Keeping Students Safe

I am so proud of our student whose piece about antisemitism is in the commentary section today. She is brave to point to her personal experience here, at St. Johnsbury Academy, where we remind our community about kindness and respect and yet see far too many instances of the opposite.

We are fortunate to have so many compassionate and capable faculty and staff at the Academy who have dedicated their lives and livelihoods to helping young people–including the many young people of St. Johnsbury and the local area whom we serve. These faculty and staff are with students daily in chapel, in advisory, in class, on the field, and in many other contexts, and they are always looking out for those students who need support. Because of their strong relationships with students, our campus and community is better protected against random acts of hate, and hopefully also from some forms of anxiety and despair, by being proximate to more adults who know and care about them.

But as we have seen, the Academy is part of the world, and we are not immune to the forces and dynamics that shape that world, including hateful messages from people who are supposed to be role models; adults proclaiming those who disagree “enemies;” and young people feeling profound, existential distress. These forces and their effects are evident in behaviors we see every day, and they are always on our minds. They are on our minds when we survey our campus every morning to make sure all is as it should be; they are on our minds because our school is a home and should be a haven. We are continually working to understand what it means for us to be a truly safe place for kids. It often feels to us that lives depend on it.