burr & burton academy breaking new ground STORY BY BENJAMIN LERNER PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY BURR & BURTON ACADEMY With the Rowland Project underway, Manchester’s Burr & Burton Academy (BBA) is doing more than just redesigning and transforming their campus. They are redefining education with a groundbreaking, modern, and collaborative approach that will bring students from the surrounding Vermont community together and provide them with unique and authentic educational experiences. The generous philanthropic efforts of Barry and Wendy Rowland have already made indelible marks on BBA’s campus. Their gifts during the years have supported the Student Success Program, funded student and faculty travel, provided a phenomenal student center and classroom space in the Rowland Center, and funded the now fully operational agriculture science lab at Hildene, known affectionately at BBA as the “Dene Farm.” Their newest generous contribution has allowed BBA to launch the Rowland Project, which will bring the school’s forward-looking academic vision to life with the planned completion of Founders Hall in the summer of 2021. 96 manchester life | manchesterlifemagazine.com Burr & Burton’s plan for the future of education is both integrated and cooperative, with less focus on the separation of individual academic and artistic disciplines, and more focus on bringing those individual disciplines together to create authentic learning experiences for a well-rounded life. As Headmaster Mark Tashjian explains, “Once kids go beyond the traditional learning that happens in high school and college, the world gets more and more integrated. We want our students to be prepared with integrative thinking, problem solving, and communication skills.” This inventively authentic approach to education requires a modern facility to accommodate it. True to that unifying philosophy, they plan to integrate the courses from BBA’s curriculum (both physically and academically) at Founders Hall. Classes taught at Founders Hall will consist of a wide range of subjects, including English, social studies, and the STEAM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics). There will be designated “maker’s spaces” in Founders Hall where