Dear Families,

I am so thrilled that you found us. For over 16 years, EBS has lived out its founding mission and vision as a space for young people to cultivate their intellectual, physical, and emotional selves to become engaged, thoughtful, courageous, and justice-minded adults.

In the news media and the public conversation, schools are often dispassionately cast as places where teachers provide information and students acquire it. With every moment I spend in this community, I see a very different reality unfolding. Everywhere I look our students and teachers are engaging passionately with ideas, questions, traditions, and each other. I can hardly help but think of Robert Putnam’s observation about libraries: “People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there.” Schools, like libraries, are vital spaces of human connection. EBS is certainly one such place. I continually find myself reminded of the power of EBS’s culture of belonging. I am deeply grateful to be a part of a community where people find each other - and find meaning - each and every day. 

One of the hallmarks of our school’s culture and program is the theme of design. On a daily basis, our students are invited by our extraordinary team of teachers to step into the design process - whether the “artifact” they are designing is a little free library, an argument for new ways of understanding American history, or a friendship with a new classmate. Our students come to EBS with their own experience and expertise, cultivated in both digital and analog spaces, as designers, and play an invaluable role in helping us all find and create new ways to celebrate, support, and understand each other. Through designing, we are offered daily encounters with ideas, stories, places, and people that shine a bright light on all that we share. The philosopher Martin Buber describes encounter as the force that “makes a human cosmos become possible again and again.” Every day I spend at EBS I am reminded that our community is precisely the kind of human cosmos that Buber would celebrate, a space of dialogue, connection, belonging, and love. 

I sincerely hope that you will have a chance to visit our campus to feel, see, and hear the vibrancy and joy of our teachers and students in action. All of us here look forward to welcoming you to our community and being a part of yours.

In anticipation,

Robert