For the Greater Good
“A good and authentic path”: From Fenn Student—or Parent— to School Leader mong Fenn alumni and parents who heeded the call to education, several, like Ben and Fred Williams, currently lead schools. Brad Bates ’84, headmaster of the Dublin School in New Hampshire, is the son of alumnus Nathaniel “Buddy” Bates ’49, who taught for many years at Belmont Hill School and who “has been a role model for me throughout my career,” Brad says.
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Brad, brother of Scott ’79, won the prestigious Butera Distinguished Teacher Award in 2007. He heard the call to education, he says, while “half asleep during rowing practice” in college, when his coach announced that he knew a school that was looking for a history teacher. The school was St. Andrew’s in Delaware, and Brad taught there for fifteen years. Looking back, he says, “I am thrilled I stayed in education.” Brad can still recite “O Captain! My Captain!,” the poem he presented during the W.W. Fenn Public Speaking Contest. And, an avid woodworker, he continues to use the toolbox he constructed in woodshop. “I seem to channel some aspect of my Fenn experience almost every day,” he says. In 1988 Matt Baker ’84 was reading a novel while in Italy for an International Relations program. It was The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, in which a young 18th-century Italian nobleman rebels against his parents by climbing a tree and never coming down. Matt says the author proposes that a true leader is someone who communicates his ideas to people rather than one who simply inherits a title and a way of life. Inspired, Matt decided to try writing and teaching because “it seemed as if it could become a good and authentic path for my life.” Ten years later, after working for a
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few years at another charter school, he founded the Metropolitan Institute, a tuition-free charter preparatory school for the performing arts, visual arts, and academics in Phoenix, AZ. “I had a vision of the kind of high school I wished I had gone to,” he explains, “based on some combination of Fenn and what my closest friends, Alex ’84 and Chris Abele ’82, had experienced at Concord Academy.” Matt was in the Intensive Language Program at Fenn, which not only enabled him to read aloud better than most of his classmates when he reached the sixth grade, he notes, but which also, due to the hours of reading homework he had, “set me up to be a very serious reader for the rest of my life.” Matt is still in touch with Nancy Hall, his Fenn reading tutor and teacher. When his first novel, The Art of Confession, was published in 2002, “she read it in one night. It was a special moment for both of us.” Among Fenn parents is at least one headmaster. Dan Scheibe, father of Tad, who is entering the sixth grade, has been appointed the new head of Lawrence Academy. Dan, like Ben, Joe, and Fred Williams, says his earliest memories involve a campus. His parents worked at Wesleyan University and Dan did what most faculty children might do: he had birthday parties in the lecture halls,
Fenn parent Dan Scheibe
“body-rolled” down the hill near the library, and later worked functions in the faculty club and labored with the maintenance crew. All the while he realized that “something powerful” was at work in the way that students and faculty “in that otherwise sleepy place in the Connecticut River Valley occupied themselves with big ideas and big hopes connected to a big world.”