Once upon a time...
. . . some friends dreamed of a new school for their children and for their children’s children. Every person and every institution has a unique story to tell. That dream was the beginning of our story. The founders of Forsyth Country Day School envisioned a school that would embody the best of traditional independent school education, and they set forth on an adventure that would ultimately bring together many innovative ideas and considerable creative energy. Today, founders’ children’s children attend our school, and our collective goal is to make all students better and to make our school one of the best in the nation. We have grown in school population, depth of academic offerings, facilities, variety of athletic teams, playing fields, and acreage. How we got here is our institutional story which, for many of us, includes our individual story.
Storytelling has a high profile at our school, thanks to the annual Storytelling Festival, which brings nationally and internationally known storytellers to our campus. Each year we invite our students, parents, teachers, and alumni to be an active part of the Festival and to share their own stories, and each year the number of our own storytellers grows. Who can forget Chuck Jones’ yellow bicycle story (or that pumpkin story), or Judith Kuhn’s tale about the snake in the car?
As a part of this school for thirty years, my own story and the School’s story have been tightly interwoven. FCDS had been in existence about two and one-half years when I came to its campus in March of 1973 as a substitute music teacher. Five buildings were on the campus when I arrived: the Founders Building (now housing Development, Business, part of the Middle School and part of the Dining Hall), the Humanities Building (now Foreign Languages), the Science and Math Building (now English and Art), the Gymnasium (now the Tierney Gym), and the Lowrey Lower School, which was the newest building on the campus. These original buildings are still on our campus today, but you may need an expert guide to identify them.
As you might guess, founding a new school was not without its eccentricities, and immediately a folklore was born. One legend firmly in place when I arrived was the story of the bugging of the teacher’s lounge. I’ve verified this story with the student (whose children now attend FCDS) who actually crawled into the ceiling to retrieve the incriminating microphone and tape recorder; if you want to know the rest of the story, you will need to talk to founding teacher and Alumni Director, John Danforth!
When you achieve thirty years of service in a single institution (as a music teacher, Lower School Librarian, Director of Library Media Services, Director of Academic Resources including Technology, Academic Dean, and currently, Director of the Williams Library Discovery Center), it is understandable that your thoughts may turn to your own legacy, which is interwoven with the FCDS story. In the fall of 1973, I was named the first fulltime Librarian for the Lower School and, working from a space the size of one and a half classrooms, was encouraged to articulate a vision for libraries at Forsyth Country Day School. The library for grades 1 – 6 was located in the center of the Lower School hallway. At that time we had not added Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten. The bookshelves extended up the walls beyond the reach of the youngest children, and I remember small tykes scaling the shelves to reach the dinosaur books. My fulltime appointment as Lower School Librarian coincided with a nation-wide movement that redefined the school library’s role in education, calling for libraries to be innovative and to lead actively in providing exciting resources and modern technology for teachers and students. In short, it was the time of “audiovisual” materials and “media centers” – the sound filmstrip, the 16mm film, the cassette tape, the videotape, the study print, “modern technology,” and anything else that would make learning exciting. When our library added floor pillows and paperback racks, some folks called them “gimmicks,” but the students found them welcoming.
In 1975 the School, continuing its early building programs, enlarged the Lower School Library and relocated the original library for grades 7- 12 to a larger space (which now houses Middle School Guidance, 7th Grade Science, the sixth grade classrooms and the Palm lab!). I moved to the library for older students, and my job became Director of Library Media Services, guiding the library program for the whole school. In the next few years, the School created a separate Middle School, added Kindergarten and then added Pre-Kindergarten. When computers came to schools in the mid 1980’s, our school became a leader in using technology for research, and our library, continuing the tradition of innovation, became the first in the state to offer Dialog searching to its Upper School students. Today’s students use both simple and advanced searching techniques when they access our web-based library catalog, our specialized databases available at both school and home, and Internet search engines such as Google.
Thirty years have seen the libraries expand, relocate, and finally come together in the Williams Library Discovery Center, which opened in the summer of 1995.
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Members of the Class of 2008 move books out of the old and into the new
The library has always been an advocate for new technology and three technology labs were included in the plans for the Williams Library Discovery Center. I remember the architect telling me that our floor would be like spaghetti if we added any more data, voice, and electrical conduits in the building. Today, eight years later, we use all of the planned connections and constantly reconfigure and rearrange and add computers, scanners, and printers to provide additional support for our students! Because academic and administrative use of technology has grown rapidly, Technology has expanded to become a department. The Library continues to promote the computerized search for knowledge and to be an advocate for technology.
To prepare for this column, I began looking through old files and old pictures to remind myself of milestones along the thirty-year journey at FCDS, and realized that the time has come to focus on our story as a School. The Arthur Link family gave the Archives room in the Williams Library Discovery Center, and that gift serves as a reminder to our school community to gather and keep the records that enable us to continue to tell our story. Through the years we’ve saved newspaper articles, files, photographs, publications, yearbooks, videotapes of programs and events, and even one-inch reel-to-reel tapes of early basketball games filmed from the WFCD booth up on the wall in the original gym. The time has come to organize these pieces of the history of our school and to gather stories from our founders, graduates, parents, faculty and students. So, I am asking for your help! If you would enjoy being involved in organizing the years of information and identifying photographs or if you have a part of the FCDS story you want to share, please call me at ext. 312 or email me at jeanettesmith@fcds.org.
Now, in the tradition of the great storytellers, we as a community can gather our archival tales, so that the story that began “Once upon a time . . . ” can take the next step toward “and they lived happily ever after . . . ”
