Our virtual vaccine for the pandemic arrived this week. We had three doses! The first was the Arts Review, which was ninety minutes of feel-good. I still smile when I think of it. Jeff Smith has included a link to one of our digital choral songs below in the Newsletter. If you would like a small dose of sunshine, click on the link!

The second vaccination came in the form of dance. A single performance on Wednesday at assembly was enough to inoculate all of us from the pandemic blues.  Powerful and evocative, athletic and artistic, and absolutely spell binding, our Dance Team’s choreography and execution was the best inoculation imaginable.

The third round came when our Marketing Team Prefects, Melanie Bent and Mikaela Hinds (Class of 2021)announced, for the first time in our 232 years history, our School Mascot!  Initiated years ago by the Class of 2012 as a way of binding the student population and unifying the boys’ and girls’ teams, as well as celebrating our Scottish roots and heritage as a Royal Highland Regiment of Canada in the Cadet Corps, the moniker Highlander was chosen.  However, the image of sword wielding kilted clanswomen and men did not resonate the student body’s genuine image of who we are up here on our campus hill.  This became a priority for our strategic plan and last year’s Student Marketing Team did a lot of work sifting through images of animals before everything came to a halt in March.  So…what reflects our nature? What is gentle but strong? What is hardy and friendly and resilient? What has a long history, has associations with the royal family, but isn’t pretentious? What is social and lives in harmony with both genders and gets along with every shape, size, and colour of animal?  There was a glorious and spontaneous round of applause when Mikaela and Melanie introduced the School to Dylan, an eight-month-old, pure-bred Highland bull.

Covered in gorgeous and unruly ginger fur, Dylan is the epitome of adorable. Even when surrounded by fifteen excited teenagers, he was calm and happy to be petted and scratched behind his ears. As he gets older and more familiar with us, he will be able to travel to the School for special events. Visiting him at his home at Hidden Meadows Farm in Cambridge (near Coldbrook) is no problem and offers our students a unique opportunity to visit a working farm.  Being the oldest registered breed of cattle in the world, the Highland shares our sense of long history.  Bulls and cows live together in social harmony, welcoming other four-legged creatures to their fold. Interestingly, Highlands do not live in herds but in “folds”. There are many wonderful touch points between the Highlands and KES, but this particular aspect strikes me as most important. We have always celebrated the diversity of our student body, but we have struggled at times to articulate the sense of belonging we want all students to feel.  Adopting the Highland allows us to “welcome everyone to our fold”.  

What a lovely thought that is for a school.