Margaret Funkhouser

This interview was conducted on August 20, 2021 with Margaret Funkhouser via Zoom from her home in Natick, Massachusetts. Margaret is an educator and Director of Writing, Film & Media Arts at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, a private boarding school focused on the arts. The day of this interview coincided with her first day of the school year, and she shared her first thoughts, impressions, and hopes for the year. Margaret expressed a feeling of safety with the school's well-established COVID-19 protocols and testing. She had not been back at the facilities for some time and expressed the strangeness of returning to a campus that was both familiar and very different. The school is also changing a lot in other ways-- from the multiple departures at the leadership level, to the new schedule, new learning management system, as well as a new restorative justice-based disciplinary program-- somethings are very different to how they were before the pandemic. She expressed a feeling among the staff that there's a lot of pressure to do well and get things right, but that she's been telling herself and others to let the small things go in order to reduce some of the stress.