A Message From HA Head of School - Rebecca Cummings:

Hello, and welcome to Hampstead Academy!

I’m Rebecca Cummings, Head of School, and this year marks my fifth year at Hampstead Academy. When I first arrived on this campus as the Innovation Coach and STEAM Teacher, I could not have known just how much this little school would become part of my own story.

I have often called coming to Hampstead Academy my “Moon Step.” After years of parenting, teaching, coaching, and creating academic opportunities for students of all ages, I had landed in a place where the philosophy aligned with something I have believed throughout my career: we need to do more than teach children. We need to help them become curious, capable, creative problem solvers who are prepared to shape the future.

Five years later, that belief has only grown stronger.

At Hampstead Academy, we believe children learn best when they have a reason to wonder, a reason to ask questions, and a reason to care about the answers. Our job as educators is not simply to deliver information. It is to create the conditions where children can inquire, explore, collaborate, make mistakes, revise their thinking, and discover what they are capable of doing.

That begins with knowing our students as individuals.

One of the great gifts of a small school is our ability to personalize learning. We can pay attention to the child in front of us rather than simply teaching to the middle of a class. We can notice the question that sparks someone's curiosity, provide additional challenge when a student is ready for it, slow down when more time is needed, and connect learning across subjects in ways that make it meaningful.

We can also keep the wonder alive.

That means our youngest students learn through play, exploration, conversation, experimentation, and discovery. As they grow, those experiences evolve into deeper inquiry, project-based learning, authentic problem solving, and opportunities to make an impact beyond the classroom.

Over my years at HA, I have watched students turn ideas into action. Our middle school students created Bake the World a Better Place, learning firsthand about entrepreneurship, budgeting, collaboration, marketing, and running a bakery. But the project became about much more than business. Their work ultimately allowed them to donate $800 to World Central Kitchen to support earthquake survivors and purchase bicycles that helped students in Cambodia get to school.

That is what authentic learning can do.

We have explored resilience and the “power of yet.” We have paired older students with preschoolers so they can experience the responsibility and joy of mentorship. We have taken learning outside the walls of the classroom and asked students to look carefully at their school, their community, and their world and consider an important question:

What can I do with what I have learned?

For me, that is the heart of Hampstead Academy.

Our mission is to Connect, Inquire, and Empower, and those words are not meant to live only on a website or a wall. We want our students to connect with one another and the world around them, inquire deeply about things that matter, and feel empowered to use their knowledge, creativity, and voices.

After five years here, my “why” is actually quite simple.

I want children to leave Hampstead Academy believing that their ideas matter. I want them to know how to ask good questions, how to persevere when an answer does not come easily, how to work with people who think differently from them, and how to turn curiosity into action.

Most of all, I want them to hold onto the sense of wonder that makes children such extraordinary learners in the first place.

I hope you enjoy exploring our website and learning about Hampstead Academy. But our website can only tell part of the story.

The real magic happens when you walk through our doors and see what children are able to accomplish when we give them the space, support, challenge, and trust to do it.

Rebecca Cummings
Head of School
Hampstead Academy