BUILDING A LEGACY

AN INTERVIEW WITH VISIONARY FOUNDING HEAD OF SCHOOL, NANCY HEUSTON

By Steve Manning, Computer Science Teacher & Founding Faculty Member

In connection with Waterford’s 40th Birthday celebration, I met with Nancy Heuston, Waterford’s Founding Head of School, to reminisce. We sat together in a beautifully sunlit room, dining on seafood salad, an audio recorder whizzing along. The conversation was delightfully wide-ranging and poignant. This article is drawn from that interview. It focuses on Waterford’s earliest days. I hope you will find in it not only a historical sketch but also a sense of the adventure, the unknowns, the lofty vision, and the all-in commitment that were a part of Waterford’s founding. This brief summary of early key dates might help place the events we discussed.

September 1976: Dusty Heuston incorporates WICAT - the World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching April 1981: Dusty secures funding for the creation of a research school in Provo and names Nancy Heuston as Head of School Summer 1981: Nancy hires founding faculty, locates a building for the school, and enrolls students Summer 1986: A second Waterford School is established in Sandy Spring 1989: Waterford Provo closes

Student with Waterford School sign at the Provo campus. Photo from Waterford archives.

[STEVE] My question goes back to the very beginning—before there was an actual brick-and-mortar Waterford School. I’ve always been so impressed by the circumstances that led you and Dusty to choose to devote the rest of your lives to improving children’s learning through the use of technology. Would you talk a bit about the times, what you and Dusty did, the courage that was undoubtedly required to leave an enviable situation in beautiful Midtown Manhattan [Nancy chuckles] and come to deepest, darkest Provo. [NANCY] This was Dusty’s understanding of the need to take a fine classical, liberal arts education to all children worldwide. He thought (as you know Dusty would) of a big campus. So, although he was Head of a very fine girls school in New York City [the Spence School], during his last few years, he was educating himself about the power of technology. We went up to Dartmouth University and listened to John Kemeny talk about it. It was a very cold weekend in New Hampshire. I remember being huddled over this old heater in the Hanover Inn and just looking at each other and saying, “It can’t be Spence. It has to be a new model.” And that was the beginning of his starting to seek funding for the World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching [WICAT], which later became the Waterford Institute. That became his passion. I was an acolyte. I knew he believed it deeply. I shared that belief. I knew if anyone could do this impossible thing that he would have a good go at it. So, [chuckling] everyone thought we were crazy. Dusty traveled around, got funding to expand computers at his school in Manhattan, but knew that it had to be more. And when he announced he was leaving to start a nonprofit institute to take education via technology—I mean, this was 1979—to all children, and he told this to parents, and trustees, and faculty, people would look at me pityingly and say, “I’m so sorry.” [Chuckles] I’d think, “You don’t know Dusty, even though you’ve worked with him for eight years. This is his dream. This is who he is now.”

So in traveling to seek funding, he met Vic Bunderson at BYU, who became WICAT’s co-founder and the connection to the brilliant people who joined the Institute during those first few years. Dusty traveled and worked with these people who felt as though he had some kind of magic in funding. He brought together private funding, government funding, and foundations. He was on the road all the time. For a while, the Institute simply created products that the funders wanted. They had to postpone that laser-like focus that they subsequently developed for courseware for all children, including those in traditionally underserved communities.

And then April 3 [1981], he was in London and had just been told over a very formal lunch that not only would this bank respond to his request for funding, but they would give him more than he had asked for. So he called me and said, “We can open the school.” And I said [eyes wide and chuckling], “What school?” And he said, “Well, we talked about the research school when we wrote the bylaws.” And I said, “Dustin, everything is in those bylaws. You could start a new world. Where was a research school?” [chuckles…] [STEVE] So this is not something you had talked about together? [NANCY] No! No, no, no. And he said, “Well, I was hoping you would run it!” I had six children at home, hadn’t finished college, was trying to take courses in between fixing dinners. And I said—well, I can’t tell you what I actually said [laughing]—but something like, “That is not your clearest idea.” So he asked, “Then who do you recommend?” [pausing…] And I said, “Okay, I understand the importance of it. I understand liberal arts. Let’s have a go. I’ll get it up and going, I’ll find faculty. We’ll start with framing the curriculum. Let’s at least go that far.” That was April 3. He came home on April 5. On May 12, we had a public meeting in Provo at the Community Center. I had also written a letter to the people at WICAT and said, “If we have a school (and I threw in, ‘there’s no tuition’), would you be interested?” [STEVE] Like -- if we build it, will you come?

Class II students looking at the globe, 1984. Photo from Waterford archives.

