 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
alumni/ae page |
|
January 2004 by Jeffrey Stanley Frances Salant ’37 has a long history with Friends schools. “My father and all his brothers went to Penn Charter, and my brother went to Friends Select,” she says. Salant grew up in Connecticut, and the family moved from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn while she was still small, and she attended Brooklyn Friends School from K through 12. She returned to Connecticut as an adult in 1940, and has lived there ever since. For the past 30 years she has been a practicing Quaker, and a member of the Wilton Friends Meeting. Eight years ago, she explains, “I got involved with sponsoring the first Friends school in Connecticut,” under the care of the Wilton Meeting. “It started with three or four families,” recalls Salant. “They met in the lobby of the Meeting House for awhile. There were nine children. I signed on as an assistant, helping children with reading, all sorts of jobs. They are now trying to get independent school accreditation in Connecticut.” Today the school has grown to over 50 children, K through 8. And, Salant adds, the school now has “a building and a half” beside the Meeting House. Last year they graduated their first class. As for her time at Brooklyn Friends, Salant says her first memory is “sitting in the brightly lit kindergarten in the old building on Schermerhorn, very sedately, compared to today’s 5-year-olds. We were co-ed, which made us different to start with,” compared to other independent schools in Brooklyn at the time, “in addition to the idea of complete equality between boys and girls.” She recounts, however, that in 6th grade the boys were assigned to shop class while the girls took art. She and her friend Mary petitioned the head of the school to be allowed to take shop, and permission was granted. She looks back on that victory as an example of what made the culture at Brooklyn Friends rare—“that we decided to ask at all, and that they said fine.” She remembers learning “a reliance on your word, a lot of school spirit. We ran the paper, we ran the senior play. It was a very involving, consuming experience.” Not until she got to college and met students who had come from other backgrounds did she learn that one “couldn't get much acknowledgment of ideas at other schools.” Her advice to current Brooklyn Friends students is to take advantage of their good fortune. “Let it all hang out and make the most of the enormous freedom, but also the responsibility to each other and the world.” Salant, who remains a Trustee Emerita at the Connecticut Friends School, has five children, ten grandchildren (“maybe more!”) and two great-grandchildren. |
|
|
home
| site map |
contact BFS |
