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Stoneleigh-Burnham School Launches Empowerment, Ethical Global Citizenship, and Voice (EEV) Center

By ANTHONY CAMMALERI, Staff Writer

for The Greenfield Recorder

GREENFIELD — Stoneleigh-Burnham School launched its new Empowerment, Ethical Global Citizenship and Voice Center — an all-in-one research, speech and debate, foreign exchange and staff development program — on March 1, the first day of Women’s History Month.

Alongside the launch of the multi-faceted EVV center, the school is opening applications for Emerson Scholars, a merit-based scholarship program named after Susan Mabel Hood Emerson. Accepted students will be chosen based on their academic performance levels as well as the quality of their written project proposals. Participants will be charged with researching the school’s history alongside a mentor, and studying past students and staff who made strides in global citizenship — such as some of the school’s first international students.

“This school was founded to provide an opportunity for young women, who at the time had more difficulty obtaining an education that prepared them effectively for higher education, which is, in one sense, empowerment,” Assistant Head of School Bett Alter said. “We’ll be taking a look at how, in the past, students and educators at Stoneleigh-Burnham have accomplished these milestones toward ethical global citizenship.”

A list of accepted Emerson Scholars will be decided later this spring. In June, the school will launch the EEV center’s Institute for Teachers, which will focus on student engagement and faculty development as well as the revival of Stoneleigh-Burnham’s Debate and Public Speaking Camp, followed by a series of classes for parents in the fall of 2024. The underlying theme behind each new program, Alter explained, is to teach the students about their roles as citizens on a global scale. The center’s global education program, Alter said, will give students the opportunity to travel abroad and immerse themselves in a foreign culture.

“It isn’t a tourist experience at all. It should be really an opportunity to authentically engage with people who are of the place where you were a guest, and it’s beginning to learn about what it means when we travel to another culture, and how our presence impacts the local culture and how that local culture impacts us, and the importance of being mindful about that,” Alter said. “Ethical global citizenship really means understanding our place in the world and the importance of recognizing other people’s places in the world.”

Although the program will remain local to Stoneleigh-Burnham students, teachers and parents this year, Alter hopes to expand some of the educational global citizenship programs to the greater community in the future.

“I wanted to help make something happen at Stoneleigh-Burnham,” Alter said, “that would really move us forward on empowering our students and their parents to be forces of good in the world.”

To learn more, visit sbschool.org/EEV.