On behalf of faculty, staff, and students, I’m delighted to welcome you to Deerfield. This is my fifth year as head of school after nine years serving as Headmaster at 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 where Monica, my wife and a teacher of English at Deerfield, and I both graduated. My education began in a public school in North Carolina, but boarding school is part of my DNA.
I’m told that we are hoping that roughly 70% of you will accept our offer of admission for next year. I’m shooting for 100%—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 it’s Deerfield or another school, and find a school community where they can discover their best selves, realize their promise and potential, and fully flourish.
So, my goal over the next few minutes is to tell you a little bit about some of the things that make Deerfield unique.
Deerfield has always aspired to both be a school of challenge and excellence and also, a school of joy, friendship, and optimism. Doing both of these well and at the same time is, for me, the single greatest challenge facing schools like Deerfield, so I want to very briefly touch on three areas where Deerfield has been very intentional in supporting the growth and well-being of students.
- One has to do with technology;
- One has to do with the political climate in which our children are growing up;
- And the last has to do with us: parents and teachers.
Deerfield has developed powerful and distinctive approaches to each of these areas:
Earlier this week, the social psychologist published a book that I would highly recommend to you: it’s entitled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. His thesis—and he cites a weighty body of research in support of it—is that what he calls a phone-based childhood has eroded our children’s powers of concentration, distracted them from other much more important activities, and undermined their ability to develop and sustain meaningful relationships. He notes that roughly a third of a young person’s life today is spent on various kinds of screens. That increased time on screens comes, of course, 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 playing;
- time sleeping;
- and time reading and studying.
Deerfield has always taken great pride in its heads-up culture, something I hope you have seen today on campus. Because we seek to create a community of connection, 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. (And I should say we will likely be taking steps next year to encourage healthy sleep among our ninth-grade students by providing cell phone lockers that they can use to store their phones before they go to bed. We will also be providing them with alarm clocks!)
This commitment to connection and face-to-face interaction drives much of what we do here, and it’s reinforced by other intentional practices:
- Our school size, roughly 650 students, allows for programmatic breath and excellence but is also small enough to allow for authentic and meaningful connections where every student is known and seen.
- 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 sense of community and closeness as a school. Over the course of four years, students will set and get to interact with hundreds of students they might not otherwise get to know. That is one way 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 another, and students taking pride in the accomplishments of peers and friends. School spirit for 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, and Saturday and Sunday are every bit as vibrant and full of energy and fun 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—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 2 to 3 classes each evening rather than five or six—it also allows for deeper learning, more creative assessments, and the development of the habits of concentration and sustained attention. At the highest levels, in math and science (where we have introduced exciting new, advanced courses in the fields of data science and engineering, among others), in the humanities, and in the arts, students have the time and cognitive bandwidth to think deeply, learn deeply and express mastery.
We also seek to cultivate in our students an openness to new perspectives and 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 such as ours inevitably and always bring 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 learning—embodied in our Portrait of a Deerfield Learner and embedded in our approach to curriculum, instruction, and programs like the Deerfield Forum and our many global initiatives and trips—does just that. It eschews the overt politicization that characterizes so much of American life and instead centers inquiry, curiosity, complexity, and the creative exploration of divergent ideas—all in a way that reflects the best pluralistic traditions of American education. Last year, Deerfield was awarded a national grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation to develop a framework in support of these values. That work is almost done, and it will center on three pillars, each of which is essential for students: Education for Expression Freedom, Disciplined Non-Partisanship, and Intellectual Diversity. Together, these values encourage open-mindedness and intellectual humility, create space for active and deep listening, and foster the ability to engage constructively, imaginatively, and with empathy across differences.
Of course, at Deerfield, everything, 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. We call this high engagement. Creating a powerful sense of community where children can thrive and flourish, meet challenges, and develop confidence, strength, and resiliency is the foundation of our work with children. That project is a collective undertaking that each and every member of our adult community embraces.
Our faculty model empathy, optimism, excitement for learning, and a sense of joy for our students, and they bring to their every interaction with students a bedrock belief in their potential and goodness—and that commitment to their learning and growth extends from early morning to late in the evening.
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.” “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 the gold standard for boarding school faculty in the 21st century.
I’ll close with one final thought. I suspect that even as we sit here and think together about next year and the next chapter in your children’s lives, we’re also inevitably thinking about college and beyond. Having gone through the college process three times in the last six years with my own kids, I know how important those outcomes are to parents. But a great secondary education is not simply preparation for college. As a lifelong educator, I’ve always believed that the years of high school in a residential community like 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 from Deerfield alumni of all ages say that the years they spent here, whether it was four or one, defined their lives—and their futures. 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 really 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 the community.