NMH Magazine : Fall 2005

A Tale of Transformation

The board of trustees’ 2004 decision to make NMH a smaller school on one campus was the first step in a remarkable transformation that is still unfolding. For Head of School Tom Sturtevant, the ground-breaking decision signaled tremendous opportunity. “I brought senior staff together and told them, ‘Here’s the chance of a lifetime to figure out how to carry out the school’s mission even better.’”    They took his words to heart, coordinating and integrating a vast number of projects within a timeline that a pessimist might call impossible. A small army of faculty, staff, administrators, and contractors set to work, and they pulled off the impossible by September 2005. Much of their work is invisible to campus visitors, who will never see the intricate layers of planning that went into merging two campuses. For those curious enough to look beneath the surface, here are several stories of how NMH shrank and grew and strategically transformed itself in less than two years.

OVERSEEING A MONUMENTAL TASK

If you’re baking a cake and need to get it done fast, you don’t turn the heat from 350 degrees to 650,” says Stan Pitchko, director of plant facilities. “In the same way, putting pressure on the folks in the field doesn’t make things happen any faster. It just burns the cake.”

Pitchko, a broad-shouldered, levelheaded former building contractor, is fond of food analogies. He’s also inordinately proud of his staff, which did yeoman’s service in shutting the Northfield campus down to idle and readying Mount Hermon for its September debut.

Pitchko, who’s in charge of capital construction, the power plant, water and sewer systems, the campus mail system, grounds and custodial crews, tradespeople, and safety and security, sees himself primarily as an orchestrator. If so, he just conducted the equivalent of Mahler’s Resurrection.

Last year the Mount Hermon campus had 428 students; this year there are 717. The campus is currently supporting 48 percent more infrastructure than in the past, and by the time all planned capital construction is done, the campus will grow by 200,000 square feet. Over the summer, along with the usual repairs and renovations, there were additions, whole-building makeovers, space conversions, and countless moves.

“I knew it was going to be a monumental task,” says Pitchko, who became director of plant facilities four months after the trustees voted to consolidate the campuses in January 2004. “We’ve had what we call our ‘fl ies in the ointment,’ but we always worked through it.”

THE SHUFFLING GAME

The task was highly tactical: Assistant Head of School Charlie Tierney, working with academic department chairs, had to fi nd just the right places for classes, academic departments, and administrative offi ces. Space was tight, though the addition of two 12,400-square-foot modular buildings eased the pinch.

“The biggest challenge was trying to fit into existing space when we still have dreams of how we want it to be,” says Tierney. “We had to remind ourselves not be impatient; some of this has to be short-term work.”

In placing departments, Tierney worked to make interdisciplinary connections. For example, he put the history, world languages, and English as a second language departments near each other in Beveridge Hall, cheek by jowl with the Center for International Education. In today’s jargon: good synergy.

Tierney has also worked to bring the fl avor and history of Northfi eld to Mount Hermon, for example, lining hallways with archival prints of the Northfield campus. He’s searched out the best classroom furniture, choosing pieces that promote collaborative learning. And he’s revived the former faculty room in the basement of Schauffler Library, where coffee now flows freely.

Amazed and pleased that the academic logistics have worked out, Tierney looks back at the summer of 2004 with awe. “There wasn’t a part of campus that didn’t have a hole being dug or a foundation going in or pipes being installed or bathrooms being replaced or carpets going in. Every inch of campus, something was changing and growing.”

FOUR DINING HALLS INTO ONE

At its busiest in the past— lunchtime during Family Days— Alumni Hall served 1,050 people. It was a stretch. Now approximately the same number of people eat lunch at Alumni Hall every weekday.

“It’s a demand we only faced three times a year, and now we’re facing it on a daily basis,” says Director of Dining Services Rich Messer. In preparation, he added a new blast chiller and walk-in complex, increased refrigeration, and installed four convection steam ovens. Now a chef and eight cooks (versus four previously) staff the kitchen, and dining services workers used to the more intimate atmospheres of Marquand, Gould, and Hibbard dining halls are adjusting to the cavernous scale of Alumni.

To prevent dining gridlock, Alumni Hall’s hours have been extended from 7 am to 7:30 pm. During non-meal times, students can “graze” on snacks, cereals, and deli and salad bar offerings. Dining services also had to plan for the breakfast rush, which includes 150 more students than in the past. The result: a breakfast program in Beveridge lounge that serves light fare five mornings a week.

In other ways, Messer’s job has grown easier. He now has only one dining hall to contend with versus four. He’s excited about having dining services under one roof and wants to make the best impression possible. “We didn’t want returning students to think we were maxed out or under stress because of the numbers. We were ready, and students should feel good about the changes the school has made.”

