Parent Testimony

Imagine life as a thing red string. Everyone has one. the red string follows you everywhere you go. It follows you to good places, bad places, and everywhere in between. Sometimes your string intersects with other people’s strings for better or worse. A history marker you can see but are sure is there. In 1984, my parents made the decision to take their only son and thread his string through Wilkes-Barre Academy (when Wilkes-Barre Academy didn’t even really exist) and to tie it right in the center of it. They took a leap of faith and went all in on this new little school, its teachers, and the two red heads running it. It was here my string met up with all of these families, laid a foundation still present today but made stronger since I left. It’s much more than a school; as corny as it sounds it’s really a community closing in on being a big extended family. It is truly a wonderful place. From here, using the foundation provided to them, decades of students left and ran their strings all over the world: Ivy League schools, Military Service academies, medical schools, Wall Street firms, law schools, Saturday Night Live writer’s rooms, Capitol Hill Offices, and a million other amazing places I’m sure I don’t even know about. We ended up artists, computer programmers, federal agents, finance whizzes, business owners, lawyers, nurses, prosecutors, teachers, and on and on. Every decision of every single graduate can be followed directly back to this school and the lessons learned here using their little red string. Before we left this place taught us to not only be a good student but good citizens: to keep our strings in the right places with the right people, to think critically about what was presented to us, to be articulate with our words, that the arts have a place alongside science and arithmetic, and to understand our place in the world. We now run our red strings through our communities as leaders, as business owners, as leaders in our workplaces, and now some of us have the most important job of all – being Mom and Dad. Along with that important job comes the time to start threading the strings of our children’s lives like my parents did 30 plus years ago. For my wife and I the choice was easy. We followed my red string right back here and started threading our kid’s right through here too. I wonder all the time about where my children’s strings will go and how far it will take them. I’m happy to have the opportunity to have theirs knotted up in the halls of this school and intertwined with these teachers to give the the best chance at success and happiness. Everyone has a little red string. I can’t thank my parents enough for pulling mine through Wilkes-Barre Academy all those years ago and even prouder to bring my own children back here. It feels like home.