About NMH Northfield

Weekend ends one chapter, begins another for NMH

Monday, September 12, 2005
By JANET BOND, Recorder Staff

NORTHFIELD — They said goodbye, but refused to call the ceremony a passing of the torch.

In a weekend called “Celebrate Northfield,” wrapped around student convocation, 175 alumni congregated on Northfield Mount Hermon School’s Northfield campus to mourn the loss of their campus and celebrate memories.

In the last of the Northfield campus activities, alumni gathered at Round Top to light a torch that would be carried by current students and selected alumni relay-style to the Mount Hermon campus, Saturday.

To those gathered, the flame that was used to light a bowl at the Mount Hermon campus Memorial Chapel reflected the spirit of the Northfield campus and the school’s commitment to keeping that spirit alive.

Saturday morning, alumni moved from an intellectual discussion of stewardship of the Northfield campus, what will be its future, to an emotional sharing of its past that evoked as many tears as it did laughter.

Carol Ramsey, board of trustee member and chairwoman of the Northfield Stewardship Committee, talked about the progress the trustees have made toward finding a second use for the campus.

Ramsey, herself a Northfield girl, graduated in the last class before the schools merged campuses in 1971 to become one school with two co-ed campuses.

She impressed on the audience how much the trustees had studied Northfield of the private boarding school before making their decision in 2004 to become a one-campus school on the Mount Hermon campus. She told them that the decision for the future use of the Northfield campus, now being studied by the Stewardship Committee, was being as carefully considered.

“We will not move unless and until we have a full understanding of the decision we are making,” Ramsey said.

To date, the school has had more than 50 inquiries from the brochure it sent to more than a thousand educational institutions in New England, said Ramsey. Those responding tended to be “arts and educational institutions looking for prestigious growth.”

Ramsey offered off-the-cuff and personal observations as she worked to inform and also engage the alumni in the reasons why their school had chosen this path.

When Ramsey asked her audience to look at the future, she talked about one of the most important results of the consolidation and downsizing of the school — an ability to increase the financial aid it could offer to worthy students who otherwise would not be able to afford the school.

“When I was admitted, the tuition with scholarships was greater than my father’s gross salary,” said the former Alabama resident.

Her mother had to get a job so they could afford her education.

“Yah, we know you have this need, but we’re only going to give you one-quarter of (tuition) or a half of (tuition),” she said, mocking the way financial aid offers must sound to needy students.

“This move helps us to fill that need,” she said.

The student enrollment has decreased from 1,012 in January 2004 to a current enrollment of 886. By 2008, Ramsey said the school projected an enrollment of about 650 with an increase in endowment per student of almost $100,000 to $210,000. Spending per student would also increase by about $17,000 per student to $47,000.

That, plus assurances that the campus transition would honor the values on which the school was founded by evangelist D.L. Moody, left a mostly enthusiastic audience headed up the hill to Round Top, the burial site of Dwight and Emma Moody.

Lorren “Lorrie” Byron, dean of faculty for the school, led the group through memories, prayer, dance and song to the lighting of the torch that would carry the spirit of “Northfielders” to the Mount Hermon campus.

The audience turned tearful listening to Byron talk about the “palpable latent energy” she felt as she “walked the empty campus.”

Byron read selections from three earlier Northfield campus girls’ winning essays, occasionally generating laughter, but more often her readings were received in a deep silence.

Particularly when she read a long passage from the essay by Janice Cort, class of 1959, who recalled a walk through the morning mist of the Connecticut River while she pondered the roots of the genuine happiness she’d experienced over the nearly ended school year. Cort found her answer as she stood on Round Top and gazed down into the valley.

“It was not merely happiness that I felt here; it was a serenity and peace that had dwelt here since its beginning and seemed destined to continue until eternity … I lived, and worked, and played in a fellowship: I was a living part of that fellowship. A great feeling of belonging surged up within me…”

Women wiped tears from their cheeks and sniffled discreetly as the Rev. Michael Corrigan offered a prayer and told them “We are going to get through all of this together, you and I.”

The Alumni Chorus sang Felix Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes,” Megan Bathory-Peeler danced her own “Avenue of Expression,” there were other shared memories and then the torch was lit, but not so it could be passed.

It was lit, in the words of Corrigan, “to send this flame to our campus across the river to remind all of the vibrancy of gifts, which the Northfield experience brings to our one, unified school.”

You can reach Janet Bond at: jbond@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261, ext.263.

Top of Page