​For Burley, it was very Elementary

By Scott Benjamin

He threw blocks in high school to protect the Big Tuna.

He was an Ivy League classmate of RKK.

As he approached age 30, he ran sub-three hours in the first two New York City Marathons and switched to race-walking, qualifying for the U.S. Olympic trials.

But Bill Burley was happiest when he was teaching Physical Education to elementary school students, which led to more than two decades in the New Milford district as an elementary school principal.

Regarding his career in Physical Education, he told Patch.com by phone, “I had no interest in coaching. I wanted to work with elementary kids because they’re so receptive to everything that you do.”

On the days when there is a Physical Education class, they can’t wait to get off the bus when it arrives in the parking lot.

“Kids at that age are enthusiastic,” Burley said. “They want to play games.”

He played with the Great Highland Bagpipes for about 30 years and marched with bands in Connecticut, New York and Cape Cod.

There is a photo celebrating a reading program with elementary students in New Milford marching with books in t their hands as Principal Burley plays the bag pipes.

“If you’re willing to be silly with them, they love it,” Burley said.

When he was first teaching Physical Education in two of the Westport elementary schools, Burley then living in a cottage in Wilton in the mid-1960s, would do long runs toward the Ridgefield border.

In 1970, he was one of 127 runners, who paid a $1 entry fee, in the first New York City Marathon, finishing in very respectable 2-hours 59-minutes. A year later he was clocked in 2:47.

“All of the sudden it became a reason to applaud if you completed a marathon,” Burley said in reference to the growing interest in distance events – even before Frank Shorter captured the gold medal in the marathon at the 1972 Olympics and the running boom began to blossom.

In those days if you were a runner in Connecticut, you might have to travel to Westport to find a store that sold running shoes.

That was because there was a market from the regulars in the Westport summer series – an eight-week schedule that concluded with a 10-miler from Staples High School.

Burley was a regular and starting in 1967 so was Jim Fixx, a magazine editor from Greenwich.

He was a middle of the pack runner who took up running to lose weight.

He told Burley he was doing research and wanted to write a book about the sport.

“The Complete Guide To Running” was published in 1977, made the New Y ork times best-sellers list and transformed Fixx into what Burley called, “The guru of long-distance running.”

He said that Fixx wrote about, “How do you enter the field of running.”

Longtime Staples High Schol boys’ track & field and cross-country coach Laddie Lawrence organized the summer series. He told Patch.com in 2022 that he had Fixx give lectures before and after the series races covering the fundamentals for running.

Burley said fellow runner Jack Boitano, a Fairfield University Psychology professor, introduced him to race walking. Boitano was accomplished in that sport, having captured a 10-miler in Coney Island.

Burley said it required more “upper-body strength and “developing a different set of muscles” since “running is pushing and race walking is pulling.”

The rules were different: “The body has to being contact with the ground,” Burley explained

At a Bridgeport event he qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials in Oregon, but with a young family he didn’t have the finances to make the trip.

While teaching in Westport, Burley worked with Physical Education teacher Suzanne, who would become his wife.

She taught at the Bedford School and coordinated a Saturday gymnastics program.

Her resume included being a diver at Kent State, which at the time was one of a dozen colleges with a women’s swimming program.

Years later she was a fourth-grade teacher at the Booth Free School in Roxbury and coached the divers at Shepaug Valley High School in Washington.

Dick Ayer, the Spartans’ head coach, once said, “She is the premier diving coach in Connecticut. When we are at the state meets there are divers from opposing teams that come to her during their warm-ups and ask for pointers.”

Burley had the fifth-grade students do the President’s Physical Fitness Test each year – which covered a 50-yard run, standing broad jump, softball throw, sit-ups, a 600-yard jaunt and pull-ups from a horizontal bar.

“There was some baseline to what kids could do,” he explained

He and Suzanne kept a record of their times running around the gymnasium.

They got 4x8-foot targets for the elementary schools and the students thew at the targets.

After being the administrator for a summer education program for adults in Westport, Burley earned a sixth-year degree from Fairfield University and in the mid-1970s was hired as a principal in New Milford, where over more than two decades he directed four different elementary schools.

