The Griffin: A Monthly Newsletter from the Head of School

Dear Garden Community,

We enter February with a lot of hope and looking toward a bright and fruitful spring. As you know, we have been dreaming of the future and after months of committee work, recently began the roll out of our new Strategic Plan, the Garden Road to 100.

This new plan has now been shared through a series of webinars with more than half of our current families, all staff and faculty, and a number of students. The goal of each overview session has been to orient participants to the dense document so as each community member views it, there is context for the process we undertook to develop it and an understanding of how to navigate all of the goals and recommendations found within it.

This is certainly a challenging time to be a senior. After years of anticipation, many of the culminating events enjoyed by seniors across the country look different than expected. Garden School is committed to ensuring this year feels as special as any senior year because our students deserve it. This year’s senior class is an engaging group of young adults poised for very exciting futures in Medicine, Business, Engineering, Health & Wellness, the Arts, International Affairs, and more.

We have a winter and spring full of events intended to celebrate them so they know even though these are tough days for a school to navigate, we are committed to making them feel honored and appreciated by their school. This includes doubling down on old traditions like an elegant prom, a commencement full of pomp, and a Senior Dinner. Naturally, these events will bend slightly to meet safety guidelines, but we are determined to pull them off in a manner befitting the moment. We also will introduce several new smaller traditions like a Senior Breakfast, Senior Service Day, and Senior/Alumni Mentoring Day while bringing back some old traditions that have fallen off the last few years like the Senior Time Capsule. The class of 2021 will not only have a great finish to their years at Garden, they also will leave their mark on future senior classes here by setting in motion a whole series of special events and new traditions. Join us in wishing the Class of 2021 well from the whole community!

Earlier this semester, Upper Division teacher and History Department Co-Chair Sarah O’Sullivan was nominated by Garden School as an Outstanding Educator to the Academy for Teachers. The Academy provides a forum for exemplar teachers to share their most rigorous and engaging lessons with peers. In addition, these educators attend master classes led by scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Shobana Shankar and Yohuru Williams.

This summer, as a result, Sarah will be given the opportunity to present her work to other exceptional educators across the NYC region on a new course she launched at Garden called Activism to Legislation. This Upper Division course highlights brave American activists who led the masses to awaken the consciousness of American politicians in the quest for a more equitable society.

The course has examined the role of African American activists such as Frederick Douglass, Brian Stevenson and John Lewis as well as female activists such as Alice Paul, Gloria Steinem, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. As they embark on the second semester, students in this elective look at the roles of Latino, LGBTQ, and climate activists.

Garden was proud to nominate Sarah to The Academy and we are excited that she has been chosen among the few exemplar teachers across the region to lead a summer seminar for fellow educators – a very well-deserved honor. Congratulations to Ms. O’Sullivan!

Great ideas are not created in a vacuum. That's what Theodora R. in Ninth Grade encouraged us to think about when she wrote a winning essay for the 2021 Immerse Essay competition that awards high school students with a scholarship to study with Cambridge and Oxford scholars this summer. Indeed, Theo’s essay did not come out of a vacuum. First, Mr. Battaglia, our Upper School Head, asked students to write an article for Immerse. Students could choose from dozens of prompts. Theo decided to write about creativity because she and her peers wrote and illustrated a graphic novel for Mrs. Massand's English class, using Google Apps for Education. The project got her gears turning, and she used Mr. Roselli's Freshman Writing class to hammer out ideas and generate several drafts. Writing is not easy, but it's incredibly gratifying. So, with profound admiration for Theo, we proudly announce her winning essay, celebrate her upcoming summer immersion at Oxford, and commend search for creativity!

Sabrina Sukhan '96 - From Jackson Heights to the Nations First Hospital

Sabrina can identify several points of inflection during her academic career. One of them was attending Garden School for high school, where her passion for English literature was nurtured. She subsequently went on to New York University and developed a growing interest and commitment to the field of medicine. After completing her training in obstetrics and gynecology at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Sabrina became an attending physician at Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital. Sabrina is currently the lead physician of her practice, the medical director of the Ludmir Center for Women's Health and is the course director of two medical student clinical courses

Jonathan Batiste '02 - Food for the Masses

Jonathan Batista loved his time at Garden and credits it with changing the trajectory of his life. He has a long list of teachers who impacted him, but especially acknowledges Mr. Hale as being a personal inspiration. After graduating in 2002, Jon pursued his passion for food, opened the first Empanada Truck in Las Vegas, and has launched the non-profit Chefs4Vegas as a means to support others through the pandemic. To date, Jon and his team have fed nearly

A new Garden tradition, Senior Mentoring Day is coming soon. This new initiative pairs current seniors with members of our esteemed Alum for coordinated and facilitated interviews, mentorship, and advice as our students prepare to step outside of the nurturing nest of Garden and off into the world. Interested in joining fellow Alum and volunteering as a mentor? Submit interest here. This is one of the most important ways you can give back to Garden and ensure a bright future for every Griffin.