This is the first of many features of teachers who have graduated from Westford Academy.

By Leah Bowness
Staff Writer

It has been forty years since Anne Stowe graduated from Westford Academy back in 1970. She attended WA for two years, her junior and senior years of high school.

Stowe had moved from a gigantic school in the Midwest with a 3,000 student population, where according to Stowe everybody was just a fact or figure, unlike her experience at Westford Academy.

“Westford Academy teachers really cared about you and it had a big impact on me because of the fact that I felt like somebody. I felt like people cared,” said Stowe.

In 1970 there were 600 students attending WA; today there are 1,637 students in attendance. This growth still leaves Westford Academy at almost half the population of Stowe’s high school, in Iowa.
Despite the growth in the school, according to Stowe the staff still displays a small school feel with the students.

“I still believe students are treated with the same care.  I think it is harder, but WA has a tradition and a strong belief that this caring is important,” said Stowe.

Not only was the school population much smaller at Westford Academy than her old school, Deerfield High, but the fact that she could play sports as a girl in high school was new too.

“I was an athlete but in the school I went to they couldn’t, wouldn’t allow girls to participate in interscholastic sports,” said Stowe.

At the time in which she attended high school it was actually acceptable for laws to be in place to prevent girls from playing sports. According to Stowe, it was against the state law in her home state to allow girls to play sports at school. This made it impossible for Deerfield High to offer girls sports without losing academic accreditation.

Westford Academy was also in a different location than it is in now; it was in the Abbot Building near the center of town. It was not until 1973, three years after her graduation, when the school moved to where it is now on Patten Road.

As a senior in high school she did not think she would end up back here at WA.

It was in her senior year of college when she realized she would be teaching back in Westford as a math teacher. Not only was she becoming a teacher here, she was following in the career path of her favorite teacher, Cynthia Theriault,  former math department head at Westford Academy.

Now that she is a teacher here looking back on what she wished she could do differently in her high school career, if she could change just one thing, what would she change?

“I wish I would have been able to have been here for four years and not just for two,” said Stowe.