On Saturday, June 9th, we celebrated twenty years of Fairhaven School. In addition to joining our annual Capture the Flag game, about two hundred current students, alumni, founders, and friends of the school visited, shared stories, played music, ate brick oven pizza, and dug up the time capsule we buried in 1998. Founder and staff member Mark McCaig shared these remarks in the backyard at the time capsule ceremony.
It’s About Time
How do you mark twenty years? We’ve been open about 3,780 days for 30,240 hours. We have 79 graduates. JC has adjudicated approximately 24,074 cases. School Meeting has met about 800 times.
In the summer of 1998, approximately 200 people, almost all volunteers, contributed time, money, muscle, and grit to build the Old Building. It was, as they say, a labor of love. On September 23, 1998, we opened for business, and students immediately started managing their own time here. And so it began. I often boil down the Fairhaven experience, the Fairhaven magic, if you will, to the following: students here have the gift of time. Time to play, time to talk, time to think, time to fail, time to succeed, time to grow, time to change, time to learn, time to forget, time to hide, time to seek, time to jam, time to drum, time to sing, time to swing, time to survive, time to game, time to curse, time to pray, time to Youtube, time to vote, time to plead, time to believe, time to doubt, time to draw, time to read, time to graduate, time to celebrate, time to write, time to add, time to subtract, time to love, and yes, time to hate, time to kickball, time to ultimate, time to infection, time to pretend, time to create, time to explore, time to munchkin, time to cook, time to argue, time to agree, time to hug, time to roughhouse, time to exist peaceably, time to ball, time to skate, time to act, time to improv, time to run, time to foodrun, time to snap, time to insta, time to climb, time to stumble, time to parkour, time to dance, time to clean (occasionally), time to cry, time to laugh, time to give thanks, and finally, just maybe, today we need a new verb: time to fairhaven.
Two more numbers I’d like to share: 1 mastodon tooth found in the stream. And my personal favorite: 10 alumni who have worked here so far. I love this number best because one day, I’ll be gone, and, along with my remarkable colleagues, these alumni will continue the work. They will keep pushing this boulder up the hill, they will fairhaven this place into the next twenty years.
–Mark McCaig
