berquist Scholar, and Oscar Erwin, who was honored as the Fine Arts Scholar.
Several staff members have left Scattergood and will not return next year. They include Amanda Edwards, Dan Carter, Dana Smith, Elenoir Wilder Tack, Heidi and Andy Casto, Rachel Howard, Lorraine Gaynor, Nan Fawcett, Rachel Butler, and S. Sutterfield Winn. We want to thank each of them for their numerous contributions to the school, and wish them the best as their future plans unfold.
Staff members returning for the 2008-09 school year include: Jan Luchini, Bob Gutwein, Chris Spinler, Dana Foster, Glenn Singer, Hans Niehus, Irving Treadway, Joey and Sarah Giffen-Hunter, John Morman, Margie Figgins, Mark Quee, Michal Lynch, Riley Lark, Sam Taylor, and Steve Nordlund.
Staff members new to Scattergood for the upcoming school year include Nicole and Steve Wolf-Camplin, Courtney McDermott, Steve and Prudence Tippins, Sarah Harper-Smith, Brian Massey, Jacquie Albrecht, Colleen Schmitt, and Kate (Lucy) McCormick.
We began the 2007-08 school year with 54 students and ended the year with 49 young adults who learned what it means to live in community. Tuition for the 2007-08 school year was $22,000 for full boarding, $20,500 for five-day boarding and $13,000 for day students. The School Committee chose to increase tuition for the upcoming 2008-2009 school year, which will be $22,750 for full boarding, $21,250 for five-day boarding and $13,950 for day students. The total net revenue for tuition was $579,762 for an average cost to parents per student of $10,939. Financial Aid totaling $562,588 went to students, with $281,281 of that being funded with donations from Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative), the Scattergood Friends School Endowment, and the Measey Fund. The remaining $281,307 was unfunded. Annual Giving and other donations totaled $334,426. We are extremely grateful to the many donors, 552, who supported the school this past year. Overall, we finished the budget (excluding depreciation) with a surplus of $90,354, which is more than we had hoped. Thank you to our staff, who spend the school’s resources responsibly.
This year we continued working on the Fire Marshal’s list of upgrades, which included many new interior one-hour rated doors and frames. These doors are also now on a magnetic system so that they automatically close if the fire alarm is activated. New emergency lighting was installed in the girls dorm lounge, and changes to the upper level exits of the Instruction Building were made to bring these areas up to the Fire Marshal’s code.
Several staff housing units received upgrades to improve living situations, including the Berquist House main level apartment that needed a hallway to separate the two bedroom’s entrances. The Duplex received a new roof and work has begun on renovating the bathrooms and the West Duplex kitchen. The campus side of the sound wall received a coat of paint. New sandblasted cedar signs were installed to identify buildings and help visitors find their way around campus. Another note worthy accomplishment that is not visible is that this past fall we made the final payment on the quad-plex construction loan. It was our only outstanding loan.
This year’s large senior class tackled several projects this spring during Senior Week. Due to a long and intense winter, there were a number of places on campus that required some serious attention. The senior class worked hard to clean up campus by picking up fallen limbs and performing various outdoor beautification projects, as well as cleaning out the fishpond, cleaning and reestablishing the crescent herb garden, and pulling willows at the pond. Their hard work paid off as the spring unfolded and campus bloomed. Many thanks to the seniors for their time and energy spent giving back to Scattergood.
Each year Scattergood students and staff take numerous trips that serve to strengthen our curriculum, as well as increase our sense of awareness of the world and the role we all play in it. The All-School Fall camping weekend was held again at F.W. Kent Park, where we enjoyed beautiful weather, kayaking, playing games, drumming, and generally enjoying our time together as a community. Scattergood Weekend was fun and rewarding as usual, as alumni, staff and students enjoyed performances by our drum circle, choir and theatre groups. Scattergood’s annual ‘Snow Day’ was a welcomed break in the middle of the winter months. About half of the student body went to Chestnut Hill, IL to go downhill skiing and snowboarding, while the rest stayed on campus to relax and enjoy a quiet day. February Intersession included many activities and workshops that occurred on campus and kept all of us busy, including classes on various crafts, herbalism, massage therapy, and managing a small business, while several staff members led a group of students in a cross-country ski trip in northern Minnesota. We are grateful for all parent and community assistance with this year’s successful intersession. This year’s seventh block trips included our school-sponsored East coast trip, a West coast trip, the bike trip, and a number of independent trips. The East Coast trip, led by Rachel Howard and Irving Treadway, explored Washington D.C., New York City and Philadelphia among other spots on the coast and engaged in a number of service opportunities. The West Coast trip traveled to California and Oregon where they learned about sustainability issues and worked on a sustainable farm. Hans Niehus once again successfully led a group of bikers back to campus from Mississippi. They returned with tanned arms, bulky legs and a huge sense of accomplishment. Other students completed projects in various locations, volunteering in a variety of ways. All groups and individuals traveled many miles, and gathered lasting memories and life changing experiences along the way.
