Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

Son of Augusta comes back to lead Kents Hill School

By Susan McMillan smcmillan@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

KENTS HILL -- The new head of Kents Hill School didn't go to school here, but the new job is a homecoming for him nonetheless.

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Jeremy LaCasse, the new head of school, gets pointers on a calculator from Simi Odinayo while visiting an algebra class at Kents Hill School in Readfiel

Staff photo by Joe Phelan

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Students Simi Odinayo, left, and Robert Patenaude chat with Jeremy LaCasse, the new head of school, before algebra class started recently at Kents Hill School in Readfield.

Staff photo by Joe Phelan

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Jeremy LaCasse, 39, grew up in Augusta and attended city schools -- including freshman year at Cony High School -- before going to Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass. His parents, John and Susan LaCasse, have lived in the same Augusta house for decades.

LaCasse returned to Maine for a few years to attend Bowdoin College, then got his first job as a history teacher at Berkshire. Since then, his career in boarding schools has taken him around the country.

Kents Hill's trustees chose LeCasse to succeed Rist Bonnefond, who retired after 21 years as head of school.

This summer he moved onto the Kents Hill campus with his wife, Diana, and their three children: 10-year-old Jack, 8-year-old Ellie and 3-year-old Finn. Jack and Ellie attend Readfield Elementary School.

Kents Hill began its 188th year of classes Sept. 13, with 245 students. The Kennebec Journal sat down with LaCasse last week to discuss his philosophies on education and his view of the relationship between Kents Hill and the larger central Maine community.

Kennbec Journal: Why did you decide to return to the boarding school world after college and make a career in it?

Jeremy LaCasse: When I was in college, I worked at Camp Kieve in Damariscotta, which is sort of like boarding school except without having to go to class. And I also coached crew at the Hyde School in Bath. And those two things caused me to think that teaching might be kind of fun. I thought I'd try teaching for a little while and see how it went, and it stuck.

Anytime you get to spend most of your time working with kids, doing things you like to do -- I feel pretty fortunate almost every day when I come to the school. I coach skiing, I coach crew, both things that I really enjoy. I got to teach history, which is another thing that I really enjoy. And dorm duty and things like that, you figure out ways to make them enjoyable, and they end up being kind of fun because you get to do fun things with kids. You get to see them grow and develop, which is the important thing.

KJ: What makes Kents Hill School unique among the places where you've worked?

LaCasse: One of the things I've noticed is how very different the culture of the school is, given geography. Having worked at Berkshire, with a lot of kids from New York, there was a high premium placed on being witty and sarcastic, and there was currency in that. When we moved to Colorado, there was a sincerity and a literalness that went along with the culture that was really wonderful in its own way. Pittsburgh, where we most recently came from, is earnest and forthright, more than anything else.

And Maine in a lot of ways feels very much like where I grew up in sort of the sensibility and I guess common sense above all else.

KJ: How do you keep a school like this from existing in a bubble?

LaCasse: You can view them as being pretty isolated because we're at the top of a hill in Maine. But we're also a microcosm in a lot of different ways. We've got kids, I think, from (15 countries and 22 states). One of our key educational drivers is how to bring this diversity together to create a coherent learning community. So although we may be isolated, we also in a way have the world right here. ...

In terms of the really local community, we do quite a bit of community service, and so the kids are doing outreach in that sort of way. We hopefully bring a lot of folks into our community for a lot of different things. We certainly never want to see the demise of something like the Kennebec Ice Arena, but certainly the collapse of that roof happened to cause a lot of people to need to use our ice rink. And so we have brought a lot of people in via that medium. But we also have a beautiful new performing arts center, where we've had a lot of concerts. We had Arlo Guthrie last fall, Judy Collins in the spring, and we (had) Shemeika Copeland actually on Friday. We're hoping to find ways to bringing the public onto campus in ways that enrich the local community and enrich our students' experience as well.

KJ: Could Kents Hill School be anywhere, or is there anything specifically about Readfield or the Augusta area that shapes and benefits the school?

LaCasse: Being on this particular hilltop in this particular locality does a lot for us. From the ski hill that we have, to our ability to access innumerable lakes -- which our outing club uses often -- to being an hour from Sugarloaf, it's all really fantastic.

The benefit of being close to Augusta is an interesting one. Our ability to have access to the locality; the politics of the state of Maine are important and instructive to our kids in a variety of ways. The kids will tell you that the shopping options in Augusta are quite helpful for them, and I think that certainly is important to us.

KJ: What are some of the special challenges of coming in after a head of school who was here for so long?

LaCasse: The short answer is, they're definitely big shoes to fill. The very positive thing is he still lives just down the road, and he has been very generous in his time in support in helping me make this transition. As a community, I think Kents Hill relished all that Rist brought here, but I think it's an open and accepting community also. They recognize that it's going to be a change just by virtue of the fact that I'll do things slightly differently.

