Given in honor of Headmaster Robert Ward, who served at Williston from 1972 to 1979, the Ward Medal recognizes outstanding service to humanity.

Headmaster Ward, said Mr. White, was one of those people whose advice mattered most to him. During a time of indecision, when Mr. White sought his headmaster’s help, Mr. Ward played him a recording of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.

Mr. White remarked on the importance of Mr. Ward’s advice. “He was a man who exemplified the notion that to the world you’re one person, but to one person you can really mean the world.”

After receiving a B.A. in English from the College of Worcester, Mr. White joined his father at Taco, a heating and air conditioning equipment manufacturer founded by his grandfather. In 1992, he opened the Taco Learning Center, where employees and their families had the opportunity to enroll in a variety of classes. His vision was to provide the company’s employees not only with job training, but a better quality of life. Taco was recognized by Fortune Magazine as “a testament to the power of human capital.”

In his acceptance speech Mr. White counseled the student body to listen to advice with a critical ear. “You’ll always find those that want to tell you how to live, tell you what to do and how to do it, and there’s value in that,” he said, “but there will be few who will challenge you to think about how to challenge yourself and those are the ones that really matter.”

As he left the podium Mr. White kissed the medal hanging around his neck.

See Mr. White’s full speech here.

“The big word at Hallmark is ‘intention,’” said Mr. Zide. “As someone who absorbs photography,” Mr. Chattman chimed in, “that’s what ultimately matters.”

The Hallmark Institute of Photography teachers were at Williston on April 23 to give the final evening talk of this year’s Photographers’ Lecture Series. That afternoon, Mr. Chattman and Mr. Zide had also spent a class period speaking to Williston’s photography students about what a professional career in photography involves.

“Photography is a lot more than a career decision,” said Mr. Chattman. “It’s a lifestyle.”  He described his dream retirement: traveling the country with his wife, who is also a photographer, in a motorcycle with a tripod mounted on its sidecar. That way there would be no glare from car windows.

“I’d be a much better driver [today] if I weren’t a photographer,” he said.

A student asked how photographers took shots from moving vehicles.  The answer was a very long boom arm that attached to the roof of the car with a suction cup, Mr. Chattman explained.

A very long cable release is needed to operate the shutter from inside the car, said Mr. Zide.

The Truth in Photography
Is there any truth in a photograph, Mr. Chattman and Mr. Zide asked later that evening, with the advent of Photoshop and digital manipulation?

Mr. Zide describes himself as a traditional film photographer.  He said he fell into landscape photography, which acted like a gateway drug to the medium.  From the first snowfall he witnessed as a young boy in Los Angeles on January 11, 1949, he became “a collector of moments that meant wonder.”

But Mr. Zide made the point that, instead of creating a new process, Photoshop has just made manipulation easier.  Since it’s inception, photography has always modified the results, he said.

Mr. Zide showed a photograph from the early 20th century where the photographer used clear strings to suspend chairs in the air. More recently, photographer William Wegman used digital manipulation to create half Weimaraner, half human portraits.

“Before photography, all of the creative arts shared a common source…imagination,” Mr. Chattman said. In all other art, an image was conceived by the artist then executed.  Photography inverts that process, he said.

Mr. Chattman’s own photography uses a stitched-together style that he’s called “found-scapes,” “fake-scapes,” and “lie-scapes.” The relationship between time and truth is at the center of Mr. Chattman’s work. His specialty, he said, is “being able to build realities inside an image that are only apparent over time.”

Mr. Chattman flipped to an image of Pablo Picasso’s painted masterpiece, Guernica. “The creative arts exist to evoke a response; photographs have the advantage of being evocative, but also of bearing witness,” he said.

Mr. Picasso’s painting is just that—a reaction to the aerial bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica by German forces during the Spanish Civil War. Because he was not there, Mr. Picasso used photographs published in The New York Times as his source. So, Mr. Chattman asked, which art form is the most truthful, the painting or the photographs?

“[This painting] is a man’s interpretation of a moment in time,” he said, and therein lies the power of photography.

Photo by Kristine Potasky '81 P'08, '14

Kirstyn Kruse ’13 signed a National Letter of Intent to play Division II lacrosse at the North Carolina school, fulfilling what her mother, Susan Kruse, said had been a dream since she started playing the sport at age seven.

“She loves the sport,” Mrs. Kruse said. “She’s been playing lacrosse since she was a little girl and she’s always wanted to play at the college level.”

Head coach Jen Fulcher described Ms. Kruse as a key member of the team and a great leader on and off the field. Ms. Fulcher noted that Ms. Kruse had been on a hot streak recently, scoring four goals with two assists in a recent game against Westminster.

