Holderness News

February is Black History Month, and students in Holderness School’s new Culture and Justice Club have used that time to spark the community’s awareness and appreciation of Black history, excellence, and culture.

Holderness School has earned the College Board’s AP Computer Science Female Diversity Award for expanding access to AP Computer Science A - one of only 232 schools in the country to receive such an award.

Despite a number of editorial challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Holderness School’s literary and visual arts magazine, Mosaic, recently took home a top award from the 2020 Scholastic Yearbook and Magazine Awards.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Best wishes to all of our students who celebrate this most important of Asian holidays. May this Year of the Ox 🐂 be filled with happiness, good health, and prosperity.

I am in awe of the outpouring of support during yesterday’s Day of Giving. More than 1600 donors – a record – contributed over $640,000 to support the Holderness Experience.  Talk about making an immediate impact! This, our 7th Annual Day of Giving, was our most successful yet because of you!

Every February, we dedicate one entire day to raising money for the Holderness Fund. Day of Giving is essential to ensuring the transformational Holderness Experience for current students.  Gifts on Day of Giving are immediately put to use to cover student scholarships, teacher salaries, special programs, and numerous essentials.

Holderness art students got a boost of recognition from the Scholastic Art Awards of New Hampshire. Dianne Fu ‘23, Cece Robinson ‘24, Logan Severance ‘24, and Jobe Gemmell-Hughes ‘21 all received Honorable Mentions. Logan Severance ‘24 also received a Silvery Key for her work “Recreation of Museum Artwork.”

Nearly a year after becoming the first athlete to compete for Trinidad and Tobago in the Winter Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland, Abby Vieira ’20, has been named Junior Sportswoman of the Year and People’s Choice Award winner by the Trinidad and Tobago Olympic Committee.

Little more than a month after he graduated from Holderness School in the spring of 2013, Daniel Do began to feel a nagging pain in his leg. Daniel, who had plans to try out for the Bowdoin College basketball team that fall, first thought it was a muscle pull. Soon after arriving at Bowdoin, however, the pain had become so debilitating that he couldn’t walk.

So often on the day designated to honor the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we focus on our needs--the things that make us feel good. We look to his speeches for hope, to be inspired, to seek out motivational quotations for social media. But this use of Dr. King’s legacy and words to comfort and inspire is, in my personal opinion, a bastardization of his legacy--of the very real complex person he was and the radical vision he had for us. A vision of justice and accountability that could only result in radical change. Dr. King was a radical for racial justice, economic justice, democratic socialism, and demilitarization. I would even purport that, as a white person, my white community has shifted the legacy of a hero of civil and human rights to serve our purpose rather than the purpose of justice. And it was ultimately liberty and justice that was the goal of the work of Dr. King.

COVID-19 has provided many challenges for all of us in more ways than we can count.  One opportunity we've seen in this challenge is that it demands us all to be more creative and one place that was most apparent this fall was in the Holderness Art Department.

With world-class ski resorts just a short drive away, plus 20 kilometers of Nordic ski trails and an outdoor ice rink on campus, Holderness School seems like it was built for winter. The same can be said of the school’s new winter schedule, which was redesigned to help students thrive amid the challenges of cold weather, short days, and ongoing COVID-19 restrictions.

Dear Holderness Community,

It is with profound gratitude that I share I will be retiring in June 2022.  As Board Chair Nell Reynolds, the board, and I have discussed, the timing feels perfect for Holderness and for Robin and me. I am incredibly fortunate to be able to retire at this time, but I am also thankful to have another 18 months to serve Holderness.

The Honor Roll recognizes and commends outstanding achievement and effort in the academic program. Holderness School recognizes that each student's growth and progress is complex. Quarterly comments written by faculty better reflect the unique path traveled by each student, and the Honor Roll and Effort Honor Roll are simplified but significant markers of the engagement of our students in the most recent marking interval.

Download the Honor Roll & Excellent Effort Honor Roll