Andrew Healy: “Way Beyond a Professional Camp Counselor”

LA’s dean of students is living his dream

by Angela Stefano

Before Andrew Healy arrived on the elm tree–shaded hillside nearly a decade and a half ago, he spent a couple of years teaching math at a boarding school in Connecticut. His tenure there was short, but extremely impactful, influencing the ethos that has helped him as Lawrence Academy’s dean of students for the better part of a decade and be a beloved Spanish teacher, coach, advisor, and dorm parent for even longer.

Andrew majored in economics and Spanish (and later earned a master’s degree in Spanish) at Vermont’s Middlebury College, but when he opened the textbook he was to teach from that first year in Connecticut, he found that he’d forgotten much of the math he excelled at in high school. The experience, he reflects, “reshaped how I approach teaching; it reshaped how I prioritized what the lessons are and what we’re trying to accomplish with the students.”

Andrew understood that his students needed to leave his class with a grasp of the material, but he could also show them the importance of the skills you learn while learning: the abilities to solve problems; question, research, and form opinions; communicate; and self-advocate. It’s a mindset that aligns perfectly with LA’s goal to recognize, inspire, support, and empower (RISE) students, setting them up for success when they graduate and move on to new adventures.

“I really do believe,” Andrew says, “we’re using our subject matter, we’re using our position, we’re using the opportunities that we have in everything that we do, to instill in the students those soft skills that are going to allow them to achieve success.”

Andrew jokes that, despite never going to summer camp himself, he long considered “professional camp counselor” to be his dream job. “It was this very idealized vision of what a good life would be,” he explains. Being dean of students, he says, is as close to living out that dream as he can get, despite outside perceptions that the role is all about “sex, drugs, rock and roll, and sign-outs” (i.e., discipline).

“People very often introduce me or otherwise present the position as one that seems like a really undesirable one,” Andrew admits, “and I think that glosses over the heart of what the position is, which is helping other people and having an impact and hopefully changing for the better the trajectory they’re on.”

Andrew remembers experiencing some anxiety about assuming the role early on. “I guess if you really wanted to take this view, you could look at every moment and every behavior of every student on campus and say it’s the dean of students’ responsibility to make sure what’s right and not wrong, appropriate and not inappropriate, and within the school’s mission, and that’s a slightly intimidating role to have,” he says. But he’s found that certain basic skills — open and clear communication, consistency, intentionality — make weathering both the highs and the lows of the job easier. Keeping his other on-campus roles has helped, too, especially for someone who describes himself as a natural introvert.

“You form relationships with students, they see you in a different light, when you are working with them on the Spanish alphabet or conversation skits,” Andrew says. “Me telling them to do something because I’m the dean of students and them doing it because they’re the student isn’t going to work, so there needs to be buy-in, and I think you get the best buy-in possible when you have a relationship with the students.”

Moving forward, Andrew anticipates that the external pressures on teenagers will continue to increase, meaning his role on campus will remain vital. He is consistently determining how to get better at his job.

“As a community, we’ve done a much better job of identifying the areas where we’re not meeting student needs, and we’ve done a much better job of trying to circle all our resources around all of the students that are here on campus in order to make sure everyone is feeling supported, empowered and recognized,” Andrew adds. “There is so much they have to sift through and sort through … Increasingly, I think that’s where the need is.”

Andrew’s goal is to leave LA — both the campus and the community — better than he found it, in part because it’s made him better. LA is where Andrew met his wife, Kimberly Bohlin Healy, now the school’s associate director of college counseling and director of athletic programming. The couple got married on the McDonald Library terrace, and they and their children, Reade and Tate, live on campus.

“An enormous amount of what I cherish most in my life, I attribute to Lawrence Academy,” Andrew says. “There aren’t too many people out there who can claim that the school has more positively influenced them than me, and I’m incredibly mindful of that … of the people I’m around and the quality of character that exists in this space … That’s really important because it’s what drives me and what makes the difficult a little bit easier to manage and what makes the easy truly satisfying and gratifying.”