Kiski: The Story of a Boys' School

The Kiski School is celebrating its 125th year, and a long look backwards reveals an inspiring and often surprising story. Great schools worldwide have typically been founded or revitalized by passionate visionaries: Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Endicott Peabody of Groton, Frank Boyden of Deerfield. Kiski's founder, Andrew Wilson, was such a figure. Like his distinguished forerunners he managed to combine a deeply ingrained piety and robust athleticism with a loving commitment to a particular place. Moreover, the great boarding schools of the eastern United States have been, at their best, family schools, mitigating the rigors of scholarship and physical challenges with warm, caring residential life, faculty and spouses serving not merely in loco parentis but as genuinely parental mentors and guides and often lifelong friends. Through its first half century Kiski did not merely feel like a family school--it genuinely was. The remarkable Andrew Wilson guided the school through its first four decades with the inspired assistance of his wife, daughters, sons-in-law, and his closest friends. Only in 1957 would school leadership pass out of the family--and then to a man, young John (Jack)Anderson Pidgeon, who not only adhered to the course established by Wilson and his heirs but managed over forty-six years to breathe new life into it. Today, under Headmaster Chris Brueningsen's thoughtful guidance, Kiski continues to be what it has always been at its best: a scholastically rigorous school with a demonstrated capacity to transform uncertain scholars into confident, capable ones. Kiski is still a family school in which the adult commitment to students extends far beyond the classroom. It is still a school where a boy's decency and character are more highly valued than any scholastic, athletic or other achievement. In extent and breadth of program it is a school Andrew Wilson could never have imagined-- and yet would recognize instantly. Kiski, perhaps foremost, is a school for boys, and this is its story.