New School Leader Looking at More than Academics

Peter Caldwell journeyed from rural Delaware to the heart of suburban New Jersey, with time out for a sabbatical, to become headmaster of Morristown Beard School.

Caldwell worked at Riverdale Country School for five years and was interested in coming back to the day school experience, he said.

For the past 20 years he worked at St. Andrew’s as a history teacher, academic advisor, soccer coach, cello instructor, director of admission and financial aid and assistant headmaster for the last 12 years.

Hearing the former headmaster took a job at Choate, Caldwell came to take a look at Morristown Beard. “I wanted a suburban or urban day school. It’s different from the boarding experience,” he said, adding he wasn’t quite expecting the experiences he saw when he moved to New Jersey. “We had an earthquake a hurricane and an early snow,” he said with a laugh. Having grown up in Putney, Vt., he wasn’t too unnerved by a Halloween snow, though.

“The school is in great shape,” he said. “I want to put my stamp on it in small ways.”

“The academic program is moving from content-driven to honing their analytical skills,” Caldwell said. “This year all of the students have iPads. We’re not only changing how we teach but, in come cases, what we’re teaching. We have the ability through technology to be in different places across the country.”

Lessons aren’t all in the classroom, he added. “We emphasize sportsmanship and behavior. They have always been emphasized and we’re continuing.”

In his installation address, Caldwell commented on his and his wife’s perceptions of the school and the area: “In these early months of our life here, we have experienced a visceral awareness of the lessons by people who have lived here for longer than we. More often than not we are told ‘I will never leave this area. It is where my family is from.’ This was not what we expected when we moved to New Jersey.”

He's glad to be back in the day school environment as well. "In a day school, you can talk to a student in the lunch line and if you see his or her parent that evening, they will report back to you what the child said about your conversation." He also ejnoys getting to know the parents, "having been through the parenting experince myself."

Caldwell and his wife, Darcy, also an educator, took their sabbatical when their youngest, Lucinda, graduated from high school. She is now a sophomore at Brown. Their twins, Tyler and Alexa recently graduated from Harvard and Brown, respectively.

The new headmaster grew up in an independent school community, the son of boarding school teachers. He received his undergraduate degree in history and music from Bowdoin College and his master’s in education from Harvard. He taught, coached soccer, skiing and lacrosse and served as corridor parent at Vermont Academy, where he was appointed dead of students at 26. He was then director of admission and financial aid at Riverdale before joining the coeducational St. Andrew’s in Middletown Delaware in 1991.