The Burleys built a house in Roxbury and decided they wanted to direct a summer running series similar to the Westport races.

Burley recalled, “I made a pitch to the Recreation Commission” and they were supportive and had “no limitations on which roads.”

He said, “Roxbury is bucolic and there are some great roads for running.”

He and his wife developed a schedule of courses and worked at the finish line.

Burley started the series in 1977 and remained the race director through 1979. Under his immediate successor, Larry Kershnar, who taught Science at New Milford High School and later Education at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, it expanded starting in 1984 and in 1986 adopted a schedule of about 38 races stretching from early March to December.

It now offers more races than any series in Connecticut and reportedly the second most on the East Coast, behind the Fresh Pond Series in Cambridge, MA.

The Burleys have been living in Colorado for nearly 13 years, but Burley said he “regularly tunes in” to the Roxbury Races Facebook page. Burley said that he is pleased to see some familiar names, such as former New Milford High School Social Studies teacher and cross-country coach Mike Abraham, who has been the season champion at Roxbury the last two years.

At northern New Jersey’s River Dell High School, Burley was not a cross-country runner in the fall but instead played football for the Golden Hawks.

He was a 180-pound offensive guard at River Dell High School – a northern New Jersey commuter town to New York City.

“The heaviest guy I ever had to block was 225 pounds” he recalls, noting that today there are high school and college players approaching 300 pounds.

The quarterback for the Golden Hawks was future Pro Football Hall of Fame Coach Bill Parcells, who guided the New York Giants to two Super Bowl championships.

Burley recalled that Parcells “was a vivacious guy, but he didn’t fight anybody.”

“But he was an aggressive athlete,” he added. “He was bigger than many of us” at 6-2, 210 pounds.

Sports columnist Mike Lupica, who co-authored Parcells’ 1987 memoir, has said, “He is a nut, but a lovable nut.”

Among Parcells coaching stops was the New England Patriots, who went to the Super Bowl following the 1996 season.

Burley was a classmate at Columbia University of RKK, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who was the class president.

Burley earned his bachelor’s degree majoring in Political Science.

He describes himself as “not a great student” ‘among classmates who came in some instances from the best high schools in the country.

“But I got by,” he related.

He took a Senior Seminar Class with Richard Neustadt, the author of “Presidential Power,” which decades later is still considered one of the best books on presidential decision-making.

Neustadt underscored that to succeed, presidents need to persuade members of Congress that their policies are good not only for the country but for the people in their districts.

Former state Sen. Jamie McLaughlin (R-32) – a former Woodbury resident who now lives in Darien - had a graduate class at Harvard with Neustadt in the 1980s.

He said that Neustadt told the students that a chief elected official should be, “The conductor of a moving symphony.”

Burley also had a Soviet Foreign Policy with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who helped organize the Trilateral Commission, and would serve in the State Department for two years under former President Lyndon Johnson. Brzezinski later was the national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter.

In sports at Columbia, Burley won a few matches while wrestling for the Lions at 177 pounds.

But after four years of Ivy League learning, he said, “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Going to law school was not on my radar at the time.”

He enlisted in the Marines to become an officer, but didn’t accept a commission.

He would spend six years in the Marine Reserves doing a six-week program each summer in Virginia.

Shortly after graduation, he landed a position at an advertising agency, but quickly grew tired of the routine.

“I could not think of a more boring thing than driving into New York City every day and go into an office and doing some creative, non-sensical stuff,” explained Burley.

However, while at Columbia he had a part-time job taking prep school students in Physical Education programs to Central Park and Randall’s Island and “playing sports with them.”

Burley spoke with “a sympathetic professor” at Columbia who directed him to the university’s teachers’ college.

He got a “small loan” from a bank and took courses in “physiology, anatomy and kinesiology” to earn a master’s degree with a Physical Education focus.

His first job was teaching elementary school students at the Dalton School in New York City, where the headmaster was Donald Barr, who would go on to write four books, including a science-fiction novel.

Barr’s son, William Barr, would later serve as U.S. Attorney General in t he first Donald Trump administration.

Educators sometimes say that the elementary school years are the most important years in a child’s development.

