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Middle School Museum Club Discovers TGS History
by Katie Patt

What do you get when you put together Middle School students, old yearbooks and artifacts from TGS’s history, and a seasoned historic preservationist?—Why the Museum Club, of course!

Our primary objective is to catalog, document and preserve the history of The Gregory School... The Museum Club is TGS’s latest Friday Exploration endeavor. Before the start of the current school year, JJ Lamb, executive director of the Vail Preservation Society and grandparent of a current student, reached out to see if our Middle Schoolers were interested in engaging in historic preservation. The Middle School faculty answered a resounding yes, and the Museum Club was born. Our primary objective is to catalog, document and preserve the history of The Gregory School through engaging in hands-on, real-life museum work. 

Under the direction of Ms. Lamb, Mrs. Jacobs and Ms. Patt, the students in the Museum Club have dug through old yearbooks, memoranda, and other ephemera; cataloged the aforementioned ephemera; studied old maps and created new maps of the campus; conducted primary source interviews (mainly of storied teachers), and begun to make a memory quilt of all that they have discovered so far. In the future, we hope to conduct more interviews with faculty, founders, board members, and alumni and to continue to add to the rich story of TGS.

Seventh-grader Margot Pew reflected, “We found extremely strange dress code rules, old handbooks, letters to our principal, posters and pictures of old students and even a small disk with athletic awards, staff pictures, and videos on it. Our favorite fact was that in 1982 you couldn’t wear shorts unless it was the first week of school or the last six weeks of school.”

Katie Patt earned her M.A. from the University of Massachusetts and her B.A. from Kenyon College.
Katie has been teaching at The Gregory School since 2014.

Allycyn Jacobs earned her M.A. from Washington State University and her undergraduate degree from Northern Arizona University. 
Allycyn has been teaching at The Gregory School since 2015.