IN MY LETTER TO THE DEERFIELD COMMUNITY last September, I wrote in some detail about the visit of Abdullah II, King of Jordan and Deerfield graduate of the Class of 1980, who was our commencement speaker last spring. It was an entirely fitting conclusion to what had been, by almost any measure, another extraordinarily successful year for us, of which you will see plenty of evidence in the following pages of this annual report issue of Deerfield.

I know that I often say, when I am traveling away from school and talking with alumni and parents, that I do not worry about leaving Deerfield behind because the school "runs itself" very well. Once again this past year, for example, we got terrific leadership from our senior class. And once again, the Deerfield faculty (including my own very seasoned senior staff) performed in that triple-threat capacity for which teaching at Deerfield has been so well known for so long. It is surely no coincidence that in my six years at Deerfield, six faculty members have left for administrative posts elsewhere-five to headmasterships, and one to the headship of an upper school. This year we are losing John Taylor, our academic dean, to St. Andrews School in Buenos Aires.

But no one at Deerfield would say that it is enough simply to continue doing our jobs as well as we can. Education is an inherently regenerative enterprise, and knowledge is always proliferating. We therefore have to operate with the idea that we can always be doing things better. Indeed, if one does not live with such a possibility in whatever it is that one does, life becomes rather stale.

Of the many examples of new initiatives at Deerfield Academy, I would like to mention just two that occurred last year. Both actually took place during the summer, after the school year had ended, but the preparations for them began almost with the beginning of the year in September of 1999. One was our international conference of heads of schools in June, and the other was the inauguration of our Success Through the Enrichment Program (STEP) last July.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE from June 25-29 was an outgrowth of Deerfield's membership in Global Connections, an organization which we helped found four years ago. The point of Global Connections is simply to give heads of "national schools" around the world an opportunity once a year to meet and in particular to discuss a selected theme of common interest and importance. Membership is completely open to any head of any such school anywhere in the world. The annual meeting has previously been held in Johannesburg, Melbourne, and at Wellington School in England. This year it was Deerfield's opportunity, and we accordingly got to work early in the school year with our preparations. We selected the theme of environmentalism and secondary education. Our planning team of Malcolm McKenzie (our Bicentennial visiting fellow, headmaster emeritus of the Maru a Pula School in Botswana and now the new headmaster of Atlantic College in Wales), Marty Lyman (assistant headmaster and director of college advising and coordinator of international relations at Deerfield), and Jan Rogers (conference coordinator and teacher emerita of English at Deerfield), met with me almost every week. When the conference finally occurred, Deerfield was ready in a way that would have made anyone proud of the school. Eighty heads of school from virtually every continent were here-from Russia, Ukraine, China, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, France, Germany, England, and Canada, as well as a number of schools in this country, including Barbara Chase from Andover and Skip Mattoon '59 from Hotchkiss. Gil Grosvenor '49, gave the keynote address on Sunday night, June 25. Afterwards every day consisted of two or three panel programs, each one chaired by a member of the Deerfield faculty. On one panel Tom Heise, chairman of history at Deerfield, presented a paper on how we study our local history, and it was very well received indeed.

I don't know that any such gathering, which took the form of an academic conference, and with its proceedings to be published this year, has ever occurred before among independent secondary schools. We very much hope to demonstrate that the many excellent "national schools" across the world do have a great deal to share with each other and that, as each one of us continues to offer the best educational opportunity to our students within each of our national situations, we can gain much from meeting with each other and establishing ongoing relationships throughout the school year. I will never forget the moment when one of our delegates, Jeannie Egan, an indigenous Australian, spoke to us about her environment in the remote desert reaches of Australia, and how she taught her students to respect it-speaking to us in Waripiri, with her sister translating, underneath the portrait of Mrs. Boyden in the Caswell Library. It was really quite extraordinary. I hope that Tom Murphy '37, will not mind if I publicly thank him for helping so much to make this conference possible.

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE CONFERENCE ENDED, we initiated our Success Through the Enrichment Program (STEP). It is an idea that we have had in the back of our minds for a long time, and yet suddenly this year it seemed possible to actually provide that summertime opportunity for disadvantaged children to come to Deerfield Academy and be exposed to the kind of education that we offer. For us the opportunity came in a happy conjunction of circumstance: in Jeff Armes and Cheryl Lindsay we knew that we had the people to plan and implement the program, and in the immense generosity of the Gray family we had the resources that would help to make it all happen.

This year the children who participated in the program were very carefully selected from schools in the Connecticut River Valley, many of them from the Springfield area. They actually boarded at Deerfield during the weekdays, and their parents would pick them up to take them home for the weekend. The program lasted three weeks, and concluded with the impressive exhibition in their various classes of all the things the students had accomplished. After that there was a brief ceremony, at which Meera and I congratulated the students on their success. I don't think we had to tell them what an important moment in their young lives that was, for we could see on their faces the joy of knowing that they had taken a new step in life and imagining where that step might lead.

These initiatives, along with everything we do to sustain the strength of the educational experience at Deerfield would not be possible without the loyalty of our alumni and our parents, and for that I will never know how to express my gratitude adequately. Whether it is the special generosity of the Class of 1950 last June, or the parents' campaigns this last year, or the unremitting momentum of our Strength of Heart Campaign for Deerfield, or Deerfield's enviable first-place position in annual support, or the countless other examples of generosity, we are deeply grateful for the opportunity we have to bring opportunity to others.