Vacation time should be easy, but for this blog site, it's a drag. I mean, the mission here is to provide a window into life with Proctor students. This means that I spend the summer offering observations illuminated by boring campus vistas or images mined from archives. All that ended Thursday evening with the annual Day Student/Family Picnic, held on the terrace in front of Cannon Dining Room.
 
Let the action begin! Day students are a critical mass at Proctor; we're opening with 93, the largest day population--I'm guessing--in a century. They come with a social advantage, for while boarders hail from 30 states (NM, CA, MA, MI, NH, ME, OH, NY, CT, PA, RI, VA, AZ, WA, FL, VT, IL, NC, CT, CO, MD, NJ, SC, SD, TX, DC, TN, GA, DE, PR) and 12 foreign nations (England, Mexico, Korea, Germany, Cameroon, Guatemala, Pakistan, Morocco, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Canada, Sweden), many new day students know one another from local middle schools. Name tags:
 
Over the next week, we will welcome 123 new students: 73 boys and 50 girls. Seventy comprise the largest ninth grade we have enjoyed in--I'm guessing--well over a century.
 
Thirty-three new sophomores bring that class to 92, 43 girls and 49 boys. This is a very strong enrollment position for the future, because the junior and senior classes (93 and 98) are about the same size as the sophomore class, so we are front-loaded with young kids. To an extent, we will enroll new upper class persons to the extent that we experience attrition. (Notice that if you have a very large senior class, you exercise less selectivity in replacing them through the admission process.)
 
Being such a uniquely informal, supportive, experiential college prep school, Proctor is a place about which people tend to be opinionated. Those who like Proctor, love it. This proposition is validated by the shocking number of "legacies" (immediate relatives of current or past Proctor students) enrolled. Of the 123 new students, 29 are siblings or legacies, and the total number of sibs and legacies enrolled is 89!
 
Off topic, but also of interest is this: of the school's 160 employees, 18 are alumni/ae!

That's enough data for now. I'm just happy to have some teenagers on campus again!