Retiring Faculty and Staff

I recognize that I’m one of the last things standing between you and the party. A perilous position. Not to worry: We were told we only got a minute for each year served (right?) so you should be out of here in time for a late supper.

From the age of five, when he performed in his family’s backyard variety show to raise money for polio research, Bob has lived to serve. In high school in Meriden, Connecticut, Bob led the Key Club and for his efforts was named Key Clubber of the Year. As a math major at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he was one of only five juniors selected for the school’s honor society and was later elected president of the math honor society. After college, he joined Peace Corps as a volunteer in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

While all of this was going on, Bob was also developing his chops as a musician. In high school, he played with a rock-and-roll band so successful that its gigs began to conflict seriously with class time. As a means of making ends meet for college expenses, Bob played bass in the polka band “Johnny Prytko and the Connecticut High Tones.” (Rumor has it there is a polka version of “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” out there somewhere. One person who has heard it observed that someone in the band should be arrested for “taking a song across state lines and murdering it.”) During his time in Jamaica, Bob was commissioned to write music for Jamaica’s National Dance Theater Company. His composition “A Question of Balance” premiered there in 1972. That experience so inspired Bob that he enrolled at Berklee College of Music when he returned to the states. While at Berklee, he also worked as a substitute teacher for Boston Public Schools.

So, when Bob came to Milton as a full-time math teacher the following year, 1973–74, he brought not just a way with numbers but a way with the world. Bob challenged Milton to move beyond its exclusive focus on Western European music and include jazz in its curriculum. What began as a single combo with six students grew at one point to 75 students and 10 combos, the top units able to hold their own with very best in the country.

It was a revolutionary, ground-breaking program. The prominent jazz pianist, Aaron Goldberg, Class of 1992, told me that almost all of the top jazz musicians in the U.S. come from 50 dedicated jazz programs; there was no precedent at a “liberal arts” school like Milton Academy for generating the musicianship and swing Bob’s groups achieved. Added Goldberg, “Until I left Milton and became a teacher myself, I didn’t fully appreciate how extraordinary it was. Bob did it his own way without any sort of a model.”

Milton combos have won numerous awards from Downbeat Magazine, MusicFest USA, the Berklee College Music festival. They have played in the White House twice for the Clinton’s and at the inauguration of Deval Patrick ’74 (a former math student of Bob’s); performed for Desmond Tutu and Hugh Masekela; appeared four times on NPR’s “Says You”; and, until the club closed during COVID, were a spring fixture at Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge. Even more remarkable, Bob produced all of this excellence despite the fact he made it a matter of policy, of philosophy, of a fiercely held belief in the universality and necessity of music, to accept all comers. No high-stakes auditions, no cherry-picking. Bob worked with anyone who came through the door.

At the jazz program’s first performance here in King Theater in 1991, famed South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim heard the Milton students perform his compositions and immediately declared that Milton had to come to South Africa. Thus was born one of the signature features of the Milton Academy Jazz Program: the South Africa jazz tour. Thirteen times Milton has travelled to South Africa over spring break, amounting to 431 total participants over the years. Each time students brought donations of instruments, charts, and other gifts for schools and music academies in the townships, over $300,000 of materials in total.

This was not musical tourism. Bob wanted students to understand South Africa in all of its complexity and richness. They visited the Apartheid Museum. They toured Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated. They spent a day at a subsistence community where micro-financing was slowly lifting families from mud huts to one-room concrete block homes. They worked closely with the Amy Foundation and were the featured act in a Township Jazz Festival. They played with students at the Music Academy of Gauteng School and in Soweto and experienced what truly exuberant playing feels like. As Chats Devroop, a South African saxophonist and close friend of Bob, shared, “Bob brought Milton to the world and the world to Milton.”

