On behalf of the entire Deerfield community, I’m delighted to welcome you to Deerfield.
This is my sixth year as head of school, after nine years serving as Headmaster of King’s Academy in Jordan and, prior to that, 17 years as a teacher, coach, department head, and dean at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, which is from where Monica, my wife and a teacher of English at Deerfield, and I both graduated. My education began in public school in North Carolina, but boarding school is part of my DNA.
I’m told that we are hoping that roughly 70 percent of you will accept our offer of admission for next year. I’m shooting for 100 percent. First, because I’m competitive (sometimes irrationally so, since we don’t have room for everyone!), and second, I want you to love Deerfield the way I do, the way my colleagues do, and the way our students do. But I know there are many wonderful schools out there, and most of all, I want you to make the best possible choice for your son or daughter—whether that is Deerfield or another school—and to find a school community where they can realize their promise and potential and fully flourish.
Deerfield has always aspired to be a school of high achievement and also a school of joy, friendship, and optimism. Doing all this well and at the same time is, for me, the single greatest challenge facing schools like Deerfield.
So, how do we meet that challenge? Here are seven things, in no particular order, that are unique to Deerfield, that shape and define our students’ experience, and that I would want to know about if I was a parent looking at boarding schools. I will move fast.
- Our school size—roughly 650 students—allows for programmatic breadth and excellence, but it’s also small enough to allow for authentic and meaningful connections where every student is known and seen.
- Our approach to technology: The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written powerfully about what he calls the “phone-based childhood.” He cites a growing body of research documenting how phones have eroded our children’s powers of concentration, distracted them from other much more important things, and undermined their ability to develop—and sustain—meaningful relationships. Haidt notes that roughly a third of a young person’s life today is spent on various kinds of screens, and that comes at the expense of other things that really matter, and which Deerfield seeks to prioritize.
- face-to-face interactions with friends, peers, and adults
- time outdoors in the beauty of nature
- time competing, performing, practicing, and just playing
- time sleeping
- and time reading and studying.
Deerfield has always taken great pride in our heads-up culture, something I hope you saw today on campus. We ask students to leave their phones in their rooms during the academic day, and we insist, as much as possible, that they keep them pocketed on walkways and in public spaces at other times of the day. Last year, we took steps to encourage healthy sleep among our ninth-grade students by providing cell phone lockers that they store their phones in before they go to bed—an approach we plan to extend to the tenth grade next year. I should note that we will also be providing them with alarm clocks!
- Our new dining hall, opening in January of next year: A Deerfield colleague of mine just shared the annual World Happiness Report with me. One of its key findings—one that stands up across countries and cultures—is that shared meals support happiness and social connection. Our commitment to sit-down, family-style meals where students from different grades and backgrounds work with our staff to set the table, serve the meal, clean up, and sit and eat together, along with a member of the faculty, creates a shared and powerful sense of community and closeness at Deerfield. Over the course of four years, students will sit—and get to interact with— hundreds of students they might not otherwise get to know. That is one of the ways we create community, and it’s a powerful expression of our commitment to inclusion. Students learn the art of interaction and conversation and develop essential social skills. In many ways, our dining hall is our greatest classroom.
- Tremendous school spirit. For us, school spirit is this: Students supporting and caring for one another, students cheering for one another, lifting one another, and students taking pride in the accomplishments of peers and friends. School spirit at Deerfield is a celebration of excellence and belief by students in their friends’ and peers’ ability to take risks and do great things.It’s worth noting that the social energy of this campus stays here on the weekends, with games, performances, food trucks, intramural competitions, and all manner of fun and goofiness. Saturday and Sunday are every bit as vibrant and full of energy and joy as the weekdays.
- Our new, as of 2021, daily schedule, which includes Community Time set aside in the middle of the morning and is designed around longer periods of time: It not only slows the pace of the day and places reasonable limits on the amount of homework students are responsible for each day—with students preparing for two to three classes each evening rather than five or six—it also allows for deeper learning, more creative assessments, and the development of habits of concentration and sustained attention. At the highest levels (where we have introduced exciting new, advanced courses in the fields of data science, engineering, the ethics of AI—quantum mechanics, and behavioral economics—among others), students have the time and cognitive bandwidth to think deeply, learn deeply, create, invent, and express mastery.