We would like to acknowledge and thank the following Friends-in-residence or visitors to the school this year. Rita Golden-Gelman, Sandra Winn, Rey Caranza, Carolyn Treadway and Paul Wagner, Heather Bouwman, Ellen Ekman and Mary Cloudsparks all made valuable contributions to campus during their Friends-in-residence stays. Mark McCusker and Nora Marcos (of Habeas Corpus) continued to bring their dance, singing and performance expertise to our curriculum. Our usual wide-ranging February Intersession offerings were enhanced by a repeat performance of alumni and parent Mark Helm’s class on Judo, a polymer clay class with parent Rachel Grossman, and a business class with Laura Rierson from the local West Branch coffeehouse, Reid’s Beans. This past year was greatly enriched by the contributions of each one of these individuals, and we are grateful. In addition, we would like to thank the many families of local students who hosted students in their homes over breaks – we appreciate their generous hospitality and know that the students they host appreciate it too. Those families that hosted students this year include Sylvia and Patrick Sanford, Kamal Hammouda and Laura Fendt, James Erwin, Annette Maynard, Loren Santow and Julie Chesterton, Brenda Roth, Mark and Sandi Tomer, Steven and Linda Kellner-Miller, Maribel Gonzalez, Callie and Larry Marsh, Kristin and Ernest Batson, Diana and Tom Stamborski, and Leigh and Carl Estabrook.
We are now in our sixth year of the seven-year ISACS (Independent School Association of the Central States) accreditation cycle. We were required to produce a Progress Report that detailed our efforts over the past year and a half on their recommendations. We have received ISACS’ response that our report was accepted and that our accreditation status remains in good standing. The Latta Harris accounting firm is in the process of completing a review level audit of the School, Farm and Foundation’s books. Preliminary results from this audit will be presented at Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends (Conservative), and the results will be published in the IYM minutes.
Our interactions with the Department of Education regarding accreditation requirements took up a large part of the fall for the Head of School this year. On August 28, 2007, the state’s Director of Education, Judy Jeffrey, and several of her advisors, met with the heads of the eight specially accredited schools and our lawyers. We had several follow up meetings, without the state representatives, to develop our group and individual plans of action to prevent the loss of our “specially accredited” status. These actions were enough to persuade Director Jeffery to drop her proposed changes to the bill that governs “specially accredited schools”. The Department of Education has set this idea aside for now, but it is one that we should expect to resurface sometime in the future.
This past year, we continued to work toward our goal of becoming a more ecologically sustainable community. A few of the major breakthroughs toward our goal have been: A plan, with one new vehicle already purchased, to replace all of our current gasoline vehicles with diesel so that bio-diesel and blends can be used as much as temperatures permit. We have collected the data from the anemometers on campus and have determined that we do indeed produce the wind speeds needed to produce electricity for the school with the right wind turbine. The new root cellar we installed this summer has extended our ability to enjoy a variety of squash and root vegetables grown at the farm. Meg McCormick led volunteers Larry Marsh, Don Laughlin and Roger Laughlin and many staff and students in conducting a blower door test on the Boys Dorm. We were able to tighten the building’s envelope considerably using the data from this very informative test. We all learned quite a bit that weekend about air infiltration. We are grateful for Meg’s expertise in this area and we look forward to putting this process to task for the other buildings on campus. We made some good progress on our goal and have some great plans in place. These efforts will be ongoing for years to come as we work to become a more sustainable community.
As always, community building is a big part of our mission, and this proved to be another rewarding year. We came together in August from many different places across the country and globe and over the course of the past year, we melded into a community where trust, caring and mutual respect were the norm. Community meetings became organized this year with the student clerks taking on larger roles in the organization of the agenda. This pre-meeting organization and posted agenda allowed for a community prepared for great discussions with all continuing to have a voice in the community and in our lives here at Scattergood. We have spent community meetings, meetings for worship, and time with each other, which have given us incredible opportunities for developing our ideas about community, sustainability, and how we can become a working community for change. Fun activities occurring this year included our Pirates vs. Zombies themed Faculty Follies, our fun and colorful prom with an 80s theme, Class Olympics, Sophomore Breakfast, Freshmen Dinner, Dance Alarms, fall camping weekend, and the All-School Spring Picnic.
Life at Scattergood continues with all of its usual complexity, simplicity, challenge and beauty. I would like to acknowledge and thank Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) for their generous and continued spiritual and financial support of the school collectively and individually.
Respectfully submitted,
Jan Luchini Head of School