What today’s Storm King students hope the new Academic Center will mean for the generations who follow

When students, faculty, trustees, and alumni gathered outside Dyar Hall on the morning of March 4, 2026, to break ground on The Storm King School’s new Academic Center, the ceremony belonged as much to the students standing in the crowd as it did to the leaders holding the ceremonial shovels. This is, after all, a building they will use—and, in a very real sense, a building they are helping to leave behind. In this fourth installment of our Academic Center Series, we turn the spotlight to the young people at the heart of it all and ask what this milestone means to them.

A legacy written by each class

For senior Keiyona Jolly ’26, the groundbreaking carried a weight that went beyond the excitement of a new building. She stepped forward during the ceremony to read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Builders, a meditation on how every generation contributes to the future through the work it leaves behind.

The reading struck a personal chord.

“Reading The Builders made me think about how each class contributes something to Storm King,” Keiyona said afterward. “This building will be part of the legacy we leave for the students who come after us.”

It’s a sentiment that captures the spirit of the entire project. Storm King has stood on its Mountain overlooking the Hudson River for nearly 160 years, evolving over time while staying grounded in the traditions that shape life and learning here. The new Academic Center is the next chapter—and today’s students understand that they are the ones putting pen to paper.

Watching history happen

For younger students, there’s a particular thrill in witnessing a moment like this firsthand. The last major academic expansion at Storm King—the buildings that gave us Dyar Hall, Ogden Library, and Highmount Dormitory—took shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most students never get to see their school transform around them. This generation will.

“I think it’s amazing that we get to watch something like this happen while we’re still here,” said sophomore Eylul Bakal ’28.

That sense of being present for something historic—of watching the fog lift over the Hudson Highlands as the first shovels turned the ground—is a memory these students will carry long after they graduate.

Excited for what’s ahead

If the seniors are thinking about legacy, the youngest students are thinking about possibility. When the Academic Center is complete, it will feature ten classrooms, collaborative learning areas, a dedicated faculty meeting room, a courtyard garden, and a terrace overlooking the Hudson Valley—along with the Warren Leonard Lobby, named for the headmaster who guided Storm King’s last great period of growth.

For freshman Ronan Kraeutler ’29, the appeal is immediate and hands-on.

“The classrooms and labs sound amazing,” Ronan said. “I’m excited about the projects and experiments we’ll be able to do.”

New spaces mean new opportunities: room to imagine, to build, to test ideas, and to collaborate across every discipline. As Performing Arts Chair Anne Fulton, Storm King’s longest-tenured faculty member, put it, the new Academic Center “will give students room to imagine, create, and collaborate. It will be a home for inspiration across every discipline.”

More than a building

Taken together, these student voices echo a truth that Head of School Lisa Shambaugh named at the ceremony itself.

“The new Academic Center is more than a building,” Ms. Shambaugh reflected. “It is a promise to our students.”

For the students of Storm King today, it is a promise they are proud to be part of keeping. They will graduate before the building is fully woven into daily life on the Mountain, but that’s precisely the point. Like the classes that raised Dyar Hall more than six decades ago, they are building something for the students they will never meet—the future Cougars who will fill these classrooms, labs, and gathering spaces for generations to come.

That is the legacy Keiyona read about in Longfellow’s verse. And it is the one this generation of Storm King students is writing, one shovelful at a time.