ALUMNI PROFILE
matt green ’82 “graduating kids who care— about each other, about learning, and about the future.” By John Xeller, Alumni Relations Manager/Special Events Coordinator
The 2020-2021 academic year was unlike any other in Rectory’s 100-year history. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the entire world to consider new ways of doing things, and how to educate children despite new and unforeseen challenges became a central issue within the broader health crisis facing our society. Rectory School has dealt with adversity in the past on an institutional level, and few people in the Rectory community could speak more expertly about Rectory’s past challenges and triumphs as well as the issues brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic than Matt Green ’82. His Rectory experience began as the son of former Headmaster, John Green and continued as a student for his ninth-grade year. His familiarity with the pandemic’s effect on schools comes from 30
his current position as Head of School at Falmouth Academy in Massachusetts. Parts of this article are adapted from Matt’s interview with Falmouth’s publication, Centerpiece. In the early 1980s, Rectory School was at an inflection point. The United States was barely out of a recession, and there was a considerable amount of domestic and international instability. At Rectory, the school was being led by its first non-Bigelow headmaster, and the challenges facing that man, John Green, were steep to say the least. Chief among those challenges were updating and maintaining a campus that was attractive to families considering sending their children and then, enrolling a student body
that would fill the dorms and classrooms. The Rectory of today faces some similarly steep challenges, many of which are intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is a fitting time to look back to prior moments of adversity in order to acknowledge the steadfastness of Rectory’s values. Mr. Green shared some thoughts about his Rectory experience and, in particular, how growing up on a boarding school campus prepared him for his current role as head of school. Though shielded from many of the particulars of independent school management, as most children are, Matt Green had an insider’s perspective on Rectory School during his time on campus. He remembers some of what he calls
