A letter from Gabe Burnstein, Head of School
Dear Charles River School Community,
I write to you as August hurdles toward September and a new school year awaits. Before we say “Happy New Year!” at CRS on September 3rd, I hope you and your family find a few more summer moments of peace, connection, and restoration.
Highlights of summer for me include more time to read and meet new people in the Charles River School community. Both offer opportunities to learn from people’s stories. Every CRS student understands the power of storytelling – stories allow us to build connection and empathy, to make learning stick, and to inspire us to action. I love good stories, and I ate these opportunities up during the summer.
Here are a few lessons from stories this summer that will propel me into a new year of learning:
1) Failure is an essential ingredient to growth and learning.
I re-learned this lesson by reading Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography on Ulysses S. Grant. A biography on a Civil War general and our 18th president may seem like a strange choice, but it brought me back to my roots as a history teacher and enthusiastic history learner.
Here is a brief summary of Ulysses S. Grant’s story for context:
After a middling experience at West Point, (he finished 21st out 39 graduates), Grant struggled mightily in civilian life. He failed in business venture after business venture; one year he had to pawn his watch to buy Christmas presents for his family. In 1860, he was selling firewood in the streets of St. Louis before returning home to Galena, Illinois, where the only person who would hire him was his own father. He was labeled a failure by everyone who knew his name. He was 38 years old.
Five years later, he would be known as the general who saved the Union. Three years after that, he would be elected President of the United States. He used his presidential power to fight for the rights of formerly enslaved people, pushing for the ratification of the 15th Amendment that said states could not disenfranchise African Americans.
Grant struggled, and he struggled a lot before finding success.
Our children need opportunities to struggle too so they can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, look around and say, “I’m okay, and I’m going to keep going!” That’s how they build grit. Joy and confidence are not about the absence of struggle. Joy and confidence require struggle, and yes, even failure! Because failure is simply a prologue to the joy that is born from doing hard things well.
I get it. One of the hardest things as a parent is to watch our children struggle. This is really difficult! I often have to catch myself from trying to prevent my own children from feeling frustration. (Watching Moses, my nine year-old son, pitch for the first time in little league this summer was excruciating! I wanted to yell instructions from the bleachers and it took everything I had to bite my tongue and let him learn out there on the mound.)
Let’s be clear: I’m not advocating that every CRS graduate needs to sell wood in the street or move back home with their parents at age 38. But, in a modern world built on instant gratification, we need to continue to create conditions for our children to engage in the right amount of productive struggle that will lead to growth and skill building. Our teachers are experts at demonstrating this timeless truth. As parents, we need to remind ourselves to avoid rescuing our children at the first sign of frustration. The long game is empowering young people to grow up to be self directed, self assessing, and self adjusting learners.
2) Purpose and passion require patience and persistence
Each summer also provides an opportunity for me to meet alumni, listen to their stories, and learn how our graduates live up to the promise found in the last line of our mission statement – “to know themselves, understand others, and shape the future of our diverse world with confidence and compassion.”
One of my summer highlights was meeting Molly Plummer Cook ’95 – the recipient of our 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award. I loved hearing Molly’s stories about Charles River School and its impact on her life. Molly is a clinical psychologist, and she is an embodiment of our mission in action. I was particularly inspired by her work as a trustee at Plummer Youth Promise – a Salem based nonprofit dedicated to helping young people, particularly those in or at risk of entering the child welfare or juvenile justice system, achieve long-term, lifelong family connections and stability. Molly spoke passionately about her work and the word “permanent” kept coming up—as she strives to make a permanent difference in the lives of the children her organization serves.
As we return to campus this fall, we give our children the gifts of time and space to find their passions and develop their superpowers. Like our new Community Garden, this requires constant watering from their teachers. And like our garden this past April, sometimes when we don’t see the harvest right away, we wonder, “Is it happening? Is anything growing?” In our current hyper-speed world, the rate of growth during a child’s education can sometimes seem painfully slow to us adults.
But trust the gardeners! After dropping off your children on campus this fall, slow down and look to your left at our Community Garden. It is bursting with vegetables – peppers, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, watermelon, and cucumbers, all grown from the seeds our students planted this spring thanks to leadership of another alum, Leslie Jackson Judge ‘91 P’24 ‘26.
When Molly Plummer Cook graduated from CRS, she did not know she would one day be dedicating so much of her time to helping children in foster care, but she can draw a straight line to the seeds that were planted by her beloved teachers like Theresa Baker, who taught her to build skills, believe in herself, and use them to help others in her community. I can’t wait for Molly to return to campus this October to lead an assembly, so our students can draw inspiration from her stories too.
3) Optimism is essential.
I don’t know how often Molly Plummer Cooke is compared to Ulysses S. Grant but here goes: their shared optimism is essential to understanding their stories and their impact on others.
Molly Plummer Cooke and Ulysses S. Grant did not pick easy problems to tackle, but they are both defined by an unwavering belief that tomorrow will be better than today. This is also a core value at Charles River School. Just ask our teachers who spend their days inspiring and empowering children to build skills and to use them to make our world a better place.
Yes, there is a dizzying pace of news and no shortage of reasons for us, the adults, to put our heads in the sand when it all feels overwhelming. (And yes, I’ve heard time and time again this summer that our country has never been more politically divided. After reading hundreds of pages about the Civil War, I respectfully disagree.)
If you are feeling pessimism creeping in, I have the answers: find an excuse to drop something off at school at 10:00am, so you can watch five minutes of a Charles River School recess. The joy of childhood is palpable when 13 and 14 year-olds giggle and play and slide down the slide alongside their four and five year-old buddies. Come and witness a Sharing Assembly and see the courage, teamwork, and creativity that our Otters bring to the stage, and watch their teachers beam with pride from the wings of the theater. This fall, come to Friday Night Lights on October 3rd and cheer on our fourth through eighth graders as they put on a CRS jersey and huddle up with their teammates, arms around one another. Pick any of these opportunities to see our children in action, and I promise that you will leave campus filled with hope that tomorrow will be better than today.
For me, the first day of school can’t be here soon enough. Summer is wonderful, but in my book, it can’t compete with fall; and besides, the universe needs the children back at school.
When I see you, I hope you will share with me about how your summer went – the books you read, the people you met, the adventures you had, and what you learned too.
Together, we will begin again with a new school year and the important work of inspiring and empowering our children to learn and grow and lead, and to do it all so beautifully and courageously together. I can’t wait.
Best,
Gabe