HEAD LINES
Head Lines:
Community at Trinity
September 2024
Dear Trinity Community,
Welcome to our 30th year! Thirty years ago, there was no Trinity School, and this year we open with 600 students, TK through 12—quite an adventure. The next 12 months will mark the 30th anniversary of several important milestones in the history of our school: the first gathering of our founders (February 1), the official incorporation of the school (May 31), the very first day of school (September 5). We will begin to celebrate all this early in 2025, so stay tuned.
One of our early Trinity families made a remark that has always stuck with me: “We came to Trinity because of our kids, but we parents have gained as much as they have.” I was talking recently with a newly empty-nested alumni parent who voiced the same sentiment, grieving the loss of community for the whole family once the kids graduated. I like to say that Trinity is a Gospel community of learners. Today I am thinking about what community means for us in 2024, and to do that I’d like to take us back to the spring of 2020, when we were sheltering in place and trying to do school at the kitchen table in front of a screen, juggling our jobs from home. Here’s what I wrote in a Head Lines in March 2020:
Community at a human scale is personal, face-to-face, sweaty, and bustling. I miss that. I miss the overloud voices of Middle Schoolers in the hallways outside my office between their classes. I miss standing at the door of the Lower School and saying silly things to the littles as they enter in the mornings, like “Welcome to Tuesday!” I miss handshakes with prospective families touring, sideline conversations at a soccer game, and seeing the whole Upper School plopped down on the floor of the HUB for Cornerstone. I miss seeing your cars drive through the car line and the Track team running across campus. I miss the embodied incarnation of the Trinity School community.
…I think that what we are most likely to learn about community in this season is how much we miss it, how much we depend on that piece of God’s creation at 4011 Pickett Road and all the routines and rituals that happen there. And how much we really just want to be together. In the flesh.
Just over four years from that awful spring, I am grateful that Trinity has recovered from the setback of the pandemic, that those words could describe a day in the life of the Head of School in the fall of 2024. We are back in business, the business of community. “You, Lord, showed favor to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob” (Psalm 85:1).
But we can never simply go back. The Shire that Frodo returns to is not the Shire he left when he set out on his quest; and, maybe more importantly, Frodo is not the same hobbit. So it is with us. Trinity in 2024 is not the Trinity of 2019 or 1995. Changes in our culture and our school have impacted our community, and if we are serious about promoting community, we need to face these changes and understand how to live with them or transform them as we seek to be a Gospel community of learners today.
Today, community in any school is shaped more powerfully by safety and security concerns. I don’t have to rehearse the sad and horrific reasons for this. If you traveled in time from Trinity in 2018 to Trinity in 2024, you would be surprised to find all the outside doors locked, with card readers. We’re long past lamenting the loss of whatever freedoms those safety improvements have curtailed. We are learning to gather for Hatch Day in second grade after we sign in; and we fully expect to be buzzed into every building we try to enter. But we still enter.
Second, we’re all more comfortable post-pandemic with remote and virtual connections. The pandemic made us all more proficient with Zoom, Google Meet, and FaceTime. Remote parent conferences are a real possibility now for those without flexibility to come to campus. And I wasn’t surprised last year to see an iPad set up for fourth grade Biography Day so that family members could witness their child’s presentation. This is one of the ways that Trinity is adjusting to the reality that many of our families have two working parents whose flexibility to get to school is sometimes limited.
Still, the pandemic taught us that in-person learning is part of Trinity’s secret sauce. If there is any way to make it here on campus to see the TK Circus, to be in the room for the committee meeting, to sit in the bleachers for the game, you’ll be richly rewarded. Charlotte Mason said that a big part of education is its atmosphere: this ineffable something makes a huge difference, and you can’t get it on a screen. We are trying to schedule events with dual working families in mind this year, so that more of us can be here.
At the beginning of our new school year, I’d like to take this opportunity to say, clearly and unequivocally, that parents, guardians, grandparents, and special friends of students are welcome here on Trinity’s campus. We are back open not only for business without pandemic restrictions—we are open for community. One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic was that parents were not on campuses across our country for an extended time. We mean to change that.
We are working hard this year to communicate clearly with families, with as much advance notice as we can, about the key events you are invited to attend. I’m enclosing a 2024–2025 School Calendar (thank you, Lindsay Roseborough!), which includes notable special events, Head of School Coffees, and school holidays. Your students’ teachers and division directors will be sending regular communications to tell you when Greco-Roman Day is scheduled, when your eighth grader is presenting in Sanctuary, when the fourth graders will recite King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and when the Lower School Strings are playing in Fellowship. Come on down the sidelines of a soccer game this fall, or linger on the playground with other Trinity parents after school. All-School Chapels are one of the best ways to “taste and see” the mission of the school in action. Come join us.
The Trinity Parent Organization, led this year by President Alexa Gerend and President-Elect Laurel Sears, would love to hear from any parents who want to get involved or volunteer at Trinity School. You can reach them at tpo@tsdch.org.
It takes a village to raise a child. Welcome to the village at the end of Pickett Road, the community we call Trinity. Let’s do this together.
Non Nobis,
Chip Denton
Head of School