"Planning for the future in a way that fulfills the past is a very important part of what we do. The new science, math and technology building will be just one example of that, but a very important one."

REPORT OF THE HEADMASTER

This fall it was Deerfield's turn to welcome a re-accreditation visit from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, an event that occurs every ten years. The leader of the visiting team happened to be my good friend, Ty Tingley, principal of Phillips Exeter Academy. If the visit went well (which it did) it was partly because it was well led, and also because we had prepared well for it. Any accreditation review will begin with what a school says about itself, so that our own self-study in advance of the visit was a very important and very inclusive part of the process. It occurred to me that readers of this Annual Report might want to know what we had to say about ourselves in the preamble to the self-study, and so I reproduce it here in the following pages, for everyone to read, just as we wrote it last spring.

During the most recent decade of our history, we have considerably strengthened the intellectual, moral, and financial health of the school. The student body, faculty and board of trustees are more diverse, admissions even more selective, our financial aid more aggressively funded. The physical plant, enviable in 1994, is in even better shape today. Excellent faculty and staff appointments have been made. Faculty are now thoroughly evaluated and even more competitively compensated. Difficult but important issues of "pace" and "the moral vitality of the school," which would in any case be unlikely ever to be fully resolved, have at least been vigorously and thoughtfully debated. We have added some courses to our curriculum (Chinese language, and Middle Eastern history, the Cambridge course, and Arabic literature, for example) and tried to address the pace issue by reorganizing the weekly schedule of classes, so that each class meets four times instead of five. We have established a teaching fellows program, and we have founded the Deerfield Academy Press, which has published five books and the annual editions of the English, history, and language journals of student work. We also established the Bicentennial Fellowship program -now called the Wilson Visiting Fellow-an endowed position that brings to Deerfield every year someone from outside who will contribute in a construct very special way to our community all year long. Meanwhile, we established the Lambert Fellow program that brings a visiting writer to Deerfield for Chapin a three or four-day visit each year, and we have established at least ten additional distinguished chairs, many of them in honor of earlier faculty members at school.

To support the academic life of the school we have refurbished our classroom building, built a new dance studio, and are now planning for the construction of a new science, math and technology building which, when completed, will have been the largest such project ever undertaken by Deerfield.

Our international horizons have also expanded. In 1995 Deerfield became a founding member of Global Connections, an international organization of national schools worldwide. We hosted the Global Connections congress at Deerfield in June of 2000. And now we are a member of the Round Square organization as well.

In residential life we have constructed three new dormitories, and added significantly to three others. We have accordingly reduced the ratio of students to faculty members in our dormitories. Our faculty housing has been improved at the same time.

The athletic program, already strong, has been considerably strengthened. The gymnasium project was finished in 1995, with a new pool and squash courts, and many other enhancements. As for our athletic fields, each one has been, or soon will be, re-landscaped and irrigated. Four new fields have been developed in the south meadows. The tennis courts have been moved slightly to the north and completely re-surfaced, with the possibility that six of them will be covered. The academy is now hoping to finalize the purchase of a splendid new site on the Connecticut River for its crew program, with plans to construct a boathouse next year.

The Community Service Program has grown enormously. Headquartered in a restored Chapin House, our program now has great numbers of students going out to all corners of Franklin County in the afternoon, including the largest number of Big Brothers/Big Sisters in Franklin County. We also have become the clearing-house headquarters for all volunteer opportunities in Franklin County, which we maintain on our own website in Chapin. Meanwhile, Heritage Day, inaugurated seven years ago, has become the much-anticipated moment in the fall term when school stops and we all go out in teams to accomplish special service projects. Finally, we should note that Deerfield's contribution to the United Way has tripled, and we are now the number one institution in employee contributions in Franklin County. This past year we were given the "Company of the Year" award.

Developments in technology have been quite extraordinary. It was only in 1994 that the Committee on the Technology Initiative was established, subsequently becoming the Committee on Technology Policy. In 1995 we established our Deerfield.edu website and also the Parker Technology Center. In 1998 the Office of Information Technology Services was founded, and a director hired for the first time. We installed our fiber-optic network in 1995, along with high-speed Ethernet cabling in each building. Our massive network now supports campus information needs and services, as well as our growing energy management system. We began our faculty laptop program in 1998, and now the student laptop program. Last September we undertook the replacement of our administrative data processing with the Banner system. All student rooms and all classrooms are wired. We have a growing number of fully electronic classrooms, and now wireless classrooms as well. When the Banner system is completely installed we will have a single, integrated database for the entire campus.

For two years a committee of faculty, students, parents and alumni reviewed our support for the inner lives of our students, with the result that the new position of dean of spiritual and ethical life was recommended to the headmaster. The recommendation was accepted, and the position established. It has now been filled by the Reverend Elizabeth Clement P'00, of Atlanta, Georgia.

During all of this time we have been extremely busy in our external affairs-first in planning for and then implementing the celebration of our Bicentennial, beginning five years ago. This was an immense, ongoing event for Deerfield, lasting for two years. It was followed by an even greater undertaking, Strength of Heart: The Campaign for Deerfield. When the results were announced, we had raised more money in less time than any school our size had ever accomplished. We became the first school to win AAA ratings from the two principal bond rating authorities. We achieved the highest percentage level of giving in our Annual Support program of all the schools we typically compare ourselves with. But just as important, we reclaimed our heritage as well, and used the occasion of the Bicentennial to remember the past, and all the people who have preceded us and bequeathed us our tasks and our opportunities today. Accordingly, we have paid attention to the look and feel of our campus, wanting it always to evoke that sense of "permanence" that is part of Deerfield. We have tried to uphold the relationship between built and open space, wood and brick, large and small, old and new, sun and shade. We have planted trees, established gardens and orchards, and put up picket and split-rail fences, being guided by the wish to make anyone's journey from one part of the campus to another as pleasant as possible.

Planning for the future in such a way that fulfills the past is a very important part of what we do. The new science, math, and technology building will be just one example of that, but a very important one. As with so many other things, it could not possibly be accomplished without the very strong board leadership and board support that Deerfield enjoys. In this respect alone a progression of great importance has occurred over the last ten years, with the board, through all of its committees, exercising a strong ambitiousness for all that we are doing during this time. It is as if we are all together determined that there will be no "might have beens" to look back upon as we stride confidently forward and take advantage of this moment of great opportunity in the history of Deerfield.