Sixth in a series

Re “Kent’s Theory About Peer Influence”

Circling around the theory of peer influence on students, School Board candidate Prof. Kelly Kent, an East Coast native, was asked if her childhood home differed significantly from those of her high school peers at Friends Academy in New York City, her favorite learning campus growing up.

“Yes,” she said, slowly. “I lived in New Jersey and commuted in. I was stigmatized for that quite significantly,” building to a hearty laugh. “We didn’t have as much money. That was obvious.

“You can ask anyone of my friends — I am still friends with most of them — and they will say ‘she’s not really from New York.’ Which is a stab in the heart,” she said to another chuckle. “I feel like a New Yorker. I really do.”

Before Friends, Dr. Kent attended both public and private schools, with the accent on a “co-op school, a cute little hippie kind of environment,” in the fifth and sixth grades.

She described Friends Academy the way some characterize a family member – “really open, loving, warm, accepting times.”

Discipline, too, at the Quaker school where meetings were called. “We would sit in silence twice a week for 20 minutes and meditate together,” Dr. Kent recalled. “At other meetings, there was silence, but people were invited to stand up and speak about problems they were working through at that moment.” Friends was where Dr. Kent matured. “Oh, my goodness. No question about that,” she says of the last of the half-dozen schools where she studied because her family “moved a bunch.”

(To be continued)