I woke up this morning to a wintry squall outside my window. Winter Storm Fern had pushed north from the South, bringing with it a blustery mix of snow, sleet, and freezing rain. I live and work at a boarding school, which means that while most of the campus is on a long weekend break, I am among a small group of faculty assigned to oversee campus life for the students who remain. Typically, these weekend assignments are quiet and predictable, filled with trips to local markets and restaurants, the movie theater, or the mall. Many students who stay on campus—particularly during long weekend breaks—are international students who live too far away to travel home within such a short span. These breaks often provide a welcome opportunity to make the hour-long drive to Philadelphia for food, shopping, and cultural connection in the city’s Chinatown district. Because of the storm, however, the trip to Philadelphia was regrettably canceled. In its place, the abundant snowdrifts offered hours of sledding, trekking, and snowball fights, ensuring that not all fun was lost. The weather also gifted students something their busy schedules often make elusive: rest.
One “perk” of the weekend is having a television in the common area of the dining hall—a true privilege in an otherwise screen-free space—where students can watch movies or play video games. Usually, the television fades into white noise behind lively conversations or competitive card games. From my table at lunch, I looked up to see that someone had turned on the news. It was not lost on me that while we sat in the eye of a literal storm, the images on the screen depicted a figurative one unfolding in Minneapolis, where protesters had taken to the streets to oppose U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) presence and practices and to mourn the tragic death of yet another beloved neighbor, 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti.
These images felt especially salient given reports of ICE activity in towns adjacent to ours. The news prompted sobering conversations with our international students and with faculty on winter break duty about how we might respond should ICE officers question or detain a student. As colleagues worked to develop language and protocols to protect our students and equip our faculty, I was struck by the unsettling realization that, despite our community sometimes feeling insulated from the outside world, we are not immune to the literal and metaphorical atmospheric pressures that surround us. The parallels between the severe conditions of Winter Storm Fern and the lived trauma experienced by so many across the country—family, friends, colleagues, and students—have weighed heavily on my mind.
As the evening draws to a close and our students retreat to residential and social spaces across the campus, I wonder how they are processing the blinding flurry of information and images that overwhelm us all. What fears do they carry that I may not know or understand? What can our community do to honor and acknowledge our collective grief while remaining hopeful that a greater humanity can and will prevail? Moments like this remind me why Episcopal education matters so deeply. Rooted in a tradition that calls for justice, peace, respect, and dignity, Episcopal schools are meant to be places of moral courage where identity is honored, difference is welcomed, and love is made tangible through action. Our classrooms, chapels, and common spaces remain the “radical spaces of possibility” that theorist and educator bell hooks exalts in her seminal text Teaching to Transgress. The storms that we face—both literal and metaphorical—remind us that Episcopal schools are not meant to be refuges from the world, but training grounds for engagement with it.
The break continues with email invitations from students for a movie night and a game of hide-and-seek in the arts building—gentle reminders of how precious and promising their young lives are, and of how important it is that they be protected. In times of uncertainty and upheaval, our commitment to equity, belonging, and justice becomes not merely aspirational, but essential, shaping how we care for one another and how we prepare young people to engage a complex and often turbulent world with faith and determination. I am deeply grateful for the alignment between our daily practices and the Episcopal guiding principles for equity and justice, which call our school communities to moral courage and radical empathy as we weather the storms ahead, together.
Danica Tisdale Fisher, Ph.D. is Dean of Inclusion & Belonging at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, DE.