Bob himself has also made a mark outside Milton. Just a few highlights: For almost 40 years, he was a featured instructor for the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshops in Chicago, Louisville, and London. He founded two bands, named, fittingly, SoundsGlobal and World Leaders. Bob was the first and only full-time high school teacher in 60 years to be elected president of the international organization Jazz Education Network. In 2007 he was the inaugural recipient of the John LaPorta Jazz Educator of the Year Award. The roster of people Bob has played with and for includes such jazz luminaries as Victor Wooten, Danilo Perez, Joe Lovano, Babatunde Olatunji, and many more. In the past year his book Pathways Towards Greatness— Walking Bass Line Construction—F Blues hit the shelves and has already received a great deal of critical and commercial attention. His SmartMusic interactive/online F Blues improv books have been used in 63 countries. For Kevin Chaplin, managing director of the Amy Foundation, “Bob’s impact goes deep. He has brought so much joy to thousands of lives, has brought so many people together. He is one of the most remarkable human beings I know.”

That sense of a larger social purpose has suffused all that Bob has done. Josh Nash ’94, parent of Jonah ’24, echoes that sentiment, pointing to the life lessons learned as Bob’s true legacy. He remembers vividly the day that Bob stopped class and asked him, “Are you here?” Says Josh, “This is where Bob was decades ahead of his time. He was teaching me what it means to be present, to show up fully. He saw me for who I was and didn’t give up on me. ‘Own the good, own the bad, figure out what you can improve.’ Bob was right on so many things, out-there, metaphysical stuff.”

For years, having gank was the highest praise Bob could bestow. Onomatopoeia for the sound a bass string makes when you really dig into a groove, gank meant you were fully into the music, into the moment; the jazz equivalent of flow, presence. It encapsulated the truest, fullest form of showing up.

To Aaron Goldberg, “if you boiled it all down, simplicity was the key. Be honest; play it if you can hear it. It’s a kind of integrity, the difference between real expression and B.S.” Aaron remembers first playing for Bob. “He asked me to play a chord. I asked ‘What do you mean by chord?’  He asked me to play something I knew so I played some Rachmaninoff. ‘That’s a chord,’ he said, ‘A bunch of notes together.’ That’s when I began to learn the beautiful architecture of music and the powerful things that can happen when notes and people come together. Togetherness is what makes a group. What your peers are playing is more important than what you’re playing. It’s the roots of community, of democracy. And the end result is beauty.”

There have been many wonderful and important collaborators in Bob’s long career but none so wonderful and important as his wife Frances. Bob met her, fittingly, in a spiritual workshop. They were married in the old trustees room in Straus in 2002 and Frances has been a fixture in Bob’s and, in no small measure, Milton’s life ever since. A can-do person of the first order (among many things, she once re-shingled her house single-handedly), Frances has been a source of interstitial wizardry: serving as graphic designer of ads for the Nesto Gallery; designing posters for the jazz ensembles many concerts and tours; taking countless pictures of those concerts and tours. Every bit the chronicler that Bob is, Frances has ensured that the doings of Milton jazz are securely and fully fixed in posterity. Thank you, Frances!

There has been another constant in Bob’s life. Every person I interviewed noted at some point Bob’s love of bad jokes, particularly his feeling that, if you can tell a bad joke once, why not tell it twice? One interviewee reported “the unexpected and delightful connection” he felt at this spring’s 50^th jazz celebration when, as Bob was telling one of those chestnuts, he saw all past and present Milton jazzites exchanging sideways glances and mouthing the punch line right along with Bob (Even here Bob promotes togetherness)! As some of you may know, I am not exactly immune to the charms of a bad joke myself, but I bow now to your greatness, Bob.

It feels entirely right that the Milton Paper tribute to Bob was entitled “The Man Who Loves.” And not only because Bob taught a course on love during Milton’s spring project period for three years. William Cronon, in “Only Connect…,” his seminal essay on the makings of a truly educated person, lists ten non-negotiable traits, from the ability to listen and hear to the ability to get things done to the insistence on rigor not for its own sake but as the way to truth. The final and most essential quality is the ability to connect:

A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves…(It) nurtures human freedom in the service of human community, which is to say that in the end it celebrates love.

