Exeter Bulletin Fall 2003

It's a Small World After All

One Big Playground

Properly fortified, many faculty children would race off to Exeter’s unsurpassed athletic facilities. “I don’t even want to think about how many hours a day I spent in the gym,” Mahoney says. “That was stuff that I just kind of took for granted. We had a deal with the janitor. He’d lock us in there and we would play for hours.”

Mahoney’s brother, Kevin ’92, had just as much fun. “To me, fac brat life can be summarized as one big playground,” Kevin says. “Exeter provided me and my friends an abundance of places to play and have fun, all within a couple of blocks. I mean, how many kids get to grow up across the street from a college-level gymnasium and live 50 feet from their best friend’s house?”

Faculty children can be as invested in Exeter sports as the students. “We’d follow the teams pretty carefully,” Swift says. And what of the school’s chief athletic rival? “I hated Andover,” Mike Mahoney says. “They were the enemy.”

Dennehy says he did some of his best roaming and trouble-making during the school day. He remembers regularly crawling along a ledge on the outside of one classroom building. “Classes would be going on,” he says. “I’d be peering in the windows.”

More than once, classes have been disrupted by faculty children. “We used to all play in the academic quad,” says Tracy (Dennehy) Shapiro ’90, Pat Dennehy’s older sister, who adds that teachers would occasionally stick their heads out open classroom windows and urge the children to be quiet.

The sounds of children playing are still present at Exeter, where there are now 52 faculty offspring ages 5 and younger. Shapiro and husband Ethan Shapiro—the current dean of students—have four of them. “It’s just a great place to raise a family,” Tracy says. “The kids get to be so involved in so many things. They spend a lot of time over in the gymnasium with my father or Ethan. At age 4, my twins could skate.”

Growing up on campus means always having enough friends for a game of touch football, like the one above between (left to right) Nate Shepard, Richard Aberle, Jake Sneeden, Matthew Zia and Eliza Sneeden. It also means—as it did for Aimée Birnbaum and her mother, modern language instructor Evelyn Christoph (right photo)—a fully equipped dining hall for your kitchen pantry, as well as an appreciative audience on Halloween.

That’s what happens when your family has unlimited access to the ice rinks. “I have many memories of growing up on campus,” Dennehy says, “and a lot of them are athletic. I’d take my father’s keys and go skate for hours.” Dennehy has moved on to the Holderness School, where he is now associate director of admissions and the school’s hockey coach. So his 3-year-old son is growing up in a similar environment. “I chuckle, because he’s doing the same things I did,” Dennehy says.

Faculty children don’t necessarily need fancy athletic facilities to have fun. “We went fishing on the Exeter River off the old, falling-down bridge,” Bennett says. “We skated up the river in the wintertime.”

Spring found John Heyl ’71 and friends tapping trees around campus. “We did maple syruping in the backyard,” says Heyl, whose father, Dr. James Heyl, was the Academy’s medical director. “This is the kind of freedom we had.” Freedom, and opportunity: When A Separate Peace was filmed on campus in 1972, Heyl was cast in the central role of Finny.

Swift says the lawn in front of what is now the library was the site of “almost daily” baseball games between faculty children from April to October. They used the large elm tree as the backstop for homeplate. One day, Swift, playing outfield, began chasing after a well-hit fly ball, which wound up bouncing across Front Street with him in hot pursuit. “Some poor old lady found me and the ball on her bumper,” Swift says. “I still have the scar on my knee to show for it.”

When students departed for vacations, faculty children had the run of the place. “We used to always play in the dorms during vacations and build forts in the common rooms,” Bourne says. In Mike Mahoney’s day, empty dorms meant the chance for spirited games of laser tag. “We all had laser tag sets,” Mahoney says. “There would be something like 10 of us. We’d play for a couple hours in the different dorms.”

Raising Kids at School
English Instructor Becky Moore reflects on the lives of campus families.

McConnell Hall (at rear) is home to English instructor Becky Moore and her husband, Marshall, and their three sons: (seated, from left) Davis ’05, Tim and Nick ’03.

As members of the PEA community, my children have taken bagpipe lessons, played in an African drumming group, performed in a Main Stage production, learned math from Exeter teachers, studied in France and had access to pools, rinks, squash courts and track pads—all while surrounded by students from many parts of the country and the world. What makes this list notable is that my kids had all these opportunities before they could enroll as students at the Academy. Such are the riches in the life of a campus child.

