This past year has been a gratifying one at Putney. As we welcome Emily and Gordon Jones to Putney and express our gratitude and best wishes to Brian and Joyce Vining Morgan, it is an appropriate moment to take stock of our accomplishments and the challenges that remain.

As you can see in the pages that follow, Putney has been blessed with the generous support of our alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff and friends. Your financial support and gifts of time and goodwill have enabled us to enrich the program and the physical plant, and helped Putney remain a unique educational institution. This past year we benefited from record levels of support for the annual fund, and many generous contributions to our capital campaign. As schools everywhere grapple with the growing gap between the cost of educating students and tuition, your generosity has made all the difference for Putney. Thank you.

This past year, we congratulated 61 graduates of the class of 2007 who benefited from Brian and Joyce’s leadership. Over the past 12 years, Putney can thank Brian and Joyce for many accomplishments, including:

• Attracting and developing a devoted, energetic and talented faculty, staff and administrative team
• Increasing Putney’s student enrollment from 168 to 225
• Making and keeping Putney fiscally sound
• Growing the endowment to more than $20 million and securing the future of the Farm
• Meeting the physical needs of the school with the completion of Huseby House and the Michael S. Currier Center
• Raising Putney’s profile and helping students find colleges that are supportive of who they are
• Stewarding the education and development of 12 classes of Putney graduates

I know you all join me in your gratitude to Brian and Joyce for their extraordinary rvice and friendship over the past 12 years.

During this time we have also invested in strengthening our relationship with our neighbors, and will continue to emphasize and develop community service and engagement as a part of our program and way of life. We have paid particular attention to inviting the greater community to events on campus such as art exhibits, talks by guest speakers and movies, including this year’s premier of Charlie Bartlett. The Michael S. Currier Center has truly become a community resource, as we had hoped it would during the planning and construction work. Harvest Festival has become not only an event for our students, faculty and alumni, but a community event including many local nonprofits and artisans. Our students also perform community service at local agencies, and we welcome our neighbors to enjoy our many acres of land and miles of trails.

During this year, we also pushed forward on our strategic planning effort. With Emily now in place, we expect to drive this process to conclusion over the coming year. While we are excited about where this process is taking us, the challenges are sobering. Boarding schools in America face an uncertain future. Many families are turning away from boarding education, both for social and economic reasons. Tuition is beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest families. At the same time, we are seeing a dramatic growth in school-based support and education-related services, particularly those focused on health and wellness. These services, combined with regulatory changes, are driving the operating costs of schools up—way up. Many boarding schools are responding by engaging in a facilities “arms race” to attract the strongest students. Others are closing or becoming day schools.

We believe that Putney offers a unique and important program, and that our future lies in strengthening those aspects of our community and program that are distinctive. We must become, if anything, more Putney-like. We must remain true to the values and founding principles that inspired Mrs. Hinton to buy a farm and start a school for girls and boys, and find a way to continue to live those values in the face of a changing technological, economic and social environment. Therefore chief among our strategic priorities is a commitment to sustaining and strengthening the core of our program: academic rigor, work, the arts, the outdoors, physical activity and the community. In recognition of the changing geopolitical climate, not to mention the actual climate, we also recognize a need to further strengthen our international programming and to develop cultural competence, and to more fully embrace and incorporate environmental sustainability into our campus and program.

Of course, much of our energy this past year was devoted to completing the search for our next head of school. We could not be more pleased that Emily Jones is joining us as the ninth director of the Putney School. Emily brings a mix of experience and talent that we believe are well suited to the challenges we now face. A search committee of nine trustee, faculty, staff and student members stewarded an extensive search process, in which many members of the Putney community participated. Many of you sent in suggestions and came to campus to meet the candidates. Your participation was essential in making the process a success, and we thank you for your efforts.

We are looking forward to the coming year with enthusiasm and hope you will join us in making Emily and Gordon welcome, and in making their efforts to lead and guide Putney into the coming years successful.

Elizabeth Eisold Blaylock ’80