Where Are They Now? Christopher A. Seeley ’90, Dean of Faculty, Religion teacher, 1994–2007

Since 2013, I have been working at Church Farm School (CFS) in Exton, Pennsylvania. CFS is an Episcopal boarding school that was founded a century ago to educate boys of promise but not of means. Once a 5–12 grade school where students had farm chores and attended daily chapel, we now serve boys in grades 9–12 who hail from fifteen states and eleven countries.

 

Thanks to an endowment built and stewarded by decades of generous donors who believed in the mission, we are able to offer students whose families had never considered boarding school an affordable, first-rate, college-prep education with generous financial aid. More than 90 percent of CFS students receive tuition assistance, and the average cost per family is less than $4,000 per year. CFS is a beacon of socioeconomic, racial, and cultural diversity among independent schools.

 

My wife Staci and I were married twenty years ago in Groton’s Chapel, and both our children were baptized there. We have now raised children while working at two boarding schools, two public charter schools, and a couple of nonprofits. We are really proud of Camille, a graduate of St. Andrew's School and a first-year at Pomona College, and Crawford, an eighth grader at Montgomery School, who is currently applying to boarding and day schools. Both of them have kept us hopping with their athletic and artistic pursuits. Thanks to Staci's work we traveled overseas as a family, for the first time, to South Africa in 2015. It was a life-altering experience, and it reinforced our belief in the critical need for access and equity in education regardless of means or background.

 

Groton was my first teaching job. I returned to the Circle as an intern, only months after earning my undergraduate degree. I was teaching and coaching alongside my former teachers and headmaster—and resisting the urge to address them as Mr. or Ms. I learned quickly that I would be treated as a colleague, an equal, and a friend. I can say without equivocation that Staci and I made and have kept some of our closest friends through our time working at Groton. The dedication our colleagues demonstrated each day to all aspects of young people’s development inspires my work to this day. I would never have landed at a place like Church Farm had I not experienced the servant-leader model first at Groton. Almost every day, I recall with fondness and gratitude some memory of the years I spent at Groton and of the many great people who helped shape my career and life. I won't list any of them by name here, but I trust they know who they are. To each of these friends, I say, "thank you."

 

So much of my time at Groton was marked by good humor and good fun. It's hard to choose just one memorable experience. Long bus rides and daily practices with the football and baseball teams, advisee dinners, karaoke at faculty/staff parties, late nights with the Friday night poker group, Roll Call announcements, and even a few faculty meetings come to mind. And since I lived life on both sides of the desk at Groton, I have the privilege of holding on to memories across eighteen years at the school.

 

At the risk of relaying too much of an inside joke, I'd have to say that one moment stands out above the rest: I can't recall the year, but we were in the middle of an intense week of football practice in preparation for our game against a talented and heavily favored opponent. John Lyons and I convinced Choatie that we needed to change our entire defensive scheme, and we worked hard to keep the boys focused on their roles and keys all week. Choatie was never really convinced that we should try to pull off something that complicated, and late in the week, during a defensive run-through, Choatie threw up his hands in frustration and kept saying, "Seels, we are so [screwed] up." Lyons, Charlie Alexander, and I couldn't contain our laughter, and neither could the players. Eventually Choatie was able to laugh at the situation, too, and we all realized that ISL football couldn't possibly be that serious. We were going to have as much fun as we could going into that game, and we loved every minute that we spent together as a coaching staff and with our team. I can’t remember whether we won or lost the game that Saturday, but the sight of Choatie roaming around the practice field, flinging his hands about, and muttering certain unmentionables was something we laughed about for many years after.

 

I’ll never forget a student in Biblical Studies (now Sacred Texts) who resisted our methods of critical analysis of Scripture and adamantly told me, "My mother said not to listen to anything you say, and to never give up my beliefs." What a challenge! The point she missed at the time but later came to understand was that I wasn't trying to make her a doubter; instead, I wanted her to become a more critical and careful believer.

 

We happened to be in a world religions class, but the lesson here was important in every context. My life as a teacher, administrator, and educator has continued in that vein: I continue to implore students to question, to decipher, and to uncover the true meaning of all that is before them. At my best, I encourage the educators with whom I work to challenge assumptions, respect students' intellect and experiences, cultivate a healthy environment of dissent and skepticism in order to reveal a greater, deeper truth, and to maintain a sense of humor and humility every day. In this way and in so many more, my years at Groton continue to shape my personal and professional life.