Over 18 years, and three boarding school campuses, our three sons, Nicholas ’03, Davis ’05 and Timothy, have always lived with teenagers—the girls on the other side of my dorm study door. As Nicholas moves on to college this fall, he will continue living in a dorm; the only difference may be that his mother and her colleagues will not run it. As well as the students in the dorms and the larger campus, our children have enjoyed the company of adults, faculty and staff alike, who live and work with a shared mission: to educate students both in and beyond the classroom. The campus children make a logical extension of that mission, and thus my colleagues’ invitations to be in a play or come watch stars at the observatory are given freely. In the same well-intended way, so are the suggestions that one boy refrain from skateboarding down Tan Lane, or another work harder in biology. Day to day, my children know that many people on this campus are looking out for their health and well-being.

Luckily their father, Marshall, enjoyed his own five years as a boarding school student. He understands the purpose behind the dorm family’s required “permeable membrane” sort of home life—a status that includes students dropping into the kitchen at almost any time to chat, evening fire drills five times a year and planning a social life around my duty schedule. He also reminds me that if I am not on duty, I might try letting another colleague answer that knock at the door and thus keep paying attention to our boys’ thoughts in the family dinner conversation. Balancing the roles of dorm head to 36 and parent to three takes this sort of steady help, I find.

Striking a Balance

In the days before coeducation, Marshall and my roles in that balancing act probably would have been reversed—the boys would have seen their dad as the dorm master and me as the cautionary spouse. However, today their mother is the faculty member and Marshall makes his work life outside of the school. Over the years, the increasingly flexible structure of boarding school life has made our particular balance of work and parenting possible. While running a dorm has been a constant in my 24 years of school work, teaching and coaching a full load have not; for 11 years, until Timothy was 6, I worked at three quarters or half time, while Marshall worked full time. The segmented tasks in a daily prep school schedule, onsite daycare and summer breaks have allowed us to care for the boys in ways that we found sane. With two parents, three campus communities and an intricately planned calendar, the boys seemed to have grown well in the arrangements.

A real plus in coming to work at Exeter was the PEA Children’s Center, where early on Davis and Tim spent most of my class and coaching hours. A quick walk from dorm and classroom, the center let us avoid the daily commute many working families face. When he was 9, Tim attended a retirement party at the center for the same woman who had cared for him at 9 months—such is the commitment of the center’s staff. No system is perfect, of course, and the crew teams I coached were grateful on the late-tide days when my patchwork of care frayed and Tim, bundled up in his red snowsuit and yellow life jacket, made a patient assistant in the bow of my launch.

Our family did spend one year of our Academy life away from the residential campus. Living in a second-floor apartment on a busy city street, we had no dorm door, no fields and rinks and no immediate crowd of campus children with whom to play. We lived in Rennes, France, where I taught for SYA. Marshall served as “homme de foyer” and the boys attended French schools; again their mother’s teaching setting gave our children a special chance to grow and learn. By January they could speak French with friends, win marbles in the courtyard games and coin their own Franglais phrases—a favorite of Nick’s was “Donnez-moi une casse!”

Returning to Exeter, the boys settled back into campus life with ease. Once again they could enjoy their “small town” independence—they could run outside, walk to the Ioka or bike to soccer practice—all with their brothers rather than their parents. As I sat down to write this piece, I asked each of them what they remember most about growing up at school. “Well, there were always good targets for snowball fights,” said one. “You knew the students would play, but they would not kill you if you hit them.” Added another: “And Mom, there were always good snacks at the dining hall—I mean, you just couldn’t keep the kind of variety around that they can.” My son looked at me tactfully as he pulled out the word “variety”—I imagined the boys ducking into Elm Street for some frozen yogurt or a quick grilled cheese between rounds of four-square; such are snacking options of the campus child.

As the boys grow to high school age, their relationship to the Academy as a home has broadened to one of a school as well. Some of their campus buddies have joined them in classes, while others have used the Academy’s scholarship program to attend other independent schools, or started out at Exeter High School before finishing at PEA. Whatever secondary school they attend, campus teenagers still always seem to find each other during Academy vacations. In those quiet stretches, the campus again becomes just their home. It is a place to play and live together in curiosity and community, just as they did in childhood.

An English instructor and dorm head of McConnell Hall, Becky Moore began teaching at Exeter in 1990. She is one of the founders of the Exeter Humanities Institute.

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