Each year, our team at McMillan Education chooses a theme to guide and inspire us in our work with students. Last year we chose “Cultivate our Garden,” following 2023’s change-inspired year of “Run to the Roar.” This year, as our group celebrates 70 years of guiding students to educational outcomes that are reflective both of who they authentically are and who they hope to become, we have chosen “The North Star” as our theme, and I was honored to be given the chance to kick off our reflections on this enduring theme in this opening blog.
I find inspiration both in endeavoring to be a North Star for our students and families, and for our team, and also in faithfully following our own enduring mission of taking care of kids through increasingly complex seas as they navigate their educational journeys. For me, the theme of such a stalwart and enduring beacon has a rich and complex significance, especially in turbulent times.
While the earliest known reference to the North Star appears to have occurred around 3000 BC, in Egyptian navigation records citing the star Thuban (Alpha Draconis) in the constellation Draco, it has been a symbol of permanence, enduring wisdom, and steadfastness in powerful myths and in very practical and real ways on journeys of all kinds ever since. My own first experience learning about the North Star came during an elementary school tour of the Jackson Homestead in Newton, MA, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Harriet Tubman had led some 70 slaves to freedom on incredibly dangerous covert journeys from southern plantations to the northern US. The North Star was the only guide for significant stretches of those perilous journeys, and its durability and utter reliability safely guided enslaved people to freedom. My mind could hardly grasp the depth of that star’s importance, and yet I also understood even at that young age that the home I was standing in had been owned by wealthy northerners who had risked their own lives to house and care for those on these journeys. I was learning to see that the good in some people, an enduring commitment to helping others even at personal cost or risk, was its own kind of North Star, and was something I felt inspired to follow.
I had already been inspired on that journey by my grandparents, Fran and Jerry Olrich. My mom had significant and permanent health issues when I was born, and my biological father had fled the scene. When my mother’s parents saw there was no way my mother would consider adoption, they took several deep breaths, and committed to being parents of a young child again, even while looking after my mom. They were people of incredible principle, and had committed in innumerable ways to a life benefiting others. Enduring the Great Depression in their late teens and early twenties, they left academic careers to focus on the labor movement in the US. My grandfather left a graduate program in Chemistry to become a machinist, a tool and die maker. He spent a significant portion of his life working on printing presses and was a union leader, pressing for workers’ rights in a resurgent economy, and was also a political activist. Later in life he became a part-time consultant and taught a group of displaced women to operate lathes and become machinists. My grandmother spent years as a labor organizer and laborer in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and was a political activist even later in life, when she became a teacher at Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College, working with students who were often the first in their family ever to attend college.
Around Fran and Jerry’s dinner table, there were no lectures, but there was plenty of evidence of what it meant to devote your life to helping others, and especially to prioritizing justice for those who were underrepresented in our political and educational society, and in our country’s economic engines. Several foundational lessons emerged as I grew up:
Work tirelessly.
Work for the benefit of others.
Work in whatever ways you can for those who are marginalized and for justice.
Participate and live–make a difference.
Satisfy yourself, rather than always attempting to satisfy others.
These lessons were precepts for a larger mission I built my life around, a life devoted to assisting others in discovering themselves, and in educating themselves to make their own difference. I approached coaching this way. I approach managing people in this way. I approach teaching and counseling in this way. My wife Shannon and I approach the raising of our kids, Willow and Eliza, with these lessons in mind as they take their own journeys to adulthood. And I approach broader leadership as an educator with this mission steadfastly in view, unwavering despite the currently very turbulent seas in higher education, and in our world.
When I came to work at McMillan, it was in part because I truly did see the group, and particularly Don and Sarah, as a symbol of true and authentic educational leadership, steadfastly focused on student development and growth while helping students land at an incredible array of schools and colleges and universities. In this very complex moment in education and in our world, that focus on authentic student fulfillment, health, and growth, and the certainty that that growth can and must align with a path to the best results for each student…that is our North Star. It aligns beautifully with my own, and my eyes are fixed on it now, as much as ever.
