On September 26, 2011, an anonymous commenter on The Scroll Online under the name “Worthy Of His Heritage” wrote to the editorial board, “Get a grip, stop polishing the school’s fragile reputation and focus on what goes on inside.” In the nine issues of Volume LXXXVI, we hope we have brought The Scroll closer to achieving this objective.
We covered and wrote editorials on a number of issues that directly affect students, as was our goal, including the implementation of the Imagine Deerfield strategic plan, the gender balancing proposal for Student Council, the Respect Forum, the Koch Center graffiti, new dormitories, Hurricane Irene, dress code and schedule changes, limited time at school meeting, a curriculum overhaul, college athletic recruiting and legacies, the reaccreditation survey, letters of reprimand, Choate Day cheering restrictions, day student inclusivity, and record-high levels of student stress.
We also looked outside of Deerfield to examine issues that will affect us as we expand beyond Deerfield’s boundaries, such as Bin Laden’s death, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the 2012 election, Palestine and Israel, sports sex scandals, ecotourism, and the Tea Party.
We expanded our readership by placing The Scroll in dorm rooms and promoting our Online edition, recruiting a wide range of contributors so as to ensure we represent the broadest range and the most accurate cross-section of the student body as possible.
I could not have done any of this without the enormously talented and fiercely dedicated Scroll editors, associates, writers, and photographers, who relentlessly sought truth and grammatical errors all while eating pizza, tolerating Front Page Editor Sarah Woolf ’s music, and wrangling interviewees.
When trying to thank Ms. Hannay and Mr. Palmer for their patience, genius, time, and love, I am confronted with the hopeless inadequacy of the English language.
To next volume’s Editor-in-Chief Kristy Hong and her board: congratulations, good luck, and in the words of Samuel Hazo via Ms. McConnell, “I wish you what I wish myself: hard questions and the nights to answer them, the grace of disappointment and the right to seem the fool for justice. That’s enough. Cowards might ask for more. Heroes have died for less.”