“She is kind, funny, hardworking, and her teammates love being around her,” Ms. Fulcher said. “She will leave a huge hole as a person and an athlete after she graduates.”

Nine of those teammates were on hand for the signing, sporting hats and T-shirts with the motto “wildlax” in preparation for a game against Suffield Academy later that afternoon. When Ms. Kruse signed the final piece of scholarship paperwork, which also serves as a notice to other schools that she may no longer be recruited, her fellow lacrosse players cheered.

Ms. Kruse is the fifth Williston athlete sign a National Letter of Intent this year. Seniors DonQuale Williams (Assumption College, football), Dylan Arthurs (Stonehill College, football), William Consavage (Bentley University, football), and Eric Yarrows (Florida Southern College, golf) have also made commitments.

Assistant coach Emily Gowdey-Backus said that Ms. Kruse, also known as “Kruser,” was the heart of the lacrosse team.

“She knows each girl’s story, how to pick them up and encourage them when needed, and how to celebrate with every win,” Ms. Gowdey-Backus said.

Ms. Kruse said she fell in love with Catawba during a tour of the campus and joked that she was looking forward to having a Chick-fil-A restaurant nearby. In the midst of the signing celebration, though, Ms. Kruse seemed more focused on the upcoming game.

“Suffield is a really interesting opponent,” she said, when asked about the competition. “I think we can win if we play our hardest.”

Her father, Bob Kruse, offered his thanks to the entire Williston community, particularly Greg Tuleja, Ms. Kruse’s advisor, and Ms. Fulcher, whom he described as a teacher, motivator, and “the best coach ever.”

Family, friends, and teammates then headed off to Sawyer Field, where Ms. Kruse scored four goals on the way to a 16-3 win over Suffield.

“I’m also a former smoker,” he said. “It’s a very hard thing to quit. So part of why I talk to people is that it is much easier to never start than it is to quit.”

As a health educator at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Dr. Schiff works on such issues as men’s health, violence prevention, and leadership. On April 24, though, he spoke to Williston students about another area in which he specializes—tobacco education and cessation.

Dr. Schiff is the most recent visitor in a series of special assemblies that have included such experts as Rachel Simmons, a nationally regarded speaker on bullying prevention and female empowerment; Dr. Christopher Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center UMass and an expert on bullying prevention; and Rob Hackenson, a motivational speaker who specializes in the prevention of youth drinking and drug use.

During his 20-minute talk, Dr. Schiff shared grim statistics on tobacco use, noting that, with one death every six seconds attributable to smoking, some 200 people would die from tobacco-related causes during his talk. He asked the audience to put up their hands if they had a family member who had died of a tobacco-related illness.

“Take a look around and see all the hands that are up. That’s a lot of hands,” he said. “In my case, two of my grandparents died from tobacco-related illnesses.”

While there were many health and safety reasons not to use tobacco, Dr. Schiff also pointed to the overall economic cost. If a pack of cigarettes cost $8, then a pack-a-day habit comes with a $2,920 price tag.

There was an environmental cost, too, he said. Not only were discarded cigarettes a leading cause of forest fires, but they also created an enormous amount of litter. During the annual cleanup effort at UMass, “No Butts About It,” he noted that students could gather some 40 to 60 pounds of cigarette butts in a single three-hour period.

When it came to tobacco cessation, though, Dr. Schiff noted that each plan should be tailored to the individual, and should also acknowledge the reasons why he or she started using tobacco in the first place.

“Everybody has different ways of quitting,” Dr. Schiff said. “There are many different ways why we use [tobacco], it might be to manage stress, it might be to be social, it might be because you think it’s fun, so we need to find ways to replace those as well.”

Braden Chattman

A pair of photography instructors who approach the natural world from vastly different perspectives will visit the Williston Northampton School for the final in this year’s Photographers’ Lecture Series. The event, held in the Dodge Room in the Reed Campus Center on Tuesday, April 23, at 6:30 p.m., is free and open to the public.

Braden Chattman and Michael Zide, both instructors at the Hallmark Institute of Photography in Turners Falls, will speak about their work, how their approaches have changed over time, and how others can explore their own authentic voices.

While Mr. Zide looks to capture what he describes as “moments of wonder in the landscape,” Mr. Chattman combines photos he takes over time to form landscapes of his own.

“We will discuss our individual paths and processes for finding and creating our art,” Mr. Zide wrote of the upcoming lecture. “Acknowledging that the life of the artist is not a straight line is the first step to staying on the right path.”

