Kent is a school that takes pride in its tight knit community, but the stories of our students are really what makes our campus unique. Everyone comes here with some passion or direction strong enough to take us away from our friends, family and homes. Our campus is pulled together from across the globe and we still find ourselves more interconnected than most local schools. The diversity of not just people’s origins but goals on campus enrich our community. Every year as new students join us we may stop to consider and appreciate the strides we have all taken to get here and embrace each other even more for it.
This year, Matthew Dayle is joining Kent as a postgraduate. Spending 4 years at a Catholic private school in New York City, he would attend mass every morning for 40 minutes. Emphasis fell on two major pillars: religion and sports. Those were the core of the school. He valued the tight-knit community he left behind, but his greater focus, on squash, drove him to come to Kent.
Being a PG at Kent feels much like being a senior for him, and transitioning to that again hasn’t been difficult here. Coming from a larger school, the adjustment to Kent was noticeable, but acclimating to Kent’s environment came easily. Unlike his previous school, where playing a sport was essential to fitting into the social scene, the expectations to be part of the community here were lesser and more inclusive. Although he misses the city, and is sure to be visiting and returning to it, this quiet campus is providing a dedicated space to pursue his goals.
Academically, Kent feels more rigorous for Matthew and how he learns here is a shift from his old school. It’s been a positive change going from 25 students to under 15 in every class, especially in Matthew’s favorite class, Spanish 3, with Mr. Torrez, where there’s been more room for an engaging class environment. He recognizes that everyone wants to be here giving it their all and he shares that mentality. While academics are important to Mathew, they are part of a goal: competing in the 2024 Squash Olympics. With the support of his new environment, he remains driven toward this ambition.
After traveling the globe – from New York to Singapore, through Africa, Mainland Europe and finally to Cambridge – new 5th former Kristina Roeloff was well familiar with the many wonders the world has to offer. But now, she was ready to settle into an environment that would prepare her for applying to the exceptional universities she aspires to attend. For her, that environment was a U.S. boarding school, and Kent became the perfect one for her to grow.
Coming from The Perse, a day prep school, in Cambridge, UK, Kristina found Kent a not completely unfamiliar experience. Much like her previous school, the learning environment is fostered through intimate round table discussions with small class sizes. What The Perse didn’t offer her was a broad range of those courses. Her school had a structure mirroring a university where she took 3-4 specialized subjects for the entirety of the year. Classes functioned for specialization, not experimentation. At Kent, Kristina has a broader academic range where she focuses now on economics, since cultivating her focus was on “maths” in the UK.
Like Matthew, Kristina felt the compassionate embrace of the Kent community. Unlike the cliquey, more exclusive atmosphere of her previous academy, Kent was easy to adjust to, or as easy as it gets as a junior in high school. She too misses the closeness of her home and the daily routine of cycling to school, but Kent’s peaceful, mountainside backdrop is certainly a refreshing change. The demanding athletic schedule here for her sport, field hockey, is a significant change from her previous school, where she only had two hours a week of practice and two hours a week teaching young children the sport, but Kent’s quiet, structured rhythm is suiting Kristina as she takes after her two sisters who also came here before her, and becomes more and more embedded in the community.
Leaving the closely bonded community of his school, Howard S Billings in Chateauguay, Quebec, was not an easy decision for Logan Lejour. His old school was a close community of mostly English speakers in a predominantly French-speaking area. There he formed strong friendships and played alongside hard-working teammates, but there was something more that wouldn’t stop digging at him – a larger dream. For Logan, taking football to the next level was worth the sacrifices of leaving his home, friends and family. Though he holds his old school close to heart he knew that the environment there was not what we needed to pursue his ambitions to the fullest extent.
Many coaches reached out to Logan, but what made Kent different was the dedication of the football coach, Mr. Martin, during the recruitment process. It required a great deal of faith to join a team that had not previously been performing at their best, but Logan was committed to growing alongside them. He recalls now how Coach Martin has treated the new members of the team not just as athletes but as his own sons, and in so creating a great sense of belonging on not only the field but the school as a whole. The dedication of the coach and the players at Kent has already carried them forward, including a recent victory at Hotchkiss.
Logan said of moving to Kent that it “took a lot to take me from my home” but he has been embraced by the strong community culture here and has settled into the fast-paced lifestyle of a Kent student, finding both the athletic and academic environment exactly what he needed all along.
For so many years, and years to come, Kent has been a home and a place to pursue ambitions more diligently than most anywhere else. The campus is composed of dedicated students and faculty that makes it the respected establishment that it is.
