October update from Head of School

Dear GFS Parents,

It has been such a pleasure to see so many of you around campus in these opening weeks! The start of school has been full of festivities and celebrations, and I have enjoyed the various opportunities to live some of the wonderful early-fall traditions at the Forest. As you know, right now we are in the middle of "Spirit Week" (confession time: I was able - briefly - to get away with wearing pink and denim on Monday, and some of the Upper School students made sure I had a blue ribbon in my hair for wacky hair day, but to everyone's great relief, I did not join in for pajama day - though I tried to convince the students that I actually sleep in my suit!). Between Spirit Week and the Light Blue/Dark Blue sorting that I enjoyed in every division, I can attest that the Garrison Spirit is alive and well - and my ears are still recovering from the joyful sounds of those sorting days.

I have also enjoyed seeing many of you at some of our other occasions, including my formal installation ceremony, the GFS Inaugural Golf Outing this week, and at various athletic contests, college counseling and 9th grade parent nights, seeing all the Middle and Upper School students off for their class trips last week, and other events. Coming up, we have several more opportunities for the community to come together: this Friday, we have hockey "under the lights," as we gather to support our team and the Baltimore BARCS Animal Rescue and Care Shelter; on October 16, we also have an after-school Parents Association Grizzly Tailgate (complete with food trucks!) to celebrate and cheer on several of our teams with home games that afternoon. In addition, we have Back to School Days coming up in every division: look for more details on all of these in the weekly newsletters and online!

Now that we have turned the calendar page to October, we are also settling into our more normal patterns of school, and as much fun as it has been to see the festivities that surround the start of school, it's also been enjoyable and rewarding to see the students and teachers working hard and well together as they teach, learn, collaborate, process, and grow together. Those student-teacher relationships, which are so vitally at the core of everything we do, are magical to observe as they continue to develop over the course of the year.

As promised, I want to update you on the status of the water and lead concerns that I shared in early September. We have followed "best practices" in addressing this situation, using both state guidelines and additional outside experts. As I reported in my first notice, we immediately removed any water fountains that had negative test results, and the laboratory sinks continue to be labeled "non-potable," as they were before the testing. We have since done follow-up testing on every other spigot that had previously exceeded the EPA limits for lead, and in the results (which we received this week), every spigot was well below those limits, and most of them had no measurable levels of lead at all. This indicates that the issue has been in the faucets themselves rather than the piping, and we are continuing the work of replacing all of those faucets. We will run an additional test on these spigots later this fall to make sure that we have addressed every issue.

I also write to provide an update on campus safety and security. As many of you know, Eric Immler, our Director of Campus Safety and Security for the past year, has left GFS to take on a position leading a college security office. In his place, we have hired Michael Glaubach, who will begin his new role on Monday. Michael spent eighteen years on the George Washington University police force, serving as a shift supervisor, Captain of Operations, and Assistant Chief of Police. He has also worked as a private security consultant, and, appropriately, he is an experienced educator: he earned a Masters of Education from Gannon University, and has designed curriculum and taught classes in campus security to undergraduate and graduate students. We will introduce Michael to the students, faculty, and staff in the coming week at various morning meetings and Grizzly Gatherings. In addition, we are in the final stages of hiring an additional full-time member of the security and safety team to further support the very good progress we have made over the past year and this summer in upgrading our security facilities and procedures.

In all, the school year is off to a wonderful start, and I look forward to the many ways that we will connect over the coming months.

Best wishes,

Chris Hughes

Head of School