In his senior spring, Sam Dunn ’22 spent an afternoon ostensibly helping Bob organize his classroom. Sam marveled at how meticulously Bob had recorded and sorted every single Milton performance, every single chart, CD, and DVD (1,400 charts and books, 2,000 CDs, and 100 DVDs in case you were wondering) and soon realized Bob didn’t really need his help. “His memory is encyclopedic!” At one point, Bob put on Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Mountain” and the two of them listened to all 40 minutes of the recording in silence. “By the end of the third song I was tearing up; he was, too. I realized that he just wanted to spend time together before I left Milton. It was a sharing of humanity. That is what will stick with me: the care, the love. He goes beyond because he feels that’s what we deserve. He made me completely rethink the student/teacher relationship.” Concluding, Sam mused “Sini defines a life well-loved. He is such a deeply spiritual man, spreading wisdom, spreading love.”

One parent, Suzanne Magaziner, who saw three children go through the jazz program and who, as a result, was herself part of three different tours to South Africa, remembers Bob insisting that everyone learn and use the Zulu greeting sawubona: “I see you.” Can there be a more powerful way to recognize someone else? It speaks to that core principle of teaching and community—meet people where they are; it speaks to connection, to love.

So, Bob, sawubona, we see you, especially today. Thank you for 51 years of keeping us in tune with the world, with ourselves, with each other. You have touched so many people with your music and, even more powerfully, with your heart.  Thank you.

Rod Skinner ’72
Former Dean of College Counseling

I taught English here for 34 years and retired nine years ago. Facts about me would be impertinent this afternoon except in this respect: When I arrived on Center Street in 1981, a young woman named Sarah Wehle had already been working at Milton for four years. I labored through what I thought was a pretty extensive stint, but now when I return after nine years of happily putting my feet up, I find that Sarah still has her shoulder to the wheel. As a matter of fact, I imagine she’ll be reading over some of your advisor letters later this week, so please, in addition to saying something substantive and encouraging about each of your charges, make sure that all the sentence subjects agree with their verbs as they should do in English as well as in Latin and Greek.

One of the things that has made Sarah a great administrator for so long, one of the things we love and admire about her is the scope of her attention, which runs all the way from big school policy issues to the tiniest anxious freshmen whimpering in the corner of the dormitory common room and on down, yes, to subject-verb agreement.

Sarah certainly gets a blue ribbon for durability and another for her sense of duty. Her talent as an administrator was inversely proportional to her ambition to be one. She would’ve much preferred to be sitting down with a dozen kids working through the Aeneid, but when the school came knocking on her door, she always felt compelled to say yes. When I asked her if she had held every administrative position Milton has to inflict on a person, she was quick to deny—perhaps only because so many new ones have been created. Give her another decade, and she’d probably run the table.

Some of her roles have changed names more than once since she first took them on. She has at various times been chair of the Classics Department, head class advisor or class dean, director of studies, dean of studies, academic dean, Upper School principal, and dean of faculty. A commonality running through her tenure in each of these has been her steady hand of the helm, a combination of unflappable, good sense and generous goodwill. When she ran Monday morning assembly as principal, her parting words as we trooped off to start the week were invariably “be kind.” They may not have ushered in a benign utopia, but they set a bar that we could at least aspire to clear as we went about our work, knowing that we could count on Sarah to be kind to us.

The work we went about was the work she always wished she could be pursuing full-time, teaching and learning in the classroom. Though I was lucky enough to teach two out of Sarah’s three wonderful sons. I never saw one of her own classes. My good friend and colleague, Caroline Sabin saw a lot of that because both she and her daughter had Sarah as a teacher. She’s going to complete this farewell picture by telling you what that experience was like.

David Smith
Former English Department Faculty Member

Thank you David. And hello everyone. It’s really an honor to be able to celebrate Sarah’s teaching. I first met Sarah when I was 14, a freshman in her Latin one class. She told us that she was Athena and we more than half believed her. Forty-two years later we still talk about her class and here are the phrases that we use: Equally formidable and inspiring. Joyfully serious, those eyes saw all.

