“I remember her father saying to me ‘there’s nothing more important to me than my children’s education.’ If they were doing schoolwork, they were excused from doing housework.” “Maria and her brother joined the program,” Ann said. Ann Northrup, who visits with every family before their children come into the program, still remembers meeting a little girl named Maria who was in third grade at Banneker Elementary School but was reading a sixth-grade level book. Her family lives in a tenant house on a Middleburg farm, where her father is employed as farm manager. And we also wanted to have our Hill eighth-graders involved as mentors.”Īll of that has happened, frequently with grand results. To do that, it needed to be top-heavy with adults. We wanted to provide a safe and respectful place for a child to come and be together with other children, to provide enriching opportunities, and lots of individual attention. “It was not going to be tutorial, in the classroom. Can we give them something they would enjoy and mean something in their lives? “We realized the children had to want to come and that we had to have something they would want to do.
“When we started out, we needed to know what we could accomplish in four hours every other Saturday,” said Ann Northrup, who has run the program from day one. The programs were intended to attract youngsters, mostly from families in the school’s western Loudoun footprint who were not enrolled at Hill but might benefit from using its classrooms and playing fields to enrich their lives. That program, Team Saturday and a few years later, TEEN Saturday, were started twenty-one years ago under the direction of educators Ann Northrup and her husband Tom, who back then was Hill’s Headmaster and now oversees its development program. She also knows that because of a program at The Hill School she joined while still a third grader in a local public school, none of the above would have been possible. Maria Arellano was the first in her family to graduate from college two years ago, and she’s now a legal assistant in a Washington law firm still thinking about applying to law school.
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