Putting Down Roots

EAGLE School — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:10:23 +0000

A Tree in Honor of Andy Wright

On Tuesday, October 13, members of the EAGLE community gathered on campus for a special tree planting ceremony honoring Andy Wright, who is retiring at the end of this school year after nine years of leadership and dedication to EAGLE School.

The tree, donated by the EAGLE Parents’ Organization (EPO), celebrates Andy’s lasting impact on our school. Over the past nine years, Andy has helped EAGLE grow and flourish, nurturing a school where gifted students can develop a lifelong love of learning, explore their curiosity, and thrive.

Parents, staff, students, and community members came together for the ceremony, which included a lovely speech by Assistant Director Jamie MacDougall. Jamie spoke about how a tree’s roots reach deep into the ground where we can’t see them, yet they are what allow the branches above to flourish. In the same way, Andy has laid down roots for EAGLE that will sustain our school for many years to come.

The tree will stand as a living tribute to Andy’s leadership and a reminder of the strong foundation he has nurtured for future generations of EAGLE students.

Thank you to the EPO for organizing this meaningful celebration, and thank you, Andy, for all you have given to EAGLE School!

Nest (Kindergarten)

EAGLE School — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:02:55 +0000

In the “Nest,” our youngest students have the opportunity to grow socially, emotionally, physically, and
intellectually through developmentally appropriate practices. Students are encouraged to look closely at
their surroundings—to hypothesize, analyze, and talk about their observations and conclusions. They engage
in group and independent learning activities in a setting where cooperation, fairness, self-confidence, and
sense of community are fostered. Students become actively involved in the learning process as they utilize
carefully designed classroom areas that correlate to the general theme or unit being taught. Equal emphasis
is placed on teacher-directed activities and student-initiated learning.
Nest reading and writing instruction evolve as the child evolves. Early readers work on mastering letter
sounds, recognizing high frequency sight words, and making predictions. Advanced readers, building upon
early-stage skills, improve their fluency using phonetic decoding, as well as context and picture clues.
Writing activities include journaling, rewriting published stories, and creating original stories.
Math instruction involves “hands-on” experiences necessary for processing math concepts. Areas of study
include counting, recognizing and writing numbers and patterns, graphing, estimating, and measuring.
Students are also introduced to fractions, addition, subtraction, place value, time, and money.
Science instruction, based on classroom themes, allows students to describe, sort, and organize their
observations of objects and organisms. Topics typically covered include trees, animals, oceans, and the solar
system.
Social Studies activities help Nest students to become responsible individuals as they relate to the world
around them. Self-control, self-awareness, and community awareness are prime areas of focus. Activities
may include studying maps, investigating careers, and exploring customs and holidays from around the
world.

Welcome to EAGLE Jamie!

EAGLE School — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:33:24 +0000

This article — featuring new Assistant Director Jamie MacDougall — was originally published October 5, 2026, in The Regal EAGLE, EAGLE’s digital student newspaper. The interview was conducted by ClaraV. (8th grade).

Jamie is our new assistant director at EAGLE School, working in the position that May Mijares used to fill. This is an interview about Jamie’s career, interests, and goals for working at our school.

How did you get to be an assistant director at our school? Have you had a similar position at other schools?

I have spent most of my life in gifted education.

Yeah, so I have spent most of my life in gifted education as a teacher. I taught at Purdue for a while, but I worked a lot in middle schools. I was a head of middle school for a long time at a gifted school in Indianapolis that’s a lot like EAGLE School, and that’s actually where I met Andy and Collette, and Carol came down for a conference, too. So, I’ve been a big fan of EAGLE School for a long, long time.

I’ve also been an Assistant Head of School at another school, and I’ve always had this pull between like, I love the strategic thinking of administration, but I also like to be in a school where you can still be in classrooms and out on cross-country courses or helping with clubs, and all of those things too, because I think it’s kind of nice to have those daily interactions. I love working with faculty and thinking about, you know, long-term planning as well.

What job did you want to have as a kid? Did you always know you wanted to work in a school?

Honestly, I know it’s a little bit nerdy, but I have known that I’ve always wanted to work in a school. I would, with my friends, set up these ‘schools’ in our neighborhood. I thought it was going to go one of two ways: either school or camp director. What I love about EAGLE is it kind of feels like a little bit of a mash up of those things. I love that there’s an ultimate frisbee club, I love that there’s a letterboxing club, and it feels like we have all these choices of these more camp-y things, and everybody’s outside a lot. It kind of has the fun and spirit of camp. Also, the thing I didn’t like about camp: you have new kids every week; and with school you can have this continuity of community, and that’s what I love.

