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NANCY GAYNOR | COUNSELOR IN HEALTH SERVICES
THANK YOU!
OPPOSITE: Nancy Gaynor, at work with a team of students at this year’s Eco Day, an annual event for the School community that she co-founded in the 1990s with former Instructor Jim Morrill
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In her more than 25 years at Hotchkiss, Nancy Gaynor has seen the School’s counseling program grow from a small, almost ad hoc, effort to deal with adolescent issues to being an important part of the boarding school experience. In the early days, “students used to kind of sneak down to my office and not let anyone know they were in counseling,” she says. “Now, that’s not necessarily the case. There’s a greater willingness to seek support, and a greater willingness in the Hotchkiss community to accept it.” Nancy came to Lakeville in 1986 when her husband, Wayne Gaynor, took a job as an instructor in mathematics. “When we first came,” she says, “I did not know that I was going to be working; our first son was five, and our second son had just been born that spring. During the summer, I felt ready
A G A Z I N E
to return to work and began poking around to see what possibilities for jobs there might be in the area. I wrote to Sam Coughlin, who was Dean of Faculty at the time, to ask whether she knew of places I might investigate.” Nancy already had a history of counseling adolescents. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., she graduated from Haddonfield (N.J.) Memorial High School and earned a degree in sociology from the University of Hartford (Conn.), where she met Wayne. She then spent a year at Valleyhead, a small residential school for girls with a history of learning and emotional issues, in Lenox, Mass. “I was on the residential staff and taught math,” she explains. “The social and emotional parts were more important than the academic side.” She and Wayne married in 1976; he started teaching at Cheshire Academy, then moved to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa. Nancy taught reading and study skills there, and earned a master’s degree in education, with an emphasis in adolescent and family counseling, from the nearby West Chester University. They stayed at Hill into the 1980s, and during the last three years there Nancy was the director of an outpatient counseling center at a youth service bureau, working with adolescents and their families. “At the time,” she says, “Hill was still an all-boys school, and we were interested in being at a coed school. Wayne’s roots were in New England – he had grown up in Mystic, Conn. – and so we were happy to settle in northwest Connecticut.” Nancy asked Sam Coughlin whether Hotchkiss “would be interested in having somebody do counseling a few hours a
week; at that point Hotchkiss was thinking of enlarging the program and there was an interest in having a counselor on campus. So, I threw my name out, they were interested, and I was hired. I started at eight to 10 hours a week; I would see students in my apartment in Coy.” Her second year of counseling involved about 15 hours a week, and by her third year she was working full-time. “The issues that came up in counseling were the problems that you would see in any population of teenagers,” she says. They were typical adolescent concerns, with the added complexities of life at a boarding school.” Her contributions to Hotchkiss include both curricular and extracurricular initiatives. Along with Director of Health Services Nancy Bird, she created a peer-led health course, Human Development, which combined sex education with a range of other topics -- life skills, adolescent adjustment, living in a community, diversity, drugs, and alcohol. “This class filled a longstanding void at Hotchkiss,” says Kim Martineau ’91. “It was the product of years of grassroots work by the Nancys that has visibly made Hotchkiss a kinder, more welcoming place.” Nancy Gaynor also worked with biology instructor Jim Morrill and members of the Students for Environmental Awareness on campus projects. In time, Morrill and Gaynor became the founders of the annual Eco Day. She became a central part of the Independent Schools Gender Project, which is now approaching its 20th anniversary. “It began when a group of women