"I don't do change well," a veteran upper school teacher told me recently. She was referring to the change in leadership of the Upper School division with the departure of Robbie Seum, who announced in August her intention to leave MPA at the end of this school year.

(As I wrote in the first Head's Message of the year in August: Robbie came to MPA in 1986 as a math teacher, later served as an Upper School Dean and Assistant Director of the Upper School before being appointed Director of the Upper School in 2001. We have been tremendously fortunate to have benefited from Robbie's steady leadership and we will miss her.)

But returning to the subject of change and our teacher's worries about it, I'll respectfully disagree with her. That is, I believe she actually does very well with change. Teachers in the vanguard at MPA, our pioneers, have been all about change. About taking an existing form and making it better, which they did splendidly at our founding in 1982 and have been doing ever since.

MPA has consistently evolved to meet changing circumstances, changes in the kids and families that populate our community, and the massive changes in the world to which we send our graduates.

In fact, we owe our institutional existence to an original impulse for change - to create a school that was different than the status quo of independent schools in the Twin Cities. So while most of us face change with the very human response to be somewhat apprehensive, our collective "MPA" response has always been to grow from it.

And while it is a leap of faith to imagine our Upper School division under new leadership, it is a leap we take with great confidence in MPA's core mission and solid fundamentals.

A group of us have been doing just that - imagining new Upper School leadership. It is all part of the process of conducting a search, which will move in to a more public phase next month.

On several different days in January, we'll be visited by candidates recruited through a national network of independent schools. During that time, groups of students, faculty and parents will be asked to help us imagine the Upper School under new leadership through interviews with candidates. (More detailed information on the search process can be found at the end of this message.)

Speaking of change, winter break starts in a little over 24 hours. Families used to being separated for most of the day are brought back together (or thrown back together, depending on your perspective) for extended periods of time.

As we approach the last hours of 2007 and prepare for the first of 2008, I am struck by the fact that holidays have the significance they do because they represent a constant in the midst of a changing world. Familiar music cycles back around, familiar foods and familiar rituals mark a fixed place in time. We've been here before. We know this place.

But the return to the familiar can also be a benchmark, showing us the changes we've experienced since last year, like the parade of annual holiday photographs that highlight the passage of time. We've been here before, but we've changed.

Those of us who devote our lives to education do so because of our fascination with the process of growing and learning, the by-product of which is always some form of change. I hope and trust that MPA will always be a place that welcomes and embraces change, facing the new with a spirit of adventure and optimism, even as we continually cycle back on that which makes us what we are. We CAN do change well.

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For those interested in more detail about the US Director Search: A group including faculty, administrators and a parent representative have been reviewing resumes over the last few months. A search committee, which I am leading, has been formed to oversee the candidate interview process toward a final decision about future leadership.

Candidate visits to campus will begin with a first visitor on January 10, followed by additional visits on subsequent weeks in January. Candidates will interview with student, faculty, parent and administrative groups. In addition to three Upper School teachers and two administrators, the search committee includes parent representative and board member Karla Myers.

More information on the candidates will be made available after the winter break. Our goal is to have made a final decision by spring break.