Our stories mentioned hard work, but lots of fun too. Most of all, they extoll our devotion to the course because of our devotion to Sarah. She held us in thrall. I later found out that you don’t have to be 14 to feel that way. A few years ago, an English Department colleague who had begun the morning, unhappy about losing a day with his students in order to watch others teach, expressed his gratitude for what he called the masterclass in teaching that he received by observing just 20 minutes of Sarah at work. And when my husband found himself with a free period on parents’ day, he asked if Sarah was teaching during that block. He didn’t care if our daughter was in the course or not. He just could never get enough of Sarah’s lightning-quick pace and wit. He often said that Milton should cycle all prospective families through Sarah’s class. He believed that the chance that one’s child could be in a classroom so electric would convince any parent to apply.

I also learned later exactly what David was talking about, how great a role of kindness plays in Sarah’s teaching. I experienced it as a young teacher at Milton when Sarah went out of her way to encourage me. I experienced it as an advisor hearing Sarah speak about her students with insight, compassion, and wisdom, and I experienced it as a parent. My daughter loves Sarah’s class in the same way that I had—and by the way, she also wonders about the Athena thing. She also found a perceptive and caring supporter in Sarah. Sarah went well beyond the role of Latin teacher to notice my daughter’s emotional vulnerabilities and convince her to address them, as she has done for so many students. To me, that’s Sarah’s greatest gift to Milton, the model she provided for balancing caring about students with caring about scholarship. So please join me and David in saying thanks to our green-eyed goddess for the 47 years she spent down here among the mortals.

Caroline Sabin ’86
Former English Department Chair

Vivian—a self-described history teacher and advocate for equity and inclusion—came to Milton 32 years ago, as she has often said,” to support the Asian students on campus, get Asian Society up and running, and maybe stay for a couple of years.”

In these “couple of years” Vivian raised two wonderful children, D.J. and Jonathan, both of whom attended Milton from the Lower School through the Upper School. As a parent of Lower and Middle School children, Vivian was an active member of the parent community, volunteering her time to help run Swap It, and to ensure the quality of the Lower and Middle School program.

As for her original goals set 32 years ago, Vivian has turned Asian Society into one of the most established culture clubs on campus, helping to transform the culture of Milton. Asian Society is not only a well-attended club, but our Asian population on campus—which 32 years ago consisted of a few students who identified as Asian Americans plus some students from Hong Kong—now comprises students from almost all of Asia. This has transformed our school-wide events on campus with holidays such as Lunar New Year being celebrated as an Upper School event with students gathering in the dorms to make dumplings and a Lunar New Year assembly as part of the regular school calendar.

Vivian was one of the early pioneers of the Transition Program, coming back to campus early (back when faculty meetings started after Labor Day) to teach a week of classes to the Transition students. Vivian also advocated that international students be included in the Transition Program, as she felt that it was vital to the school’s mission, and our community’s commitment to diversity to not just admit a diverse student body, but to ensure that all students could be successful at Milton.

Vivian has also invited, supported and pushed for Milton faculty—and our department specifically—to grapple with the tough questions of representation in our courses, her own work a living example.

Vivian has always included/translated activism from her student days at Stanford and work with the Chinatown community into her teaching at Milton, inspiring countless students. This past spring, Vivian was honored at the Asian American Footsteps Conference with the creation of the Vivian WuWong: Pan Asian Student Leadership Award. Starting in 2025, this award will be presented to the “student(s) who have demonstrated a significant positive impact on the Pan Asian community at their school and/or at the local, state, or national level”. Vivian has also

been a fierce advocate for a diverse narrative of the American experience. Her elective course Asian American History has allowed students to think more critically about what it means to be an Asian American in this country and at what have been predominantly white institutions. Her course provided an important window through which all students could learn about the politics of race in this country while simultaneously helping Asian and Asian American students form their own racial identities. She has also challenged the U.S. History course group to recognize and support these complex readings of our past.

