January 2007
Dear Friends of Chatham Hall:
A conversation on a rural hilltop in southern Virginia, early one morning a week ago:
“Did you finish Kaffir Boy over Christmas break?” I asked.
“I did, and now I’m reading Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, and it is a long walk, but fabulous” she answered, measuring the thickness of the book between her two flattened hands.
“Pretty powerful writing and lives …”
“What I’m trying to figure out is where I was when all of this was going on in South Africa? I was young, high school and college age, and I did not know how awful it was. Why was I not tuned into what was going on there? Such a huge injustice. I sit wondering what I can do. I feel as if I can’t do anything.”
This colleague and I (plus other Chatham Hall adults, students, alumnae, and parents) are heading to Cape Town in March. We’ll be working on food distribution in a township and with endangered species in a national park. In preparation for this trip, Sunday evenings this winter we meet to study contemporary social and political issues in South Africa. Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy—a fabulous autobiography about growing up under apartheid in a township in Johannesburg—is one of our texts. Mark will be visiting campus in late January.
And, as you would imagine, on Sunday evenings, we also talk about the travel details: what to pack, how much baggage to bring, how to call home, and on and on.
Travel is, well, education, and vice versa. A trip that calls the world into question, that makes us reflect upon ourselves, that dedicates us to new actions, and that can leave us in that invigorating limbo of feeling empowered and powerless. How much baggage do we bring? What will it be like when we call home? What different person will return?
And so, what else has been happening recently on the journey of Chatham Hall? What new baggage? New people?
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan was a dynamic leader in residence in October. She spoke to the need for democracy in her country and to the common beliefs of Islam and Christianity. She is a true ambassador of reconciliation. And she was amazed with the preparation of the Chatham Hall girls—she kept calling us the best “college” she had visited.
Kaitlin Tebeau ’08 has been selected to be this year’s Hallam Hurt Student and Faculty Foreign Travel Award recipient. Kaitlin will travel to Scotland this summer to study the impact of the Scottish Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries on the clan system. She intends to write a fictional narrative based upon these events. Kaitlin is sponsored by history teacher Caswell Nilsen. Kaitlin also attended the North Carolina Writer’s Network Fall Conference, where she had been accepted into a master class in fiction.
The field hockey team won the Blue Ridge Conference championship and ended the season ranked #7 in the State of Virginia.
Three students and an administrator from the Pardada Pardadi Girls Vocational School in Anupshahar, India, which I visited last summer, spent three days at Chatham Hall. They attended classes, performed native dances for the School, and learned what a true Chatham Hall Halloween is all about. I can still see them wandering our hallways, arm-in-arm with their Chatham Hall sisters.
Plans to renovate the dining room and kitchen and to construct a lecture hall where the school community and guests can gather are moving forward powerfully: two donors each have pledged $1 million, two others have pledged gifts each in the range of $500,000, and a foundation has awarded us a $100,000 challenge grant.
Academic Dean Chris Hughes traveled to Japan with a group of educators through the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund in November and kept us up-to-date on his journey with a picture-filled blog, including spectacular views of Tokyo at night.
Students in Dr. Alan Spearman’s class on the Gothic Novel have taken on characters and, through an imaginary correspondence with one another (a few of us adults are involved, also), are writing their own epistolary Gothic novel, tentatively titled The Plantation of Despair, set in the mysterious southern Virginia town of C_____, in the county of P_______, following the Civil War. Uncommon events, indeed, are taking place.
Eighteen girls are taking voice lessons, and the choirs are bursting. Our new
Director of Music, Dr. Steve Barton, has the Chapel rocking.
Senior Night in the Well transformed A Charlie Brown Christmas in ways that would have delighted Charles Schulz, including a dance-off between competitive Christmas trees. Senior Class President Ann O’Brien is the writer responsible for all of the cleverness!
Chatham Hall has received a $50,000 challenge grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation to create a $100,000 expendable fund that will make grants to faculty who wish to create a new class involving technology, develop technology applications for a current class, or develop technology applications throughout a particular department.
Renowned author Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life, Old School, and many other works) was our writer in residence in December. He led seminars for our students and read from his work for the School. All students read some of Wolff’s work to prepare for his visit.
Erin Haymes ’05 (currently at Virginia Tech) delivered a talk on what it’s like to major in engineering—she packed the house (or, well, the tiered classroom in Shaw …).
A whopping 22 students are on this year’s swim team, which continues to out-swim schools much larger than Chatham Hall.
Students and faculty committed over 500 hours to volunteer service programs during the fall trimester. The Chatham Habitat for Humanity house, toward which Chatham Hall students and faculty committed approximately 850 hours of construction time, was dedicated in December. Our frequent volunteer partner, the Martinsville/Henry County SPCA, has just dedicated a new facility, and Chatham Hall assisted with the donor gala and the public grand opening.
The Annual Fund has broken all records for funds donated to the School each month so far this year. Two alumnae, with an eye toward Chatham Hall’s future, have included us in their estate plans with commitments of $1,000,000 and $100,000.
Kyle Kahuda will be undertaking a special initiative that will place an innovative Environmental Studies program at the center of Chatham Hall’s curriculum—a program that will use our 360 gorgeous acres as a “laboratory.” An initial piece of this new program is what we hope will be a sustained partnership with Duke Forest and the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University. In April, Forestry and Environmental Studies graduate students will spend three days on the Chatham Hall campus as a practical lab/field experience working with our girls, thanks to the generosity of the Wray Environment Fund.
And so we are at the middle of this year. Now, on to its completion…
All the best,
Gary Fountain
Rector
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October 13, 2008
Day Student Open House
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November 9-10, 2008
Open House
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December 1. 2008
Early Decision Applications Due
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December 7-8
Open House
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December 15
Notification for Early Decision Applicants
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January 10
Reply Date - Contracts and deposits due for students admitted Early Decision
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January 18-19
Open House
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February 10
Applications and Financial Aid materials Due
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February 15-16
Open House
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March 10
Notification for Applicants
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April 4-5
Revisit Weekend for admitted students and their families
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April 10
Reply Date - Contracts due for admitted students