Writer: Liam Luepker
Under sunny skies or in the pouring rain, caring faculty welcome MPA families as they arrive at school every day. Warm greetings like these are hallmarks of our welcoming community since the days founding head of MPA, Robert ("Bob") Kreischer, stood beaming at the front door of campus. After meeting with founding MPA board members to explore the origins of our school, I discovered that current MPA principles hold remarkable continuity with the school's bright founding vision.
As the middle school director at Breck, Bob envisioned what education could be in the right hands. His burning passion, support from family and teachers, as well as Breck's inconvenient new location all inspired Bob to actualize his dream. Before long, he began to organize the groundwork for a team. To create a founding board of directors, he gathered a diverse array of professionals from education, finance, and law, to more groundbreaking fields, such as social work and the arts.
In speaking with founding board members Julie Himmelstrup and Ellen Luepker, I learned how Bob intended to innovate a new kind of education. Bob recruited Himmelstrup, a community arts leader and director of the renowned concert series Music in the Park, to place the arts on equal footing with traditional core curricula. In Himmelstrup's eyes, Bob wanted to gear MPA toward the experiential learner… to pioneer an environment where "creative juices can take flight." Bob also tailored the school to uplift student self-esteem by collaborating with Luepker, a social worker on his founding board. With MPA legend Richard Meacock, Luepker co-authored MPA's first anti-discrimination policy and procedures, which all components of the community endorsed, including students, parents, teachers, administrators, and board. From the ground up, Bob and his team designed MPA to open the door for a diverse spectrum of students, ranging from those with average ability to the artistically gifted, scientifically skilled, and humanities-focused. Furthermore, instead of ignoring the inevitable struggles students face, founders revolutionized how educational institutions approach mental health.
After my discussions with former board members, It became apparent that MPA, as currently operating, mirrors the values of its founders. MPA continues to be a community of open-mindedness, emphasizing individual students' development while adapting to their weaknesses. And while evolution is necessary for any educational facility–and true perfection is unattainable–the founding vision of our school endures over the 40 years since MPA's beginning.