Vivian has also used her life story as a teaching tool to illustrate for students how the windy path of her life allowed her to form her own racial identity. These are things that many of us have taken for granted at Milton. It was not until we did a national search this year to find someone who could teach Asian American history that we understood anew how rare Vivian’s knowledge base and teaching abilities are.

I first got to know Vivian 20 years ago when as a new teacher I was struggling to learn the culture of Milton. In particular, in the course groups everyone was talking about the Constitution test, and when I asked the course group leader what such a test should look like, it quickly became clear that I had asked the wrong question. Somehow, Vivian was able to read my mind, and in passing in the hallway Vivian casually let slip that if I ever needed to know what kind of assignments people were giving their students to stop by her classroom as she would be happy to share her course materials. Vivian has a unique ability to be thinking about how other people are experiencing Milton and she takes the extra step to understanding what needs to be done so that everyone can be their best selves. As department chair, I have been very fortunate to be the recipient of Vivian’s timely emails suggesting a topic that needs to be addressed or a course of action that could be taken to improve our community. I always find myself asking myself, “Why didn’t I think of that? It is so obvious.”

Vivian is someone who has a deep love of both the institution and the faculty. She has led by example, and with the firm belief that we, the faculty, need to shape policies and determine the future course of Milton. In 2007 when the head of school proposed that we get rid of the Middle and Lower schools and turn Milton Academy into a grade 9–12 school, Vivian took action and helped to organize the K–12 Campaign. Overnight,  stickers appeared on cars around Milton with the “keep Milton K–12” message. Vivian’s community activism, including strong connections with parents and the K–8 faculty, and belief that all of the faculty needed to fight for what they valued paid off, and today we are still a K–12 school. Saving the Lower School is one of Vivian’s proudest moments in a long and distinguished career at Milton. As the first female Asian American department chair at Milton, Vivian’s guiding belief was that we should always look out for the members of our community who are struggling, and support them. That we should use kindness and intelligence to guide our decision making. That listening is as important as speaking, and that when you see something that is not right, don’t wait for someone else to fix it—take the initiative and get it fixed.

Vivian has shaped who we are as a department, and who we are as a Milton community.  She also leaves us with a challenge: How can we practice and make real today the ideals which we profess to define us as a community? We will miss Vivian, and we wish her well as she starts the next chapter of her life. We are excited that Vivian is just down the road, and hope that she will continue to be a presence on campus and in our lives.

What a pleasure it is to present this tribute to Cheryl Aveni!

For the past 26 years, Cheryl has been Milton’s assistant to the head of school, loyally serving five different heads. For those who’ve been around for a while, you understand the wide range of personalities she’s supported and the many peaks and valleys she has traveled on this journey! She has been steadfast, loyal, committed and resilient. As good friend and colleague Bryan Price reflected recently, “There is no one at Milton who has been more responsible for maintaining stability at our school in the past three decades.” 

In October 1998, just as he was leaving Milton, Ed Fredie hired Cheryl as a temp then quickly made her a permanent employee. Then, she was scooped up and quickly promoted by Robin Robertson, who realized what an incredible resource Cheryl is (and not just because Cheryl supplied the McDonald’s Happy Meals that often brightened their days). At one time, three people supported the Head of School and then it was just Cheryl. I’m not sure how she felt about that, but it speaks volumes about her and her commitment to her work.

She was with Rick Hardy for 2 years and me for 14. Now that Cheryl has successfully onboarded Alixe, she has decided that the time is right for her to head into the sunset. She may be ready, but I’m not sure that Milton is. Recently Alixe commented, “I don’t know what I would have done without Cheryl this year” and I know exactly what she means.

We would be here all night if my task were to capture all that Cheryl has done for Milton. Luckily for all of you, I’m on a strict word limit which, ironically, is one of the things Cheryl has had to enforce on a regular basis for just about everyone in our rather verbose community. 

Cheryl’s main role was to support the head of school, but she also was the primary administrative support for the Ad Council and the Board of Trustees, too. Former Board Chair Lisa Donohue proclaimed, “Chery is simply the best!” and I concur!

