50th Timeline: 2002 – The Opening of the Hanshi Deshbandhu Building

After many years of planning, much fundraising, and several construction issues, the first new academic building at Friends School Mullica Hill opened for the start of the 2002-2003 school year.  As the building neared completion, Drew Smith wrote of the experience of “wonder” that students and staff felt watching the building take shape and noted that the “building represents the collective labor of the Board of Trustees, the faculty and staff, parents, and students, both past and present.”  Naming the building after Hanshi Deshbandhu, Drew continued, “truly captures the spirit of Friends School” and would become an embodiment of Hanshi’s “admonitions to be kind, her advocacy of non-violence, and her demand that each and every one of her students seek within themselves their very best.”  Chris Brown, clerk of the Parent’s Association in the 1990s and a Board member, recalled years later the importance of the new building.  “So, with the building of the Hanshi Deshbandhu Building,” Brown recalled, “the school felt like it had transitioned from being a little mom-and-pop organization to a real cohesive school. And it allowed education to happen in a different way…. a little bit more professional, a little bit more welcoming, without losing the things that we had before that. It was still a wonderful place and there was a lot less having to move around between buildings because we had this one central place that a lot of things just happened in.”