With EAGLE, you’ve got kindergarten through 8th grade, so you get to be with everybody for a long time, to really just build more of a school family. But yeah, I love school, and I have loved it my whole life, so I kind of knew that that was going to be the path.

I love school, and I have loved it my whole life.

Do you have other jobs right now, or are you here full-time?

I’m here full time. Sometimes in the summers I work at a gifted camp called Yunasa. We go out to Colorado for ten days, and a bunch of people from across the United States who are fourth through twelfth grade come out to that camp. And we do all sorts of cool things, like meditation, yoga, rock climbing, hiking, and nature art. And then we do ten days in Michigan with another group of students. Some kids come to both, but some just go to one or the other, because it’s ten days. It’s super fun. So that’s kind of my only other gig right now, other than that secretly—I tell Ellen all the time—when I’m at home I like to pretend I’m a librarian, so I have a lot of books and I catalog them. My only other job this year is to be a cross-country super-fan!

What do you like most about your current job as an assistant director?

I love that I get to do so many different things, every day something different happens. Even though you kind of have a plan for the day, things can change, like maybe you need to sub in a classroom, or maybe, you know, I got invited to go into fifth grade LA/SS/D and do a breakout room, that was super fun. I’ve been able to go into Nest and participate in color day, so I really like that.

I think the faculty here is absolutely incredible.

I think the faculty here is absolutely incredible, so I love getting to sit in faculty meetings with the teachers. They’ve got such great creative ideas. Every week I meet with the science department, and last week we just tested out the Verniers, which are these little tools that measure carbon-dioxide and oxygen; and we tested out some labs and that was really fun. I think it’s like the balance of getting the daily things done, but also getting to dream about what else we could do.

What hobbies do you have? I know you ran a quidditch club, could you tell us about that?

I’m a big Harry Potter fan, and I do take some issue with J. K. Rowling as a person in these moments, but I love that she’s created this world of magic and friendship and inclusivity. And yes, we had a quidditch club. There is collegiate quidditch — UW has a quidditch team, Harvard has a quidditch team, I don’t know if Edgewood has a quidditch team — but I think across the United States, and internationally, there are hundreds of quidditch teams.

So I thought it was fun to kind of bring it here. We played with third and fourth graders. It’s kind of like ultimate frisbee on a broom, and with a quaffle. Meanwhile, dodgeball is happening because you’ve got people throwing balls as bludgers in the middle, and then you unleash a golden snitch: somebody runs around with flags on their belt, and someone has to catch the golden snitch and that’s when the game ends. You’ve got three games going on, so it’s like the perfect EAGLE School game because you’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to be strategic, and you’ve got to have a little bit of ability to persist.

So I love that, I love hanging out at the Fitchburg Library. I think that the librarians there know a ton, which is really great. I also love hiking and kayaking, so it’s been cool to get out on the new trails in Madison.

Do you have any goals for working at EAGLE School, and if so, what are they?

I’d love to be here for a very long time, but because it’s my first year, the way that I kind of navigate things is just to kind of come in and observe and see what the community is like. And so far, as a strategic goal for the community right now, I don’t know that I have anything super concrete three months in, other than that I think we’ve got a really neat group of people, so I’m just continuing to find ways to make connections between students. And maybe students between grade levels, because sometimes, you know, if you’ve got a grade level of thirty people, your best friend may not be one of those other 29 people. So how do we find ways to interact between grade levels, and maybe even between the olders and the youngers? How do we build on those peer mentorships? I know the Nesters are always excited when they get to meet their buddy.

And then continuing to build parent community, too. To talk a little bit more about gifted education in parenting. So yeah, having more parent education programs. And then Betsy and I are working on helping to smooth out that transition to high school as well, and thinking through how we start to help people make connections. This year we’ve said the theme is a little bit of connecting the dots. This year I get to see all of the dots, and then talking with students and teachers and parents to figure out how we can more efficiently connect some dots, but also sometimes connecting dots to make a more beautiful picture might not be efficient, but it’s totally worth it if it’s going to be a more beautiful situation.

Is there anything else you wanted to say?

I think that one thing I want to say — that can maybe sound a little corny but is genuinely true — is that I’ve been lucky to be able to work at a few different schools, but EAGLE really feels like home to me. I grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, and so it’s kind of nice to be back up north. I think Madison and EAGLE are so welcoming. EAGLE is a really, really, good school. I think if it’s the only school you know, sometimes it’s hard to know, but this really is a special place. I like to compare it to the Hogwarts Room of Requirement; it feels like it can expand and contract in ways that we need it to. I think that that’s really pretty special. So I’m excited to continue to learn all the things… and I’m very excited for Halloween. I think it’s going to be fun!

EAGLE really feels like home.

Thank you, Jamie, for this interview, and we are all grateful and excited to have you on our EAGLE staff!