His CV includes leading one of the largest studies on the health of the U.S. “Education was the thing that allowed our family to go from slavery to middle class in one generation.”Īndover’s first African American and openly gay head of school holds an MBA, an MD, and a PhD. “I heard this story often growing up,” Kington recalled. His parents also believed that education is essential, inviting truth, possibility, and freedom. And all of it prepared him for his time at Andover.īorn and raised in Baltimore, Kington, one of five children, credits his schoolteacher mother, Mildred, and his physician father, Garfield, with giving him one of his greatest gifts: “An unshakable belief that I could choose my own path.” Kington’s atypical career path or, as he points out, “the unforeseen meandering and unexpected opportunities,” is what makes life interesting. This was his first visit to campus after being named head of school. “At no part of my education could I have predicted this moment,” Kington said to an audience of students, faculty, and staff in Cochran Chapel last December. But our community health and safety measures are working well, and we are helping each other settle into new habits of remote learning and engagement.” “The biggest challenge is always uncertainty, where you cannot predict what will happen in a week or month from now. “There have been bumps in the road, as expected,” Kington noted. Through it all-the trainings and workshops, the collaborative sessions with colleagues and students, a life-altering pandemic, a combative election season, and nationwide racial unrest-Andover has emphasized the phrase “students first.” And faculty, Kington added, rose to the challenge of learning entirely new ways of teaching, including hybrid, remote, and in-person approaches. Among them, an ambitious weekly testing regimen was implemented to keep the community safe as Andover executed a phased reopening in September. Amy Patel, protocols and guidelines were set in motion. Under the expert guidance of PA’s medical director, Dr. Peter Daniolos, a nationally recognized child and adolescent psychiatrist, and the new head of school’s husband. It made me think a lot about starting this position at Andover. I told parents that I would be reluctant to just put everything on hold indefinitely. The safety and well-being of our children always comes first. “Should they stay home, do a gap year, go remote? As a parent, I understand this is a question you wrestle with. “Several parents called me up and said, ‘Can you advise us?’” Kington recalled. What followed was an even more pressing question from parents and educators about the future of in-person classes: When considering how to balance the potential for serious health risks, what do you do? No stranger to leading a school through crisis, Kington, who was finishing up his 10th year as president of Grinnell College, made the tough call to cancel all in-person classes in March at the Iowa school when COVID-19 hit. Kington officially began as Andover’s 16th head of school on July 1, but the COVID-19 pandemic pressed him into service months earlier with rigorous planning for school reopening in the fall. It might be the most ubiquitous word of 2020, if you don’t count unprecedented.
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