FAIR HOUSING

It’s a good thing adolescents can understand the concept of fairness. If they couldn’t, Dean of Students Nicole Hager would have had an even tougher task than she did.

With the impending move to one campus, Hager had to rework NMH’s student housing system so it would be fair to Northfielders. She put the matter in the hands of the school’s student life committee, composed of faculty and students, who used the transition as an opportunity to reimagine the housing process. After a lot of thinking outside the box, they agreed that the current system—which houses freshmen together, then mixes tenth graders through postgraduates in the remaining dorms—worked best.

One of the biggest challenges was assigning dorms, since former Northfield students could no longer stay in their old houses, and most Mount Hermon students wanted to stay right where they were. With the move to one campus, there would be no housing guarantees and plenty of shake-ups.

During an open house last winter, all students toured the Mount Hermon dormitories and met with house directors. Before spring break students submitted housing forms, listing their top six dorm picks in order of preference. When the final housing assignments were revealed, Hager says it was a success. “Out of fi ve hundred returning boarders, we had about twenty unhappy kids. That’s not bad.”

Meanwhile, the process for choosing student leaders, who serve as role models and mentors for students within a dorm, was revamped. In the old system, a dorm’s student leaders were selected from students within the dorm. With the closing of Northfi eld’s dorms, the system no longer held. Instead house directors nominated their worthiest students, and, after intensive interviews, house directors and deans chose the 50 best student leaders overall, who submitted a form stating their dorm preferences but had to be willing to live anywhere. With these preferences in mind, house directors and deans then assigned student leaders to various dormitories.

The campus consolidation also jiggled the advising system in which faculty members associated with a dormitory serve as advisors to small groups of students. The student life committee again evaluated the current system and affi rmed that house-based advising was the best way to continue. Closing the Northfi eld campus threw off its advisor affi liations; the dean of students offi ce worked triple time to reassign advisors to Mount Hermon dormitories before students fi lled out their housing preference forms. Students who wanted to keep their advisors could do so by requesting to live where their advisors had been assigned for 2005–06.With housing changes, some students reluctantly had to give up their old advisors. “We reminded them that by being on one campus, we’ll all stay connected,” says Hager. “It was a weaning process for some.”

Surprisingly, the students’ criticism focused elsewhere. “They said we paid too much attention to how well Northfield and Mount Hermon kids would get along,” says Hager. “They told us to stop worrying so much—everyone would do just fine on one campus.”

A RIVER RAN THROUGH IT

In spring 2005, NMH had a sevenmile- wide server network that crossed the Connecticut River and was distributed fairly evenly between the Mount Hermon and Northfi eld campuses. Therein lay the challenge. Over the years, NMH had grown its network to support the ever-increasing technology needs of teachers, students, and administrators. Then, with the move to one campus, the school was shrinking and shifting its center—and the old system needed to shrink and shift as well.

“The question was: How do you scale your capacity back and still make sure it’s adequate for a configuration that has never existed?” says Director of Information Technology Jon Shannon. “It’s a fascinating problem.”

One that took some sleeve-rolling and heavy thinking, to say the least. It also took a coordinated planning effort, a new network operations center, extensive renovations to Cutler Science Center basement, a centralized master phone system, 12 to 15 electrical and wiring contractors, and miles of new cable in the new dorms, modular classrooms, and renovated buildings.

Perhaps the most vivid transitional moment happened when technicians on the Northfield campus extracted the core of the network from its tightly secured home, hoisted it on the back of a truck, and drove it to Mount Hermon, where it was reassembled in its new home in Cutler. After months of careful planning for the changeover, the IT team had the network up and running—glitch free!—and ready to serve the new NMH.

HAVE MOVERS, WILL TRAVEL

Gail Marie Doolittle ’89 knows a thing or two about moving. As events and facilities coordinator, she made all the campus moves happen. All it took was three months, a moving company with a minimum of three movers, up to ten temps, 11 grounds workers as back-up, and 16 custodians to do the final clean-up.

The moves included dorms, faculty housing, administrative and faculty offices, and classrooms. Before the schlepping began, Doolittle went through the Northfi eld campus and inventoried everything from desks to bed frames. All the better furniture was hauled to Mount Hermon, and their slightly lesser equivalents were moved from Mount Hermon to Northfi eld. Overall, says Doolittle, scheduling was the most challenging aspect, especially with so many building projects going on. “It was wait and see as far as when things wrapped up. I couldn’t plan too far ahead.”

By September 1, she and her staff had moved heaven and earth to get everything in place. Their hard work had vanished behind them like a vapor trail, and only the results lingered. For Doolittle, her heart went into the task: “I’m so proud to have gone to this school; I’ll do whatever I can to help it move forward.”

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