Four-and-one-half years ago I sat on a hill in southern Vermont with my daughter Bela​. I had a check in my hand to the Phillips Exeter Academy, where she had been accepted with nearly a full-ride scholarship into their “Leader-Maker” high school program. A gateway to the best schools, PEA promised amazing education, discussion-based study, and intense, laser-focused learning.

She had pretty much decided, though there were some misgivings. Then she had a meeting with her favorite Montessori teacher, who heard “Philips Exeter”, and said “Have you ever thought of the Putney School? The environment there might fit you better.”

What was the Putney School?

A few Google searches and intro videos later, we found ourselves on a last-minute reconnaissance mission, on a Thanksgiving Day weekend that promised no living soul on campus, to at least see how it “felt”. Two and a half hours later, we drove past barns and dorms and parked on a wind-swept hill surrounded by hills and trees to the horizon. We wandered the campus, walking into any building that was open, which meant most of them. We poked our noses into the dorms, snuck a peek in the observatory, petted a few cows, sat on the grass at height of land. “This is my dream school,” Bela said.

PEA was a “plan” school, and The Putney School a “dream” school. Do you grasp the linear fast track? Do you embrace the wide, round world?

A few weeks later she had applied and been accepted at the Putney School as well, and there we were again, at the admissions building on the top of the hill, me with that Phillips Exeter acceptance letter and signed downpayment check in my hand, ready to be posted; and Bela with an immediate, complex decision to make. This education would cost the family more, and would mean she would move away from the home she had known since the age of five, and the friends she had kept for all of those years.

– Can’t we wait? I can’t decide just like this!

I told her I was sorry, truly sorry, but the acceptance date for the schools was the next day. Agonizing, really. How could she choose?

– Can I use your cell phone? And can I be alone for a bit?

I left her in the car and walked around the hill. She carefully, clearly, phoned each of her closest friends, to talk with them, to ask them what would happen to their friendship, to hear what they thought about the opportunity, and what they saw in her.

Each told her: how much they loved her; how much they would miss her; how perfect this school was for her; how they would all grow apart and remain together. After some minutes she opened the car door and called me back.

– I have the most amazing friends. And I’ll be going to my dream school.

Today, after an amazing four years for study, activism, farming, social service; being dorm head, then on the school board, then student head of school; after founding a community earth-day festival, and talking with wall-street investment fund managers to help the school divest from fossil fuels; after so many friendships with students and teachers and parents; after first and second and third loves; Bela crowned the day, June 7, 2015, by graduating from this dream of school, and launching herself into the next unexpectable and doubtless exciting phase of life.

With great love, respect, and support: congratulations on a job so well done.

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