Ice, Poor Farm Swamp | Amherst, MA by Michael Zide

Mr. Zide is also a workshop leader at the Maine Media Workshops, and director of Michael Zide Workshops of Western Massachusetts. He is a member of Moab Master Photographer’s Program and is a Manfrotto Mentor. His work has appeared in national and international magazines; a selection of his photographs is in the permanent collections of such museums as Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Fine Art.

Mr. Chattman graduated with a BFA from Sarah Lawrence College. He co-designed and patented software for color rendering on digital cameras, and has developed his own brand of retouching portrait and fashion photographs. He is currently the head of digital imaging curriculum at Hallmark and runs Chattman Photography with his wife, Joanna Chattman.

For information on the Photographers’ Lecture Series at Williston, contact Kathleen Unruh by email or at (413) 529-3211.

“Every time you spend quality time in the bathroom you’ll learn something new,” he said on Thursday, April 11 in the Dodge Room of the Williston Northampton School. “Great photo opportunities come up, you don’t want to be playing around trying to figure out how to work your camera.”

An Explosive Entrance to Freelancing
On December 5, 1970 the Linden, NJ Exxon refinery exploded.  Working nearby on the General Motors assembly line, Mr. Wyatt ran to the scene and photographed the aftermath.  Later that day he called an area newspaper to see if they were interested.  Although they didn’t want photographs of the explosion, they reviewed his work and offered him a position as a freelance photographer.

Mr. Wyatt continued to work at the GM plant from 6:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. shooting freelance assignments on nights and weekends.  His next big break as a photographer came when he volunteered to cover a New York Giants football game; he had never covered sports before.

“Now that I think of it,” said Mr. Wyatt, “that was dumb to volunteer, having never shot sports in my life.”

But Mr. Wyatt returned to the photo desk with shots of pass receptions, fumbles – every major play of the game.  “I was all over it, I had great stuff,” he said.

Mr. Wyatt eventually earned credentials to shoot the Giants on a regular basis, and his opportunities grew from there.

“My whole career has been talking to people and opportunities come up,” Mr. Wyatt said.

Once, when Mr. Wyatt was on assignment at a basketball game, another photographer showed up late.  There was no room left on the sidelines where photographers are allowed to sit and no one wanted to make room.  Mr. Wyatt scooted over and gestured for the man to sit down next to him.  The photographer then proceeded to take out of his bag, what was at that time, top-of-the-line camera equipment.

Mr. Wyatt remembers saying, “Wow, I can’t wait until I can afford to buy that kind of equipment.”  The man handed Mr. Wyatt his card and told him to call his office on Monday morning.

It turned out the photographer was the vice president of Canon Professional Services. He set Mr. Wyatt up with all the equipment he would need to get his freelance career up and running.

One Roll Black and White, One Roll Color
From then on Mr. Wyatt would shoot one roll of black and white film for the newspaper and one roll of color film for himself.  He submitted the color shots to different sports magazines and stock agencies, and through those connections, had the opportunity to shoot the 2004 Athens Olympics.

“I think [the Olympics] are the ultimate assignment,” he said. “The only assignment that would top the Olympics is a day in the life of Jesus Christ.”

Kodak hired Mr. Wyatt to shoot the Olympics for them as well as to photograph some of the company’s VIPs, who were also attending the games.  He impressed Kodak so much with his work that four years later the company again hired him to shoot the Olympics, this time for the 2008 summer games in Beijing.

Between shooting VIPs against the Great Wall of China and events such as a boxing match from above the ring, Mr. Wyatt was constantly looking for new angles.

While other photographers took two or three frames and then looked down to review their shots, Mr. Wyatt was snapping away.

“I don’t go click…click…click.  I go cliiiiiiiick, like a machine gun,” he motioned with an imaginary camera held up to his eye. “Whatever it takes to make the shot you want,” he said.

By the time the closing ceremony in Beijing rolled around and he flew back to the United States, Mr. Wyatt had shot more than 50,000 frames.

Mr. Wyatt stressed that constant practice makes a career.  He never misses an opportunity to take a walk with his camera, he said, “even if it’s raining, we’re shooting.”

Editor’s note: The final installment in the 2012-13 Photographers’ Lecture Series is Tuesday, April 23, at 6:30 p.m. with Michael Zide and Braden Chattman from the Hallmark Institute of Photography.

On April 12, Ms. Simmons, a nationally regarded speaker on bullying prevention and female empowerment, spoke to the girls of the Williston Northampton School about how they could identify hurtful behavior, and change the patterns that created it.

