{"id":29436,"date":"2025-12-15T14:08:40","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T20:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/?p=29436"},"modified":"2025-12-15T14:46:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T20:46:51","slug":"connections-to-the-past-and-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/2025\/12\/15\/connections-to-the-past-and-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Then &#038; Now: Connections To The Past And Present"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-29441 alignright img-responsive\" src=\"https:\/\/nclhx5yj.tinifycdn.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/thennow-WP.png\" alt=\"Students in the Nicholson Center celebrating. \" width=\"400\" height=\"267\" \/>From George Mills &#8217;04<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hard to believe we\u2019ve already made it to December 2025\u2014and that winter has arrived overnight in all its cold, snowy glory. The first snowfall has always felt magical to me, and it recently brought back a memory from my eighth-grade year.<\/p>\n<p>I remember being dropped off by my dad along a sidewalk that no longer exists, walking through the atrium with the blue glass\u2014back when it was still an entrance\u2014and being greeted by the sound of a girls\u2019 quintet singing. It was such an uplifting way to start the day.<\/p>\n<p>That small moment made me reflect on how much MPA has changed\u2026 and how much has stayed wonderfully the same. After spending several years away and now returning as both an alum and a parent, I find myself noticing the pieces of MPA that still feel familiar. For example, there\u2019s a vase Ms. Petersen uses that I immediately recognized from Ms. Buck\u2019s ceramics studio\u2014now occasionally brightening the Lower School hallway.<\/p>\n<p>So much life happens in these hallways, even in the small in-between moments we don\u2019t always think about. Just the other day, I was waiting outside the band room for my kindergartner to finish a piano lesson when Marisue Gleason walked by. We ended up chatting right there in the \u201cT\u201d at the end of the main hallway\u2014you know the one. It was not only fun to reminisce about being her Spanish II student back in 2001, but also to reconnect in a spot that has hardly changed at all.<\/p>\n<p>MPA is full of these quiet threads that weave our past with our present\u2014little tributes and familiar touches mixed in with all the ways the school continues to grow. If you haven\u2019t been back in a while, I hope you\u2019ll stop by for a visit. Take a self-guided tour or walk with one of our wonderful colleagues in admissions or development, and see what memories stir for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From George Mills &#8217;04 It\u2019s hard to believe we\u2019ve already made it to December 2025\u2014and that winter has arrived overnight in all its cold, snowy glory. The first snowfall has always felt magical to me, and it recently brought back a memory from my eighth-grade year. I remember being dropped off by my dad along [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":29440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,19,24,29,9,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-school","category-alumni","category-featured-posts","category-homepage","category-lower-school","category-upper-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29436"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29446,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29436\/revisions\/29446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}