- Our academic commitments and principles: We seek to cultivate in our students an openness to new perspectives and new ideas and an intellectual climate—and classrooms—where students actively seek out and engage with different perspectives, ideas, and arguments. In response to a deeply polarized, political climate and the exhaustion and cynicism that is its byproduct, we encourage students to assume good faith and good intentions on the part of peers, and foster in them a spirit of thoughtfulness, generosity, empathy, imagination, and openness to the diverse beliefs and views that a student body like ours inevitably and always brings to our campus. We have one of the most diverse student bodies of any school in the world—that is not hyperbole—but the challenge is how to activate and bring to life that diversity so that our students are engaging with one another across differences.
- Our approach to teaching and learning does just that. It eschews the overt and often corrosive politicization that characterizes so much of American life and instead centers inquiry, curiosity, complexity, and the creative exploration of divergent ideas in a way that reflects the best pluralistic traditions of American education. You can learn more about those commitments in the Framework for Schools, developed by Deerfield and published last May in collaboration with the Edward E. Ford Foundation and since used by hundreds of American independent schools. One quick example of what this looks like in action: This year our Center for Service and Global Citizenship will lead 14 trips across five continents and the United States, serving 160 students and led by 30 members of the faculty. In February, for the Long Winter Weekend, a group of students traveled to Washington, DC, and thanks to many Deerfield alumni, they had the opportunity to meet with the director of Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project and leading constitutional scholar Sanford Ungar; they met with the staff of PEN America, and the vice president of Global Public Policy for Meta. They watched a taping of Meet the Press and visited Arlington National Cemetery with a former Deerfield teacher, Major Tim Morris of the US Marine Corps. And they had conversations with several political figures representing a diverse range of views, including Congressman Jim McGovern, Democrat from Massachusetts, and a 90-minute Q and A with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the session was scheduled as a ten-minute drop-by, but so piercing were our students’ questions that it lasted for 90 minutes.
- Lastly, the faculty. The writer and Deerfield graduate John McPhee defined our long-serving Headmaster Frank Boyden’s ideal faculty as: “a group of people much in evidence all of the time.” I never tire of quoting that because it so beautifully captures the collective work of a fully, deeply, and broadly engaged faculty who are present, available, and generous with their time and attention. This professional standard of high engagement—and nothing less than that—is, for me, the gold standard for a boarding school faculty in the 21st century. Everything we do—absolutely everything—depends upon the deep, broad, and caring engagement of our faculty and staff. Deerfield remains committed to a model of faculty engagement that extends across every dimension of school life. Our faculty model for our students empathy, optimism, excitement for learning, and a sense of joy and curiosity, and they bring to their every interaction a bedrock belief in our students’ potential and goodness; that commitment to their learning and growth extends from early morning to late in the evening.
Sharing the lives of your children with a school is a remarkable act of trust and expression of belief. Creating a powerful sense of community where children can thrive and flourish, meet challenges, and grow in confidence, strength, and resiliency is the foundation of our work and our partnership with you. That project is a collective undertaking that each and every member of our adult community embraces.
I’ll close with one final thought. As a lifelong educator, I’ve always believed that the years of high school in a residential community such as Deerfield are precious, defining, and transformative—perhaps the most important years a young person takes on that great journey from childhood to young adulthood.
I’ve heard Deerfield alumni of all ages say that the years they spent here—whether it was four or one—defined their lives and their futures and that their days at Deerfield have been more important to them than any others. So, on a day like this, as you think about the years ahead and the future of your children, I think it’s worth noting that Deerfield is not simply for next year—it’s for a lifetime. Or at least that is our greatest collective hope. So, thank you. I hope you have a great afternoon, and I hope that if you have any questions, you won’t hesitate to connect with me or any other member of this amazing community that I am so honored and proud to lead.