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Trustee Spotlight: James Brooks, Esq

Trustee Spotlight

James "Jim" Brooks, Esq.

Written by Stephen "Reno" Reed 

Northwood’s Board of Trustees serves the School in many ways. Most importantly, they provide general oversight of the school, most particularly in regard to financial matters; initiate strategic planning; set and review policies; offer philanthropic support. Over the next months, I thought it might be interesting for the Northwood community to get to know our trustees.

 By a fairly comfortable margin, our longest-serving trustee is James Brooks, Esq., whose service spans forty-seven years. A graduate of the University of Maryland ’63 and Cornell Law ’66, Jim is a Lake Placid resident whose three children with his wife Marcia (Maureen ’95, Cali ’89, and James ’86) all attended Northwood.  Marcia and Jim were married for fifty-one years. He has three grandchildren.  Jim first came to Lake Placid as the legal assistant to a NYS Supreme Court judge and became one of the North Country’s most successful and respected attorneys. A member of many boards locally over the years, he joined ours after an invitation from a Board Member in 1974 thinking it would be informative to learn about the educational profession.  Today, he notes “It was and still is.” His legal expertise has been an enormous asset to Northwood’s Board, as well as many others in our area as they work to bring their projects and purposes to fruition.    

He believes that Northwood’s greatest strengths include “ Its donors over the years and their continued dedication to the School after graduation; it is providing my children with an education that enabled them to move on to college and the lives they lead that they might not have achieved without the Northwood experience.”  He notes that the School’s biggest challenge is being “the small prep school it is in this remote New York community and with the massive wave of the electronic and computer age impacts and challenges.”

Asked for his advice to our current students, he wrote “Enjoy it while you can. With the vast political and economic revisions to this country and the impacts of the computer age, I expect your world to be far more complex and competitive than what I lived in.”