Late on the afternoon of Monday, September 10, the new and returning students of the 2007-2008 Stoneleigh-Burnham Middle School gathered together for the first time this year. As we formed a large circle in the Humanities classroom, the girls looked around with their faces displaying a range and mix of emotions - perhaps happiness at seeing old friends from last year, or relief at recognizing familiar faces from the new student orientation the previous day, or uncertainty as to what unfamiliar faces were going to be like, or anticipation of the first day of classes which was  - finally! - on the horizon, and underlying it all that quiet optimism and inner energy which characterizes middle school students and makes them such a pleasure to work with. Myself, as I looked around the circle, I shared in all their emotions, underscored with the absolute conviction that every one of these girls was amazing and the cumulative power in that room was, literally, awesome.

As we so often do in these early stages of the year, we talked about community and what that can and should mean for all of us. Everyone wrote down a word, phrase, or in some cases series of phrases that connected to the idea of "community," and read their card aloud, generating the following list:

"responsibility - always together forever - tight bond - teamwork - together - responsibility - caring - work together - working together - help each other -  teamwork -  helping - kindness - conviviality - respect toward each other - beneficial to each other - helping other people - working together - helpful - friendship - conversation - teamwork - many people - understanding each other - teamwork - conversation - helping each other - togetherness"

No word appears more frequently than "together" and its variants, and every single word on the list connects to the idea of "relationship" in some way. It is not surprising that should happen in an all-girls school, for we know that relationships are fundamentally important to how girls learn, work, and navigate through their lives. Carol Gilligan has written about the ethic of Justice, in which moral dilemmas are resolved primarily through the application of rules, and the ethic of Care, in which moral dilemmas are resolved primarily by examining the effects on relationships of different possible solutions. In the book "Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School," Dr. Gilligan and her colleagues Nona P. Lyons and Trudy J. Hanmer describe how these teenaged girls react to different hypothetical situations, and it is striking how even those girls who use the ethic of Justice to solve these problems still explain their choices most often in terms of how following or not following rules might affect specific relationships.

Eight days after this initial all-middle school meeting, at the first meeting of MOCA (the middle school student government),  the students looked over their list and were given the chance to add new words or phrases. They chose:

"love - happiness - family - being together as one - time - trust"

As always, their answers showed extraordinary insight. Building community does take time, and both requires and strengthens love and trust in the process. But as a community comes together as one, a sense of well-being, as in a family, results, and leads inevitably to happiness. This was the number one goal of parents of last year's middle school for their daughters, and whether or not it will be an explicit goal of parents this year, it certainly is something toward which we are inevitably working. We look forward to partnering with all families as we undertake this journey, and wish every one of you the happiest of all possible school years.