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Durham Academy Magazine

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Prepared for Life: The Science & Art of Educational Excellence

While we will always strive to prepare our students to thrive in the best-fit colleges (or gap years), we know that the best preparation for college AND for a life well lived remains a love of learning and the development of the skills needed to learn well.

A Class of 2024 graduate accepts her diploma from Michael Ulku-Steiner
A ‘Diaspora’ of Their Own: Seniors Carry Forward Stories and Values

An unmistakable aura of gratitude overpowered the heat and humidity outside Duke University’s Page Auditorium as members of the Durham Academy Class of 2024 waited to march into their commencement ceremony. After all, the last time they reached a major milestone in their educational journeys — the transition from middle to high school in 2020 — the occasion was muted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a video of recorded remarks, a virtual version of the eighth grade “tunnel of love” built in Minecraft and a car parade taking the place of the usual closing exercises festivities.

Board’s Endorsement Places Sustainability Goals Front and Center at DA
Board’s Endorsement Places Sustainability Goals Front and Center at DA

It started, like all worthy causes do, with an idea: four 11th-grade boys huddled around a whiteboard in the Upper School Learning Commons, scribbling fragments and notions that would become a constellation of dreams. It was the fall of 2018, and the quartet of Durham Academy juniors — Brandon Caveney ’20, the late Jack Linger ’20, Will Nichols ’20 and Andrew Owens ’20 — had formed, in the most informal sense, Durham Academy’s inaugural Sustainability Club.

News from Campus

Alumni News

Khari Williams ’14: Coming Home to Durham — and DA — to Give Back
Khari Williams ’14: Coming Home to Durham — and DA — to Give Back

Khari Williams ’14 thought he would return to Durham. Eventually. After he graduated from Durham Academy, he majored in Marketing, Management and Advertising & Digital Media at the University of Virginia, and he subsequently spent time working in both Washington, D.C., and Nashville. But when his fiancee, Hannah Maclellan, was admitted to the Duke University School of Medicine, Williams decided to come home — to Durham, and to DA.

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Ava Pacchiana '18: Holding Communities Together, From Warsaw to New York
Ava Pacchiana '18: Holding Communities Together, From Warsaw to New York

When she completed her undergraduate degree and earned a two-year deferral to law school, Ava Pacchiana ’18 knew she wanted to spend her extended break doing something different. She did, indeed: expanding childhood education for Ukrainian refugees in Poland, walking 600 miles across France and Spain, and joining an organization dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions.

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