This article appeared as "Handle With Care" in the Spring 2023 issue of Independent School.My visit with Mrs. Kirkman came early in my time as a Boy Scout when I needed to demonstrate my knowledge on a particular topic to her. She was the merit badge counselor for three badges required to reach the rank of Eagle. The first of these was “Citizenship in the Community,” and she’d be the one to sign off and confirm that I had prepared and understood what community was all about, thus leading me to earn my badge. I simply wanted to collect my badges and keep earning them, so I rode my bike to Mrs. Kirkman’s place thinking, “Let’s get this over with.”
Her house was warmer than the air outdoors and smelled sour-sweet. She offered me a chair as she limped to the oven and opened its door. She pulled out three loaves of bread and placed them on the stovetop. In silence, she pulled two plates from the cabinet and placed them before me. As she washed a few remaining dishes and tidied up, I began to feel uneasy. I had expected my visit to be over quickly, hoping I would list for her the offices of the government of Twin Falls, Idaho; name the people who occupied those offices; point on a map where the fire and police stations were; and provide a few other pieces of information required in the badge booklet. I knew what “community” meant for the sake of a badge, and I was ready to show it and go home.
Soon, she cut thick slices of warm sourdough bread. She set the bread between us on the counter and, offering the butter, asked how my mother was, then how my father was, then how each of my brothers were doing. She took her time in asking what I liked about living in our town, how I liked school and church. Between buttered bites of what I still remember as the best bread I have ever tasted, I answered her questions and began to relax. She told me stories about Twin Falls at the start of the 20th century, how her family had raised and herded sheep before large-scale agriculture took over, how the bread I was eating at that moment was made from the same sourdough starter her grandmother used to bake loaves to send out with the shepherds 70 years before.
When I had arrived at Mrs. Kirkman’s, I was thinking of community as only a place and the people in it, or perhaps a local government. And while she most certainly asked me the requisite questions for me to earn my merit badge, she taught me a profound new definition of the word. In her kindness and genuine interest in me and my family, she taught me that a community is not just a group of people. It’s the way that a group of people treat each other.
This definition is more vital than ever for independent school communities. Community can no longer be only a shared sense of purpose, a shared preference for a particular educational experience, or the accident of living in the same area. Just as when I left Mrs. Kirkman’s with a newfound sense of pride in where I lived, a new friend, and two loaves of the world’s best bread, as we navigate the post-pandemic world and return to addressing the difficult problems of sustainability, equity, and inclusion in a radically changed educational environment, it’s clear that community must be defined by the care with which we treat one another, the empathy we feel, and the gifts we give and receive among ourselves.