A TRIBUTE TO LEADERSHIP THE

Honoring Our 12th Head Of School

By Suzanne Morrissey

“I believe that when the next chapter of Brewster’s history is written a decade from now, to supplement the wonderful history book that the Richardsons created, this era will be viewed as one of the most important inflection points in Brewster’s development and course…that it will be literally a defining moment in Brewster’s history. And Craig Gemmell is right at the center of making that happen.”

—Roy Ballentine, Chair of Brewster Academy’s Board of Trustees

Roy Ballentine, Chair of Brewster’s Board of Trustees, says his initial impressions of Craig Gemmell happened at the Hilton hotel at Boston’s Logan Airport—and they were strong. “It was early 2014, and we were seeing our Head of School candidates pretty much back to back over a two-day period. We scheduled breaks to give ourselves some time to think and stretch. And during one of those breaks, I walked across the hotel lobby,” Ballentine says. “Craig was sitting at a coffee kiosk, and jumped up to introduce himself. In that moment, when I shook Craig’s hand and looked at the smile on his face, I felt the energy that he brought just to that greeting. I thought, Wow, this is going to be interesting! There was some sort of electrical connection.” Ballentine recalls being impressed that his questions about Gemmell’s 2006 dissertation, entitled “Untangling the Tangled Bank: Toward a Unitary Pedagogy of Nature,” didn’t fluster the interviewee at all—even when he drilled right down to the minutiae of word choice. “He took it all with good humor,” Ballentine says, chuckling.

Gemmell’s recollections of that day are similarly fresh and friendly. “I remember that first meeting like it was yesterday,” Gemmell said recently. “I entered the lobby of the hotel and found myself in this huge, abstracted space. I walked around unclear about where exactly my round of interviews were to happen. Roy had clearly spotted me from across the lobby and walked up to me in trousers and a pressed white shirt and introduced himself to me. He said, ‘Livingstone, I presume.’ I giggled and was in awe at the same time. He had a four-inch-thick stack of papers and just seemed so dialed in— focused and impressive and filled with energy. I liked him immediately.”

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. On July 1, 2015, Gemmell came on board as Brewster’s twelfth Head of School. Moving to Wolfeboro from Groton, Massachusetts, he and his family—educator Nancy Hughes and their boys, Jobe and Teddy—immersed themselves in campus life. Gemmell has often said he found a warm welcome from the campus community when he arrived. But, as Ballentine notes, “Being a new head is a tight wire act. You’re stepping into a new environment where your predecessor has been a smashing success: Mike Cooper was very beloved—he did a really outstanding job. So the next guy has nowhere to go but down, right? What a way to start off!”

Known as a disciplined but nonlinear thinker, Gemmell quickly—and, says Ballentine, tactfully— oversaw a period of transition, reshaping his leadership team. “Craig organizes things in his own way, which is different, but it really works,” Ballentine notes. He took on a few campus issues right off the bat, including the need for tighter supervision of students 24/7 and overhauling Brewster’s cumbersome 80+ word manifesto about prepping students for college into the clear, concise mission statement every Brewster employee now knows by heart: “Brewster prepares diverse thinkers for lives of purpose.”

Brewster’s serene backdrop of stunning lakes and mountains may also have been an ideal landing spot for Gemmell, an avid outdoorsman, birder, and grower of dahlias. Raised on his great grandfather’s mostly fallow farm (inherited by his parents when he was 3), and earning degrees in Ecology, Biology, and Environmental Studies, he has cultivated a lifelong relationship with the natural world, from which he draws frequent inspiration for his work. “That bond with the earth is a central part