I don't think anyone here is talking about departing from our core mission. It's a question of can we continue all the good work that's come before, and certainly adding strength to strength is an important piece of what we're trying to do. And in truth, the school could not be in a better position than it's in at the moment. We are fully enrolled and have a great group of kids who are really contributing in a whole myriad of ways that are really making this place absolutely wonderful.

KJ: How has the role of a head of a boarding school changed?

LaCasse: In the last 30 years, it's changed hugely. ... Schools like Kents Hill shifted from sort of mom-and-pop operations, where the headmaster was literally the lead teacher, to actual, real businesses in the sense of we need to make sure that we're following all the rules and regulations about employment, to we need to find streams of revenue to maintain and support a sizable infrastructure, and things like that. Fifty years ago, people didn't have hockey rinks, as an example, or didn't make snow on the ski hill. And now those are big parts of what we do. ...

LaCasse: In the last 30 years, it's changed hugely. ... Schools like Kents Hill shifted from sort of mom-and-pop operations, where the headmaster was literally the lead teacher, to actual, real businesses in the sense of we need to make sure that we're following all the rules and regulations about employment, to we need to find streams of revenue to maintain and support a sizable infrastructure, and things like that. Fifty years ago, people didn't have hockey rinks, as an example, or didn't make snow on the ski hill. And now those are big parts of what we do. ...

KJ: What's going on academically in boarding schools these days? What's the effect of being outside the accountability and testing trend?

LaCasse: The short answer is that the beauty of an independent school is the fact that we're largely independent. At its best, what that means is the fact that you're finding the most effective way to reach each of the kids who is in your classroom. ...

When you look at standards and testing and things like that that you're seeing in the public sector -- the public sector has the responsibility to teach a huge swath of the population, which is a daunting task. And they have to get them all over a certain threshold, so they're going to distribute their resources in that way that best reaches those kids that they need to move the furthest along. And that's to be expected, and appropriate. But it means that they're also trying to do it as efficiently as possible, particularly as school boards are realizing funding crunches and things like that.

I think one of the things that boarding schools do particularly well is serving the needs of folks in the middle, the kids who wouldn't be on anyone's radar in a public school, either because they're being exceptional or being unexceptional. And so those kids, I think, get a much richer experience here and develop much further than they could and discover that they can do much more than they would have in a public setting. ...

We have a faculty meeting once a week, each Thursday afternoon. Every other week, we spend time talking about our students. Which is to say, which students are being successful; and we spend time talking about successful students and the things that are helping them be successful. And we also talk about kids that are struggling and the nature of their struggles and compare notes on strategies we might deploy with those kids.

KJ: Do you have a vision for the future of Kents Hill School?

LaCasse: This year the board of trustees and I and the faculty have committed to doing a close examination of what we do. I think it's going to be largely affirming, but I think there are going to be some insights that are going to be really useful to us as we go forward. And that will do much to sculpt the particulars of how we move forward. I think our core mission is still a good one, and our ability to help prepare kids for college and prepare kids to be able citizens in the world are essential elements of our mission and things that are going to remain at the core of what we do.

KJ: Living on campus, are you ever not working?

LaCasse: There are times when you don't work. I make a point of trying to make it home to tuck my kids in and to read to them every night, so during that time I may not be working. But when the kids are on campus, it's a 24/7 obligation in some ways. And you have to find ways to retain your sanity within that complex.

But in large part, I think being at school is something that my family is highly invested in, and we're all excited about this experience. It is a little bit like being in a fishbowl. My wife will tell you, because we just moved in, we don't have window treatments on all the windows. So we're kind of literally in a fishbowl. But it's a neat thing to be this close and to be part of the community in this way.

KJ: Let me ask about your clothes. Is that a real bow tie?

LaCasse: Absolutely.

KJ: You have sort of a tweedy professor thing going on.

LaCasse: Without question, a tweedy professor, yes. The bow ties -- I started wearing them when I was coaching crew, and oftentimes you'd end up on the lake and wouldn't have had time to go back and change before practice. So you'd have your tie on still, and it would just be in the way. I guess I could take it off and put it in my pocket, but it already had soup stains on it, so why bother. And wearing a bow tie, you almost forget that you're wearing a tie. So it started out very practically, but it's sort of become a bit of a trademark, I guess.

KJ: You and Tucker Carlson.

LaCasse: Yeah, I don't know if I want to be in the same category as him.

KJ: There are some other famous bow tie-wearers, but I can't think of them at the moment.

LaCasse: Winston Churchill is always a favorite, and I think he made it look pretty good.

Susan McMillan -- 621-5645

smcmillan@mainetoday.com