Cheryl has brought such joy to Milton! Almost everyone has been touched by her extraordinary work. She was the party planner, creative genius, and gift-shopper extraordinaire behind every holiday party and staff appreciation luncheon, making these events special for all. 

Caring is at the heart of everything Cheryl does. She is deeply and genuinely devoted to the people of Milton—students, parents, teachers, staff, administrators and parents alike. As Peter Parisi recently exclaimed “more than being a Head of School Whisperer, Cheryl simply KNOWS people.” For almost three decades, she has served as wise counsel to countless faculty, staff, administrators and trustees. She is a critical voice, representing staff and, despite her famous aversion to the spotlight, she never shied away from ensuring staff needs were incorporated into the Head of School, Leadership Team, and Board’s work. 

And oh how we will miss her incredible sense of humor. I will never know which Cheryl loves more–laughing  or making others laugh. Both are gifts but for me, hands down, it’s Cheryl’s beautiful “Wicked Laugh.”

Cheryl is strong and resilient, the product of her South Shore roots (Just like her buddy Steven Tyler of Aerosmith) and her amazing family. What a delight when her son Michael joined the Facilities team 12 years ago and Milton could claim two Avenis as its own. Cheryl is quick to talk about the joy and support she receives from Michael and his wife, Rachel, her daughter Krista, her parents, her amazing (and hilarious) sisters and her partner Steven. 

Most of you will never know the extent of all that Cheryl has done for Milton. Working beside her, I had the unique privilege of witnessing her unparalleled dedication every single day. She made all the highs even higher and the lows much easier to bear. She is a fierce protector of the school and its people, and the perfect mix of toughness, compassion, humor and dedication. As former Director of Communications Cathy Everett recently described, “Cheryl tapped a bottomless source of utter fearlessness. Yes, the woman who was petrified of driving into Boston could manage, cajole, coax, assuage, alert, inspire, stand her ground or redirect a threatening parent or wayward alum, a wounded trustee, an imploding faculty member,  a relentless salesperson,  a recalcitrant staff member, a rude reporter, or an entitled figurehead, among many other characters who, sometimes on the same day, made their way to the head’s office.”

It is this role in particular for which I am perhaps most grateful. No matter what, I always knew Cheryl had my back, Nancy’s and our whole family’s. She loved and looked out for us with the ferocity of a Momma Bear. When things were their most challenging, there was no one who did more or would do more for me than Cheryl. Simply put, whenever the going got tough, Cheryl got going! And I and so many others will forever be in her debt.

Thank you, Cheryl, for your amazing 26 years. The Milton community is so very grateful for you. We all hope you have a wonderful and most well deserved retirement ahead!

Todd B. Bland
Former Head of School

Since 2015, Nick Parnell has been the school’s director of Facilities Services. He and his team deal with the things you can’t see—or shouldn’t know about—so that you can do what you do every day.

Nick was my first hire when I joined Milton in 2015—I arrived to news that our prior director was retiring—and I assembled an interview committee. Nick was selected due to his combined expertise as an architect, managing facilities for the Newton Public Schools, and most recently, director of facilities at another private school.

Nick’s main goal since he arrived has been to execute the campus master plan. This has covered everything from the school’s land strategy, to faculty housing, to how to best address needs for a new library and a new home for math, without adding additional square feet. In addition, he has lent his expertise to projects that best use and update existing spaces. Nick was also instrumental in the renovation of the Faulkner building in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mobilizing with incredible speed to create a Health Center facility with modern amenities and air circulation.

Being a director of facilities is not as straightforward as it might seem—and while we are grateful for what we have, the school is constantly having to balance the quality, speed, and price of projects. As a result, Nick has spent a great deal of his time figuring out how to divide projects into parts—in fancy terms, “phases”— to allow us to keep enough classrooms running or to afford to begin a project.

