WINTER 2003Drew Smith
Head of School
ast week I participated in the annual Heads of Friends Schools Retreat at Pendle Hill. The gathering is attended by about fifty heads of school. Most come from schools within Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, but the retreat also draws heads from Maryland, North Carolina, California, and New Hampshire. I am always grateful for the fellowship of this retreat, the good food from the kitchen at Pendle Hill, and a chance to be among peers to debrief about our common concerns, and share dreams for the future of our schools.
As a relatively new head, I was asked to participate in an informal discussion with brand-new heads. The discussion seemed particularly helpful for the two new non-Quaker heads, neither of whom had previously worked at, or with, a Friends School. I appreciated being with them because it forced me to focus again upon two things: how unusual Friends decision-making process can seem to the uninitiated, and how uncomfortable it can be to impose a hierarchical organizational structure upon this process. In other words, rather than nominate a faculty or staff member to clerk the school as a meeting for worship for business, Friends Schools hire a head who serves as a chief executive officer.
“So how on Earth,” one of the new heads wondered, “do we make this work? Where does the power and authority rest in a Friends School?” The Quakers in the room, including me, avoided the first question, but seized upon the second, more important one. The simple answer we gave was “God,” but the new friend was asking a slightly less divine question, so we indulged her at this level.
For my part, I instantly recalled the end of a meeting for worship at which a member of the faculty asked me to reveal the mysteries of the power of silence to our students. His question was prompted by an unusual amount of fidgeting during worship from the eighth-grade row. I talked to students about my own inability to center that morning, and that my mind raced from thought to thought, some of which I identified for them, and some of which I decided to keep to myself!
After I finished speaking, a seventh grader asked if she could tell the meeting what she had been thinking about during worship. She stated that she was too nervous to rise to speak during the formal time of worship, but wanted us to know she spent meeting composing a poem. Her inspiration was the window panes, all of them heavy with condensation. Her poem wondered whether she preferred the cool of the outdoors to the warmth of the meetinghouse. It went on to lament how often people found themselves in places where they could not decide, or did not want to be. How often, she observed, we are not satisfied being in the very place that we are right now. I cannot truly do justice to her words. Suffice it to say that I remain deeply touched and won’t soon forget this moment.
It has rarely been so silent with middle school students sitting in the meetinghouse. At that moment, the authority and power, divine or otherwise, at Friends School rested within the heart of a seventh-grade student. And somehow, we all knew it.
Although it has now been two weeks since her post-worship testimony, we speak of it often among the staff; the power and truth of this “poem” we heard recited as it was composed. How simple and touching her words, how powerful they have been for us as we write curriculum. or teach our classes, or decide upon new insurance policies for the school. For my new friend at Pendle Hill, this story did not quite answer her question, and yet it did, and she knew it. The outwardly contradictory, official structures of any Friends School demand that authority ebb and flow through the community in the same way it must in our worship.
And somehow, we all know it.
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Thursday, March 11, 2004 at 09:44 PM
