Pathway to Greatness

Jesse Porter-Henry,
class of ‘95, builds communities in foreign lands

Jesse Porter-Henry graduated from the Greenfield Center School in 1995, and stayed on for a post-graduate year in 1996. He then went to Mohawk Regional High School where he finished his last two years as a dual-enrollment student at Greenfield Community College, which he says gave him more options—and more freedom—than he would have had in a traditional high school structure. In 2003 he graduated from Colorado College as a geology major, and then worked in the school’s para-professional program as a TA, field-trip guide, and co-curator of the geology library. Since then, he has also worked as a raft guide in Jackson, WY and here in the Northeast, and as a high school geology and math teacher.

Jesse now works for Rustic Pathways, a company that runs community-service-oriented camps for teens around the world.

Jesse Porter-Henry

He is currently the New England representative, visiting area high schools and telling students and teachers about the program, which brings teens from North America to places like Asia and South America, where they team with local teens on community-service projects. This summer, Jesse will go to Costa Rica to direct a new camp there.

About the Center School, Jesse says, “I have tons of memories from the Center School. It has really made me who I am. GCS fosters such a sense of community, it just becomes really important to you.” He says it is no coincidence that three other Center School alums—Gabe Porter-Henry (Jesse’s brother), Jessemin Sheyda ‘95, and Dylan Cutler ’95—have also worked for the community-oriented Rustic Pathways.

A Cardiologist
in the Making

Abigail May

Abby May, class of '93, graduates from Harvard Medical School this year

Abby May graduated from the Greenfield Center School in 1993, and went on to Northfield Mount Hermon, and then to Brown University, where she graduated in 2001 with a major in neuroscience. After Brown, she worked for a year at a clinic in Providence, RI, helping to decrease risk behavior in needle-users, in order to prevent the spread of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis.

Abby will graduate from Harvard Medical School this June, and will then start a residency at one of the Boston hospitals. She is most interested in cardiology, women’s health, and the Hispanic population, where rates of disease are found to be high. This, she says, is a result of many sociological factors including access to health care, and how new immigrants integrate into this culture. Abby is fluent in Spanish— she started learning the language at GCS—and will be spending two months this summer working at a clinic in Chile.

On other fronts, Abby is getting married this April. She and her fiancé met at Brown, and he is now a resident of internal medicine at Mass General Hospital. She says much of their spare time these days is spent on wedding planning.

Abby says she has a lot of good memories of the Center School, but her fondest recollections are of the good-bye circle that her graduating class had during their trip to Cape Cod.

Econ, Anyone?

Casey Rothschild,
class of ‘91, gets his PhD at MIT

Casey Rothschild

Casey Rothschild graduated from the Greenfield Center School in 1991 and went on to Northfield Mount Hermon, graduating in 1995. He then attended Princeton University (class of ‘99) as a physics major, studying, among other things, the moons of Jupiter.

Casey is now at MIT finishing his PhD in Economics —a subject he discovered by chance during a summer research internship. His dissertation, which will be sent to economic journals this fall for publication, focuses on the regulation of insurance markets.

Casey currently lives in Roslindale, MA with his fiancé who is a Child Life Specialist at Children’s Hospital in Boston. After the wedding this June, Casey will begin a teaching position at Middlebury College.

One thing Casey remembers fondly about the Center School was the lack of hierarchy in the social structure—the fact that everyone could feel like an equal there.