OUR STORIES

I attended North Country School for four years of my life. I was “fresh off the plane” from Ghana and it was my first experience with boarding school. Middle school is an explorative time for many and it’s important to be in an environment that allows you to figure out who you are. For such a small community, they really emphasize the huge scale of the world and what you can find in it. Even through a personal crisis where I was trying to figure out my identity as a “Black American,” the people around me not only shaped who I am but also allowed me to come to terms and love myself. Between weekly hikes and skiing excursions we had homemade dinners and games of tag in the woods. There are still NCS teachers that I think of and talk to today, almost 5 years later.

Hayden Herrera is an art historian and biographer who lives in New York with her husband and two Bengal cats. The mother of two grown children and five “wonderful grandchildren,” she is best known for Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, her account of the Mexican painter first published in 1983. Hayden’s subsequent body of work includes biographies of Henri Matisse, sculptor Mary Frank, and the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky.

You get a first class education inside the classroom and outside. At NCS I got to try all these different things—making maple syrup and tapping trees, chicken harvest, barn chores, communal meals, events like Thanksgiving—and what matters is that you participated. NCS can take the credit for instilling my passion for the arts because there I had everything at my fingertips—painting, drawing, woodshop, silk screening, photography—and everything is encouraged. NCS teaches people to think unconventionally, not to put limitations on yourself. You learn to do more than what you are ‘supposed’ or ‘allowed’ to do in life.

David Loud is a music director and conductor for Broadway shows in New York City with a unique connection to North Country School and Camp Treetops. David and his family moved to North Country School when he was eight years old and in fourth grade. His father, Roger Loud, was a math teacher at the school from 1970 to 1982, then head of school until 1992. For David, North Country School was truly home.

Theater is essentially a diverse group of people coming together to create something—which is what every day is like at North Country School. I’ve always taken NCS with me as a way to negotiate and engage with the world.

Before North Country School, I was a small, unmotivated 13-year-old kid who found little joy in learning. In just the first trimester, my attitude changed. I learned to love learning.