As we have begun our school year at Bement, I’ve been exchanging “Happy New Year” greetings with families. Each September brings a fresh start; students excited for new experiences and new friends, thrilled to see classmates whom they missed over the summer. A new school year finds classrooms ready and prepared for exciting lessons and teachers eager to guide students to new discoveries.
This “new year” we are launching our Bement Blog series. Each week, a member of the faculty or administration will share reflections and ideas about Bement, education, childhood, and well being. So much good happens here each and every day, and we’re excited to give you an even closer glimpse of it through this new series.
By way of introduction, I want to share some thoughts about the power of kindness. At the opening Friday morning meeting of the year last week, I shared some remarks regarding the unique power of the Bement community to create a culture of kindness.
This summer, many members of our faculty and staff participated in a training on using discussion circles, led by the Mediation and Training Collaborative of the Community Action of the Pioneer Valley. In fact, longtime Bement administrator, Scott Smith, helped lead the training. He remarked on the natural connection between discussion circles and the heritage of Bement as a school built around relationships. After the first day of school and our upper school students’ first circles in advisory, a student remarked at afternoon meeting that he felt that the circles allowed him and his classmates to be “authentically themselves” and to have a safe space to share ideas and feelings with each other.
Likewise, I saw the power of Bement values in less formal interactions during these first few days of school. One young lady who had attended Bement and returned after a couple of years overseas came round a corner, late for class, with a longtime Bement student, both new sixth graders. With a smile and laugh, they explained that they were still getting used to the upper school schedule and had gone to the wrong room; they skipped off together happily reunited and seemingly without skipping a beat as two girls united in their Bement identity.
Finally, I watched a very nervous kindergartener start her first day. She didn’t know her classmates and was visibly rattled by all the new faces. By the end of the second day, as she waited for the Family Picnic to begin, she was happily running with her new friends and enjoying her new Bement home.
So much of what we see and hear around us in our public discourse and the media involves exclusion and self-focus. At Bement, we intentionally build a community-oriented toward inclusion, compassion, resilience, and care for each other and the world around us. This requires vigilance and care: this asks us to be kind. Students and faculty themselves help to ensure that they contribute to the culture of kindness we all value.
The power of this school to create intentional community for students, parents, faculty, and staff has long been a part of the Bement experience. Indeed, it is why Grace Bement made sure students ate meals together, sang together, and did chores together from the first days of the Bement’s founding. It is why alumni still recall the warmth and compassion of teachers and leaders long retired. And it is why Scott Smith can remind us all, so readily, of the central place of relationship and openness in our school’s history. Through tried and true methods such as the discussion circles and habits of reflection that we practice at Bement, we can continue to be a community of kindness in a complicated world.