Head-Elect Peter Fayroian Visits Campus

It was the coldest morning of the winter so far, but Northfield Mount Hermon’s next head of school, Peter Fayroian, got a warm, enthusiastic welcome when he visited campus on Monday, Jan. 16.

 

“I am so glad to be here,” he told students, faculty, and staff at an all-school morning meeting in Memorial Chapel. “I can’t wait to join you on campus and to represent NMH around the country and the world.” Fayroian will begin the job as head of school on July 1. He will move to NMH with his wife, Rachael, and the baby they are expecting in February.

 

Head of School Charlie Tierney introduced his successor as a “seasoned school leader and community builder” possessing great “experience, dedication, vision, humor, and humanity.” (Watch the video.) Fayroian spoke briefly at Monday’s meeting before NMH’s Student Diversity Committee kicked off a week of events honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with an entertaining program of videos, speeches, music, and skits.

 

Fayroian joined right in, citing the 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, Alabama, in which more than a thousand African American students skipped classes to march in support of desegregation. “Dr. King gave young people a sense of their own stake in the struggle for freedom,” Fayroian said.

 

After Monday’s meeting, he spoke with editors of campus publications and greeted every student, teacher, and staff member who crossed his path. “He looks natural and at home on campus,” Tierney observed.

 

Fayroian even met with a group of prospective students and their families who were visiting classes for the morning. “They said, ‘Tell us one thing about you,’” he recalled afterward. “So I told them, ‘I love kids. In high school, I still believe they’re kids. That said, I never underestimate what they’re capable of doing. It sounds like a cliché, but they truly are our future as a society and a civilization. So the work we do with kids on this campus is going to change the world. I love being a part of that.’”