The Upper School had divided in two for the special morning assembly. Girls listened to Ms. Simmons in the Phillips Stevens Chapel, while boys headed to the Williston Theatre to hear Dr. Christopher Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center (PSC) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an expert on the prevention of bullying and harassment.

In the Chapel, Ms. Simmons talked about what she called “relational aggression,” an attitude she described as “if you don’t do what I want, I won’t be friends with you anymore.”

“A good friend doesn’t threaten the friendship,” she said. “In a healthy relationship, you should feel comfortable sharing your feelings.”

Part of the ongoing problem girls have with relationships stems from the fallacy of the “good girl,” an uber-perfect creature who was perfectly groomed and always on good terms with those around her, Ms. Simmons said.

“We’re expected to hold ourselves in, not just physically, but in the way we act,” she said.

As a result, girls were expected to ignore, or even laugh at, rude statements that ended with “just kidding!” But not all jokes were funny, Ms. Simmons said. She encouraged girls to use a “no joke zone” or NJZ, where one person could ask her friends to take a sensitive topic — age, weight, family, hair, appearance — off the table.

“Your NJZ could be your friends, family, racial background,” Ms. Simmons said. “If you say, ‘That’s my NJZ,’ the other person has to apologize, sincerely. Then you talk about something else. It’s a low-drama tool.”

While Ms. Simmons encouraged girls to speak openly and honestly about their needs and feelings, she noted that the way they asked also mattered. Rather than being aggressive (asking for what they needed in a way that was hurtful or offensive), or passive (dropping hints and assuming the other person would guess the right answer), Ms. Simmons suggested they be assertive and pose their questions or statements in a way that intended no hurt or disrespect.

“You have to look at what I’m talking about as something you have to learn and practice,” Ms. Simmons said. “Your friendships right now are the classroom for you to develop the skills you’ll use later on.”

Do the Clothes Make the Man?

In the theater, Dr. Overtree spoke to Williston Northampton’s boys about the ways in which conscious and subconscious thoughts and attitudes dictate our actions.

The age-old concept of “breaking out of the mold” is one that Dr. Overtree simultaneously likes and dislikes. He likes the idea of standing up for your true self, but he doesn’t believe this confining mold exists. “We create it through our behavior and our attitude,” he explained.

Throughout his talk, Dr. Overtree repeatedly returned to a photo of what looked like a man in a skirt walking down the street with his daughter. Dr. Overtree explained that it was a photo of a German man, Nils Pickert, and his son in a dress. Mr. Pickert’s son had wanted to wear what is conventionally thought of as women’s clothing. Rather than try to convince his son to only wear dresses at home, Mr. Pickert decided to support his son.

“The only courageous thing he could do was wear a dress with his son,” said Dr. Overtree. The best course to take, he added, is to respect others when they “break out” of the mold.

Read senior Mairead Poulin’s article for The Willistonian, “Good Girls, Bad Friends.”

Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to “recognize initiative, achievement, and service in young people,” the Congressional Medal program is open to American citizens aged 14 to 23 years old.  Participants can earn bronze, silver, and gold certificates, or bronze, silver, and gold medals.

In order to qualify for the award, participants must complete a number of hours in four areas: Personal Development, Volunteer Public Service, Physical Fitness, and Expedition/Exploration.

According to the Congressional Award website: “This is not an award for past accomplishments. Instead, you are honored for achieving your own challenging goals.”

After discovering the national competition, Ms. Foster devoted the next four years to the Congressional Award.  “I knew that it was going to be a challenge, and it allowed me to push myself to my extreme,” she said.

She chose to donate her time to a wide array of causes.  For her personal development hours she worked on TeenJury, a website she and her sister started.  She came up with the idea for the website after visiting the Springfield Public Forum, a public interest organization that hosts lectures on a broad array of subjects. Ms. Foster introduced herself to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer after he spoke, and he invited Ms. Foster to Washington, D.C. to view oral arguments at the Supreme Court.

“Being there and watching everything happen really influenced me,” she said.  “I wanted to do something with the experience because there are other teenagers that don’t have these opportunities…so I made teenjury.com to share that knowledge and experience with others.”

The site is a team effort by two of the three Foster sisters: Olivia acts as editor and content manager and Abbie ’16 is the site’s designer.  Targeted at teenagers interested in careers in law, Ms. Foster said that the website is dedicated to the belief that, while you need to be 18 years old to vote, you do not need to be 18 years old to think.  More information can be found about the site online.