Commented Burley, “It is the first opportunity to get to meet with other children in a somewhat controlled environment, and they have to learn to get along with other people. It is up to the teachers to inspire them to enjoy learning.”

In 1944, Harold DeGroat became the Physical Education coordinator for the Newtown schools on the condition that each student in the district had physical education 180 days a year. Eventually, the Newtown schools had the highest scores in the country on the Kraus -Weber fitness exam and DeGroat was featured in Sports Illustrated.

Shouldn’t Physical Education be as important as Science and Math? Owen Gallagher, a former Physical Education teacher at Head O’ Meadow Elementary School in Newtown once said that the studies show that the physical fit student does better in their other subjects.

Why not have students take Physical Education classes 180 days each academic year?

Burley said with all the special areas offered now and with the limited hours in an academic day, it is not practical.

He remarked, “Parents have to get their kids out exercising. Parents have to provide nutritious meals. Parents need to take their kids to see ice skating and dance. If that doesn’t happen, there is not much that the schools can do to make a difference.”

After he became a principal, Burley said one of the most sweeping changes was the federal mandates on instructing students with special needs.

“All school districts across the country were forced with the task of how are we going to serve children with learning problems, emotional problems,” he explained. “There had to be way of doing that other than having them in a regular classroom. We had to figure out how to do that either in the local district or you send them some place.”

About midway through his tenure as a principal in New Milford, the state approved the Education Enhancement Act, which, among other things, required prospective teachers to have at least a 2.67 (B-minus) average before they could do their college student training program.

They were required to do professional development. Suzanne Burley was among the assessors who were dispatched to evaluate first-year teachers as they delivered a lesson.

Commented Burley, “Rather than just being a teacher you became someone who was professional in their outlook and preparation and follow-up.”

By the 1990s, the elementary and middle school students had to take the standardized Connecticut Mastery Test and the high school sophomores had the Connecticut Academic Performance Test.

Explained Burley, “Testing is good to find out where people are. But it got to the point in a lot of places where there was concern about putting too much time to get prepared for the tests.”

“I don’t mind having the testing,” Burley commented. “The question is what you do with the testing in terms of the larger school population.”

The state posted the results for each school’s district. They were grouped in categories of similar demographics.

Burley remarked, “It put some stress on the teachers. That they would be evaluated upon how the children did. It never played out. But that concern was always there.”

Burley earned a doctorate degree in Education from Columbia in 1984, writing his dissertation on ethics education. He earned a fellowship through the National Endowment of the Humanities to spend six weeks at Dartmouth studying “ethical decision-making by administrators” and “how people behaved in certain situations.”

In hiring teachers, Burley said he tried to determine, among other things, their “intellectual rigor.”

“The task for any teacher is to get students enthusiastic,” he remarked. “They all had the training and the college courses. When I interviewed people, I asked what kind of people are they. That is a hard thing. That requires some instinct on the part of the interviewer One of the things I would ask: Are you reading any books now? The response might be a hint: They might say ‘I’m not reading any book now.’ “

He said New Milford didn’t fund its schools as well as Westport.

“Westport is one of the wealthiest towns in the country,” commented Burley. “They paid good teachers’ salaries.”

“New Milford had a lot of rural feels,” he explained. “Westport was a commuting town for New York City. New Milford was more of a working-class town. There was always a money issue in New Milford trying to pass budgets. The Board of Education was frugal. To my knowledge that wasn’t the case in Westport.”

In addition to being a blocker for the Big Tuna, Burley once was part of a National Principals Association delegation that went to the White House to speak with the Gipper - Ronald Reagan.

He recalled that Reagan told the 200 principals in attendance about a conservative friend who had written books on rote math, and recommended that should be instituted into the schools’ curriculums

Said Burley, “Reagan was pushing a program that had no value whatsoever.”

Resources:

Phone interview with Bill Burley on Friday, January 23, 2026.

E-mail interviews with Bill Burley, Patch.com, the week of January 25.

https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/roxbury-runners-get-fit-conquer-hills-make-friends

Harold DeGroat story, The Newtown Bee, January 1987.

Owen Gallagher interview, The Newtown Bee, December 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski

Jamie McLaughlin, interview, 1999.