ParkScool-PioneerMag-Winter-2025

29 For Brooke Zillig '10, who’s grown from a Park School preschooler to a parent of one, family, Park, and community and have always gone together. Arriving in the Bungalow, Brooke was the fourth and youngest of her siblings to attend Park, after Rob, Heather, and Ryan '07. As a senior, Brooke and classmate Joonghee Lee '10 (known as Lee) became a couple. And now as a parent of their daughter Liv '38, her family has come full circle. “Being here now with kids of my own, I see what my parents saw in Park,” said Brooke, holding their toddler Nora in the Helen Long Building while Liv marveled at the wildlife outside Mrs. Wood’s second grade classroom. “And it still feels like home - the comfort level here is the same, I could stay here all afternoon. There’s a memory everywhere I look.” While Brooke and Lee had been friendly since Lee arrived from Korea in middle school, they became a couple during their senior year, as she would go to all his sports games while participating in theater productions - “and the rest is history,” she said, including a long-distance love while Brooke went to college in Toronto. The alumni couple eventually reunited in Western New York. And when they started a family of their own, they turned back to the comforts of Park. “We really weren’t sure where Liv would go to school,” Brooke recalled. “Then Harry Lipsitz (fellow Class of 2010 and president of the Park Alumni Association) - who’s like the third brother I never asked for - encouraged us to take a tour, and we found out Jarret Izzo (Class of 2003) was here as director of admissions, which we thought was so cool. So we came out and he gave us the tour, and at that point it was almost a no-brainer.” That tour stirred those comforts, along with observations of a school that’s both evolving yet familiar.“When we were walking around touring, walking past kids of all ages, whether seniors or lower schoolers, they all waved and said,‘Hi’ - they’re just friendly here. “It seems the same, but different, too - in good ways, in terms of the culture and community, and how they’ve made steps

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