Jen Fulcher, the head of the Williston Northampton Middle School and Ms. Foster’s eighth grade civics teacher, was Ms. Foster’s advisor for the past four years.  “Whenever I saw her get an opportunity to talk about her website, and all the great things she was doing to understand and connect herself to the workings of the U.S. government, I could always see her passion for the work she was doing,” said Ms. Fulcher.

Ms. Foster worked with the AIDS Foundation of Western Massachusetts, posting current news about HIV/AIDS-related topics to the organization’s social networking platforms to fulfill her volunteer public service requirements.

“Primarily, I tried to connect with other youth who need to be taught about HIV/AIDS and that it is, indeed, preventable,” she said.

The Congressional Award program also requires participants to complete physical fitness hours. Ms. Foster completed more than 200 of them as a member of the varsity girls golf team. As a freshman, Head Coach Ann Pickrell noted, Ms. Foster won the nine-hole division of the Pippy O’Connor Independent School Girls’ Golf Tournament.

A study abroad trip with the People to People Student Ambassador Program rounded out Ms. Foster’s requirements.  Travelling through Spain, Italy, and France, Ms. Foster said she had a multitude of new experiences, which included trying escargot.

Almost four years later, Ms. Foster admits completing these requirements was a lot of hard work, but was worth the effort.

“I learned that if I set my heart to something I can achieve it,” she said.  “There were bumps in the road and there were plenty of moments when I didn’t think I could achieve the goals I set, but I was able to push through.”

Ms. Foster will travel to Washington to be awarded her gold medal at a ceremony in the Cannon Caucus Room on Capitol Hill on June 19.

Mr. Wyatt was assigned by Kodak to photograph the Summer Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008, and is a self-taught photographer. In his presentation, Mr. Wyatt will talk about his experiences covering the Olympic Games, as well as finding the right equipment and camera set-up, planning a shooting strategy, and the importance of knowing the game.

As Mr. Wyatt notes on his website, his “first experience with photography was an unsuccessful photo documentation of my honeymoon.” Since then, Mr. Wyatt has covered the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball, among others. His photos have appeared in various publications such as USA Today, Black Enterprise Magazine, Time Magazine, Newsweek, TV Guide, and ESPN. He currently covers corporate assignments for companies that include Six Flags, Eastman Kodak, Continental Airlines, CVS, Pepsico, and Verizon.

For information on the Photographers’ Lecture Series at Williston, contact Kathleen Unruh by email or at (413) 529-3211.

It was, he told Williston Northampton students during an assembly on March 29, the general route that each one of them would take during the course of their lives.

“Each and every one of you have certain aspirations and things you want to obtain,” Mr. Hackenson said. “Certain decisions can help you attain them, and certain things can make them much more difficult.”

Mr. Hackenson, motivational speaker and founder of Dynamic Influence, has been delivering presentations on cyber safety, sobriety, and bullying prevention since 2004. After a group of Williston students saw Mr. Hackenson at the inaugural Youth Conference on Preventing Underage Drinking last year, a conference sponsored by District Attorney David F. Sullivan P’08 ’10, they asked that Mr. Hackenson be brought in to speak to the entire school.

Using a brand of what he called “edu-tainment,” Mr. Hackenson mixed stage magic and audience participation to talk about the dangers of underage drinking and drug use. On a easel at the front of the chapel, Mr. Hackenson outlined some of the potential consequences of such behavior—hurting others, getting sick, losing sight of what was important, and death—and the excuses that might lead to drinking or drugs—relieving stress, fitting in, peer pressure, having fun, curiosity.

Mr. Hackenson spun a large, striped disk, which caused audience members to experience the momentary optical illusion that his head was either shrinking or growing. He pointed back to the board.

“They’re not reasons, they’re excuses. It’s an illusion,” he said. “The biggest illusion of all is that it’s never going to happen to me.”

Mr. Hackenson urged students to continue making good decisions, to always be mindful of the consequences, and to remember that every choice they made also affected other people.

“It doesn’t matter how many good decisions you’ve made so far, the good decisions have to continue,” he said. “Is it worth the risk?”

The next school assembly speakers will be Rachel Simmons and Chris Overtree on April 12. Ms. Simmons is the author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. She works internationally to reduce bullying and create empowerment among young women. Mr. Overtree is director of the Psychological Services Center (PSC) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is an expert on the prevention of bullying and harassment.

For this special assembly, Mr. Overtree and Ms. Simmons will speak to the boys and girls separately. In the Williston Theatre, Mr. Overtree will speak to the boys about how to become “a man” in today’s society, engage in appropriate actions, and be responsible for what one does. Ms. Simmons will speak to the girls in the Phillips Stevens Chapel about female adolescence and empowerment.