Reflections on a Trusted Mentor and a Story About a Valuable Community She Supports Going Through Growing Pains
One of my most valued mentors is Meg Campbell.
Meg founded ELOB (Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound) via a partnership between Outward Bound and Harvard, running it for many years. When I was in grad school, she was not only a lecturer of mine in a class on expeditionary learning, but she offered me an opportunity to join her team as she designed, applied for (state charter license), built, and began to run a striking charter school now in its 5th year called the Codman Academy Charter School. Anyone who pays attention to education in the Boston area knows well how successful her remarkable urban school has been. And the model it provides for many others.
In addition to being a valued educator, lecturer, and school leader, Meg is a poet -- both in written and life form. 
Also, she spends time each summer on the Cape volunteering at Camp Jabberwocky, a wonderful and quite-unique world sponsored by United Cerebral Palsy (an organization I also worked for in my teens when I first became a camp counselor at Camp Capella...and moved into education).
On July 14, 2005, Gillian Lamb Butchman resigned as director of the July session at Martha's Vineyard Cerebral Palsy Camp, known to all as Camp Jabberwocky. This April 15, she sent out a letter announcing that she and a group of 60 campers and counselors from the July session of Jabberwocky will launch a new camp, The Tulgey Wood, with a two-week session from July 24 to Aug. 4, on Nantucket.
If that resignation of last July signaled a divorce, now the allocation of assets is becoming clear: Camp Jabberwocky got the real estate, and The Tulgey Wood got the kids.
It is also clear, from more than a dozen interviews with campers, counselors, camp directors, and board members over the past week, that the divisions behind this divorce ran deep in the Jabberwocky community, and that the breakup has been profoundly painful. Some friendships have been broken, others sorely tested. Campers and counselors have been forced to choose between returning to Jabberwocky, a place filled with happy memories, or continuing personal friendships of many years on Nantucket. And in a community so passionate about enriching the lives of people with disabilities, there are nearly as many heartfelt perspectives as there are players.
As Arthur Bradford, a longtime friend of Ms. Butchman and a newly appointed co-director of the July program at Camp Jabberwocky, wryly put it: "You could write a book about this."
I had always hoped to get time one summer to join the volunteers at Jabberwocky. To follow in Meg's footsteps. To get back to my camp counselor roots that started at Camp Capella.
Hopefully this story is simply part of the evolution of a critically valuable community/resources, and not a permanent divide. The kids -- ultimately -- deserve more. And the adults need to strip the situation down to its core mission before something truly valuable is lost in the process.
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