" I have often been in this dorm before,
But I always came through a window on the second floor;
Now I find my way
By the light of day
Through the halls of this dorm on the hill . . ."

The show illustrated the Abbot faculty's incredible spirit and grit in accepting a merger that was as inevitable as it was desirable but would end the existence of their beloved all-girls' school.

Just a few months earlier, the Abbot Academy trustees had turned over to Phillips Academy, for the sum of one dollar, Abbot's property and as sets, including its $2.5 million endowment. In exchange, PA would take over all of Abbot's obligations and responsibilities. The following fall, Abbot students would attend a school without Abbot's name, without many of its faculty, without a single department chaired by an an Abbot teacher, and without a single student organization headed by an Abbot girl.

But Abbot Academy did not disappear. Just when Pedagogical Philanderings was entertaining everyone with its wry portrayal of the hippie-dippie Abbot chicks skipping to the promised land of Andover, the Abbot trustees were quietly, carefully and skillfully procuring $1 million from the endowment to create an Abbot Academy Association that would carry on their school's name and its unique educational spirit.

Says PA English instructor Jean St. Pierre, a former Abbot teacher who coordinates the association's work, "The trustees were aware of what we were experiencing during the merger and of our anxiety about losing the oldest incorporated school in New England for educating women. It was an amazing leap of faith for them to take $1 million and grant total autonomy to the association's directors. It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, for the trustees to commit that money to the future."

One of those trustees, Mary "Myndie" Howard Nutting '40, helped establish the association with fellow trustees Beverly Brooks Floe '41 and Melville Chapin '36.

"We wanted to do something with Abbot's endowment that would fill in the needs of coeducation," Nutting says. "After talking with Phillips Headmaster Ted Sizer, we set up the association with a board of directors to dispense the income from our investment, and I marvel now that the statement of policy we wrote is still in use."

The Abbot Academy Association has, for 25 years now, fulfilled its mission of preserving "the spirit, dignity and high standard of the Abbot Academy tradition" by providing seed money from that initial endowment for hundreds of programs on campus. Grants are especially useful for programs that explore innovative approaches to education and the arts, the study of gender and multicultural issues, and the promotion of a nurturing environment on campus. And while the directors have committed income to grants year after year, the endowment itself has grown to $6 million.

Susan Urie Donahue, current president of the Abbot Academy Association, graduated from the all-girls' school in spring 1973. By then, she had attended nearly two years' worth of classes with the boys up the hillóa member, as she puts it, of the "experiment with coeducation."

The Abbot girls and the Andover boys, she says, were not particularly different back thenónot in what they hoped for, not in what they were learning, not in what they wanted to do with their lives. Still, Abbot Academy was very different from Andover; it was smaller and more nurturing, and innovative, with strong, "sacred" traditions. It deserved to be cherished in a tangible way, she says, which is exactly what the Abbot Academy Association has accomplished.

The association is a living legacy," she says. The grants it makes preserve Abbot's integrity, mission and values while funding programs that have helped shape the very essence of the current school.

It was Abbot Academy Association money that launched Andover's faculty Steering Committee to help refine a vision for Andover's future. It was also Abbot Academy Association money that led to creation of the Headmaster's Symposium, the Community Service Program, the counseling services at Graham House, and the Brace Center for Gender Studies. Association grants have paid for art and athletic programs, museum exhibitions, films and books and student activities. They have supported a playground for faculty kids, the restoration of campus antiques, and hundreds of other programs and projects.

Twice each year, the association's 11 directors gather on campus to spend an evening hearing funding requests from faculty and staff, as well as from students with faculty sponsors. Then they break for the night and reconvene in the morning to huddle over coffee and pastries and papers and budgets.

These are busy men and women who have ditched out of car pools and meetings, clicked off e-mail, and abandoned spouses and kids. They work all day long, figuring out how best to structure the grants, which range from $100 to more than $10,000.

At its last meeting, for instance, students Mariko Hirose '99 and Laura Oh '99 were granted association funds to buy a laboratory kit for their community service project, Science Club for Girls. Music teacher William Thomas received money for costumes, staging and lighting for a new musical based on Genesis. Math teachers Corbin Lang and David Penner received a grant to create new material and teaching methods in geometry. The association awarded 14 grants in all, including money for a multi-cultural student newsletter, a puppet theatre, a Caribbean Heritage weekend, a CD-Rom Pot Potpourri, and a pilot program in African studies.

Sometimes, there are more requests for grants than there is grant money. But sometimes, like the last time the directors met, on Nov. 14, there is money left over.

Thus, on the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Abbot Academy Association, the directors are hoping faculty, staff and students will take the time to dream big dreams and present grant proposals to the association at its next meeting, in the spring. The school named Abbot Academy may have been dissolved in 1973 by order of the Massachusetts Superior Court, but the idea that was Abbotóthe spirit of Abbotólives on when those big dreams come true. 

Nina Scott teaches English atPhillips Academy and is a free-lance writer.

Copyright, Phillips Academy, 2000