CATCHING UP With the Furlonges BY RICK CAREY
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n the spring of 1994, Holderness School’s new Dean of Faculty—Phil Peck—was trying to do something that has historically proven difficult: recruit faculty of color to come live and work at a small school in the mountains of northern New England. Phil was attending a job fair in Boston, one especially designed to attract teachers of color to New England independent schools. The fair as a whole was well attended, and many representatives from schools in southern New England were busy talking with prospective faculty members. Among those prospects was Nigel Furlonge, 21, an alumnus of Boston Latin and a new graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s in American history. Phil’s Holderness School table, alas, was not at all busy. So how did Nigel find himself there? “Well,” laughed Nigel 27 years later, speaking in April on Zoom from his home in Yonkers, New York, “the poor guy was sitting there alone, and I felt sorry for him.” Nigel was empathetic enough to visit that lonely table. He and Phil talked. Three weeks later, he accepted Phil’s job offer to not just teach history but also serve as the school’s Director of Diversity. It may have been very much an outside-the-lane sort of decision, Nigel’s choice of Holderness as a place to try out a career in teaching, but Phil, for his part, was ecstatic—and also worried. “Was it too much to ask someone right out of college to teach, coach, run a dorm, and also advance an important new program at Holderness?” he said during that Zoom call. “Eventually I asked Nigel if it was okay if we worked together as codirectors—and that’s how our partnership began.” Two years later Nigel—burdened but nonetheless f lourishing under all he had taken on at Holderness—acquired another sort of partner in marrying Nicole Brittingham, who had just completed her Master’s in American literature, and was about to begin work on her doctorate at the University of
24 | Holderness School Today
Nicole and Nigel Furlonge with their children (l–r) Logan, Wyatt, and Lucas.
Michigan. They were wed in the Chapel of the Holy Cross, and in 1997 Nicole joined the school’s English department. “Phil, you’re good at seeing the possibilities in people,” Nicole said during that Zoom call. “I still have an article you gave me on why college professors should have high school teaching experience, and it provided a way for me to articulate why I loved what I was doing there.” So began a meteoric journey up the teaching ranks that took this couple away from Holderness and then back again. From 2000 to 2007, they worked at the St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, where Nigel became Director of Studies and Nicole chair of the English department and Director of Diversity. She also earned her doctorate with a dissertation that would be expanded into a book published in 2018 by the University of Iowa Press: “Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature.” Then to the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where Nigel served three years as academic dean and Nicole was a mentor to other teachers, coaching colleagues in other disciplines around their pedagogy and curriculum design. From 2010 to 2015, while Nicole taught English and chaired the department at the Princeton Country Day School, Nigel was one of the founding team members of the Christina Seix Academy, an innovative pre-K–8 school in Trenton, both day and boarding, serving children from underserved