There’s always that question of “can we do it” in the time we have, is it “really” going to break if we do not move forward… and I know his personal favorite— a question from me— “is that really going to look good”? As you will see if you look up at the ceiling of Thacher, yes, it IS painted black behind those acoustical panels – what I’ve determined to be Nick’s favorite color. “It’s a historical room,” I said, “really, you want to paint the ceiling black?” “It will fade out, and you totally won’t notice it” Nick said. And he was right. But I will say, if you don’t like the silver-colored toe kick on the stairs at FMC, you now know EXACTLY where to direct your concerns.

While Nick may have moved into the facilities area, he is still an architect at heart. He creates high-level sketches of spaces we want to repurpose or enhance so that we can see and contemplate them quickly, allowing us to rapidly generate options, rejecting those that don’t work, and creatively playing with those that remain. He gets excited about and capitalizes on discoveries big and small— like the time we found a couple hundred square feet and windows behind a wall at Robbins house, in a stairwell that “went to nowhere”—which now serves as the dorm’s TV room and spills light into the common room.

Along with the facilities associate directors, he also has helped the school navigate tricky issues, in particular with the town Building Department, Historic Commission, and Public Works. I have personally learned a great deal from Nick—and never once felt that I could not ask him a question or ask him to re-explain issues I did not understand the first time around. He’s served as an intermediary between our construction team, project manager, architects and engineers on all of our master plan projects. And he does not hesitate to let it fly if the work is not getting done or if he sees a barrier to occupying a space on time.

On another note, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the momentary challenges and humor related to having the same first name as his partner, Heidi Black. He’s solved that problem by calling her “my Heidi” and me— well, occasionally, when it’s to his advantage—“my Boss.” That said, I do every once in a while get a wayward text, my favorite one being the one I got a few years ago that said “can you get the tomatoes for dinner?” I of course assured him that no, I could not.

At the end of the day, Nick goes back to his roots— his parents were educators— and likes to tell it from an extremely practical perspective. “The teachers won’t like that, let’s try it a different way” or “I can’t see how that will work for a five-year-old.” And in so doing, he’s shown us his own special version of “Dare to be true”—although different from what might be covered in our classrooms, it’s come in the form of big debates about constructability and how to address code issues. And it’s also come in the form of smaller ones about how to address a “reveal” and the right color for a ceiling, which—while it may seem superficial—allows us all to receive the subliminal message that it was done right, with quality and care.

Nick, we wish you well in your retirement, in your many travels that you have planned, and we are happy to know that still— for a few hours a month in the coming year— we’ll see you popping your head around the doors of buildings and projects, making sure that they will be completed as intended. Thank you.

Heidi Vanderbilt-Brown
Chief Financial and Operating Officer

Since 2011, Lynn O’Sullivan has been the administrator in the Facilities Services department, having served multiple directors of the department, including me.  It has been my fortune to have worked with Lynn for more than 7 years. We have had a lot of fun while getting a lot of work done.

Lynn has been the glue that keeps everything together and makes sure that what needs to get done gets done. And if it doesn’t, you know that you will hear from her.

Lynn, with support from her team, manages the routing of inbound maintenance requests, payment of millions of dollars in bills, vendor contracts, the mailroom, supply purchasing, and any miscellaneous issue that reaches facilities. She answers questions about policies, procedures, and supports team members who have questions about vacation and anything else. She is also responsible for making sure that all members of the facilities teams have a uniform that works for them in every season.

Described by a colleague as a “fantastic human being,” Lynn always tries to find the best path forward in any circumstance.

As much as Lynn gives to the work itself, she balances it all with fun and great conversation. Lynn is always ready to lend an ear to anyone who needs it, provide perspective that is real but caring at the same time, and share what she hears around campus if she thinks it will help someone.

She also makes sure that special events and moments within the department are recognized. Lynn was responsible for putting together the many celebratory events held in the Facilities shop area. Her attention to everyone’s dietary needs were always addressed.

In her retirement, Lynn looks forward to spending more time with her young grandchildren and, since she lives around the corner, helping with the Lower School after school program.

Lynn, I know I speak for everyone here when I thank you for your dedication, care, and commitment to the Facilities Services department and the campus more broadly. We wish you the best in this new chapter of your life.

Nick Parnell
Director, Facilities Services