Catching Up With The Furlonges

from Holderness School Today Summer 2021

A Penny For Your Thoughts

CATCHING UP

With the Furlonges

BY RICK CAREY

In 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 flourishing 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 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

Nicole and Nigel Furlonge with their children (l–r) Logan, Wyatt, and Lucas.

communities. During his time there Nigel did a little bit of everything in building that school from the ground up.

Yet the Furlonges were never entirely away from Holderness. They stayed in touch with Phil, and way back in 1996—at a time when Nigel was pondering a career switch to law—Phil had suggested he apply to Columbia University’s Klingenstein Center Summer Institute. The Klingenstein Center is the nation’s premier incubator of independent school leaders, and its Holderness alumni include—among many others— Jay Stroud, Jim Nourse, Jory Macomber, Duane Ford ‘74, Kelsey Berry, Jini Rae Sparkman and Phil. There Nigel’s fire for education would be rekindled in earning a Master’s in independent school organization and leadership, and later he would become the Center’s lead teacher in both its history and diversity groups. In his spare time, from 2007 to 2014, he would serve on the Holderness School Board of Trustees.

In 2015 the Furlonges rejoined the Holderness faculty. Nicole started off as English department chair, then also became Director of Teaching and Learning. Nigel served as Associate Head of School, and both Furlonges were prime movers in the design and implementation of its current and also its preceding strategic plans.

“In 2015, with a number of people with Klingenstein connections in the administration and on the board,” Nigel recalled, “we made a choice to centralize the intellectual and academic life at Holderness in a way that had a different sort of resonance to it—in a way, for example, that apportioned as much honor and prestige to the community’s scholars, artists, and professionals as to its Olympic athletes.”

Nigel argued that this mid-decade plan to enhance the life of the mind at Holdernesss should precede a plan addressing the needs of the athletics and outdoors programs because in that order the success of both would be more possible. “Then Nicole developed a learning master plan for where math and science is going in the next 10–15 years, and played a pivotal role in securing several lead gifts for the Davis Center,” Phil said. “I was so fortunate to have this dynamic duo aligned with my vision for the school, and their fingerprints are all over what Holderness has become today.”

Then suddenly, in 2018, the ambitious scholar who had been enticed into teaching at the secondary level became one of the nation’s more consequential college professors when Nicole was named the new director of the Klingenstein Center, succeeding the retiring (and former Holderness trustee) Pearl Kane. The Furlonges and their three children—Logan, now 16; Lucas, 13; Wyatt, 9—moved to Yonkers, where Nigel became principal of the upper school at the pre-K–12 Ethical Culture Fieldston School (ECFS) in the Bronx. Founded in 1878, ECFS emphasizes the teaching and practice of ethics in a context of equity and inclusion. This coming year, however, he will take on a new role as Head of School at New Jersey’s Montclair Kimberley Academy (MKA), another large pre-K–12 day school that foregrounds diversity and inclusion in its mission.

And this is where we find them now—at a time in America when the nation is harrowed by a pandemic, riven by economic inequality, and withered by the senseless deaths of Black men and women.

“And we’re also in a moment where independent schools are painted as elite and exclusive,” said Nicole. “Yes, we do in fact have privilege. We do in fact possess resources. Along with all that comes the responsibility to shift the terrain, to make the changes necessary to refashion our independent schools into authentically welcoming and inclusive communities, both at the student and faculty levels.”

As with any sort of institutional change, it goes best if it comes from within. It can be done one school at a time, as by that young educator who invigorated the diversity program at Holderness; who as Director of Admissions at Christina Seix Academy in 2012 welcomed its first 70 students on campus; and who now assumes the helm at MKA on the promise—in Nigel’s words—of “cultivating empathetic listeners who understand the substance and salience of being culturally competent.”

Or it can be done from the sort of pulpit that reaches all independent schools, both in America and abroad, as is being done by the former secondary English teacher who in her brief time at the helm of the Klingenstein Center has already stressed issues of equity, inclusion, and social justice in the institute’s curriculum; and who currently leads an inquiry into how the financial structures of independent schools may be brought to aid, rather than impede, progress on those fronts.

It’s not a matter of building wider dedicated lanes for diversity into the robust learning environments offered by independent schools, these two potent and compassionate educational leaders are telling us—it’s a matter of building in America’s independent school infrastructure a single lane wide enough, inclusive enough, and safe enough for us all. Blueprints are available upon request. n

THE DAVIS CENTER

A look inside the school’s new math & science facility

On May 21, 2021—just two days before commencement—students and faculty gathered for senior

On May 21, 2021 – just two days before commencement - students and faculty gathered for senior thesis thesis presentations inside the Davis Center, the school’s new math and science building. It was the presentations inside the Davis Center, the school’s new math and science building. It was the first time anyone first time anyone had truly used the transformative, 35,000 square-foot academic facility, which was truly used the transformative, 35,000 square-foot academic facility, which was designed under the themes of designed under the themes of innovation, collaboration, flexibility, and connecting to the outdoors. innovation, collaboration, flexibility, and connecting to the outdoors. It was an inspiring start for the new building, where It was an inspiring start for the new building, where future generations of Holderness students future generations of Holderness students and teachers will benefit from wet and dry science labs, versatile classrooms, and teachers will benefit from wet and dry science labs, versatile classrooms, enhanced faculty enhanced faculty planning spaces, and an atrium-like Winter Garden with stunning views of Stinson Mountain. planning spaces, and an atrium-like Winter Garden with stunning views of Stinson Mountain.