[NANCY] Yeah, exactly. And it will be a classical curriculum. And our task is to learn how to use technology with the youngest members. And the interest was so high among all these remarkable people. So we had a public meeting, two hundred and fifty people showed up. I spoke and introduced faculty that had been hired within that month. I had sent to a printing firm the draft of a little booklet on policies. And in it, I simply referred to “The School” because Dusty wanted to call it The WICAT School. This was the beginning of my understanding of what it would be like to work with Dusty [chuckling…] We needed to have separate domains. And the printer came back and said, “You forgot the name of the school!” [Chuckles] And I just turned to Dusty and said, “It has to be Waterford.” I mean, we talked about it. And he tried to negotiate, and I just said, “Waterford.” Okay, okay, I think he may have been out of town, actually [chuckles]. [STEVE] What brought people to this meeting? What was the draw? [NANCY] Oh, oh, we had an announcement in the paper—a private school with no tuition [smiles broadly]. [STEVE] That was it? No statement of philosophy? [NANCY] I think it was... [pausing] … we were in a university town. So when we talked about the Greeks, when we talked about liberal arts, the local folk thought “liberal” and “arts” and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. But university people understood. We had friends in the area that we had known when we lived in Wellesley; we had friends from New York. So there was just a confluence of people. We knew people, our children who were in college knew people. But I think it was the university—people who were seriously interested in serious education. And even if they hadn’t experienced it at the elementary

Nancy and Dusty Heuston at Sandy campus ground breaking, 1985. Photo from Waterford archives.

school level, there was enough that resonated from our language that they came! The emphasis was on a research school that would take the best about education from our point of view, wedding it with the technology. And so you had people who liked the educational emphasis; you had folks who were really curious about the role of technology. You had some who cared very much about liberal arts and had no interest, in fact had negative interest in technology. At the public meeting, we talked the philosophy, we talked about what we expected from parents, which was a great deal. I introduced faculty. We had questions and answers. I introduced Deb Johnson as the person they should send their applications to and gave out her home phone number. I watched Rich Johnson blanch [laughs…] and thought, oh, maybe, maybe I’m overstepping. We had probably 200 applications. We accepted 121 students. I came back from a month at our cabin in Waterford, Vermont in July, and Deb and I went through the admissions process. She typed up the list of acceptances and then turned to shred the applications and realized that she had also shredded documents we should have kept! [chuckles] I remember being on the floor in Dusty’s office, trying to put shredded papers back together [laughs…]. The stories! And we looked everywhere for space for the school. [STEVE] And when exactly did you settle on the St. Francis building [an aging, small building a few blocks south of BYU, formerly home to the St. Francis of Assissi Catholic School]? [NANCY] July—I mean, until then we had a newly named school and no space. To interview these potential faculty members, who asked, “And where will the school be?” [Pauses…] “Well, a place will be provided, we’re quite sure.” [Laughs…] [STEVE] That must have been hard! [NANCY] [Without pause…] It was wonderful. Our first faculty meeting, before the public meeting, was held in my home. I served pound cake with strawberries and sour cream. I had said, “Come with your ideas about curriculum. What have you always wished you could teach? And what have you taught that’s been successful? Let’s find a way to put it together.” Sherry Egan [Class I] arrived with color-coded boxes. Kathy [Class K] came with a big smile. Marcy [Class II] came a little nervous. Joanie Rollins [Class III] bounced in - gum, nail polish, shoes, all matched. Merrilee [Class IV], with her weathered eye, thinking, “Did I make the right decision?” Mark [a junior high biology teacher] walked in and said, “Okay, I’m teaching fifth grade, but we’re calling it ‘Class V’, and how tall is a fifth grader, anyway?” [Laughs…] It was so amazing. I just said to them, “I don’t have background. I don’t have training. We’re going to be building something that will contribute to the ideal environment for learning. I don’t want to hear from teachers, ‘I love my students.’ I assume that. What I want always to be thinking about is how they learn. And how can we teach so they learn better”. And these teachers were—I can’t imagine what they went home with and talked about—but they were so committed from the beginning. [STEVE] I think that commitment must have been essential to the success of the school—to find people who would come to a new, challenging, lofty experience like you had described for them. I know all of those people and they are bright, very, very fine teachers... [NANCY] … and confident in their teaching. [STEVE] I’ve interviewed a few of them and they loved the notion that they were being invited to teach to their best selves. [NANCY] Their excitement became the center stake. I mean, we knew it might be one year. We never talked about that. At this point, they were committing their entire professional learning and future to this school without a home! [Laughs…] Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. You could see them listening, or reading, and weighing it against their own past, and creating the future in their imaginations. So we opened on September 9. There was so much interest in the community that when we opened admissions for the following year, on November 1, we had people lined up around the building. We were open for three hours and then we had to close. By that point, our connection with people at BYU was beginning to bear fruit. Lynn Garner [BYU math professor and soon-to-be part-time Waterford math teacher] came, stood in line, said, “I’d like to apply for my two children.” “I’m so sorry, Dr. Garner. But I’ve heard such wonderful things about you as a teacher.” He went to the back of the line, came through again, and said, “How can I help?” I mean, people were sort of, I was going to say affected, almost infected by this. We could do something that would matter.

So it was an exciting time, it was a time of doing things that seemed right conceptually, and then constantly looking for mistakes or false assumptions. Our parents were so forgiving and so supportive. Because in those first couple of years we had no past, so we had to be talking about the future. We didn’t have much to show. The traditions weren’t in place. The kids didn’t really want to be there. They were mischievous and naughty. And underneath it, you kept saying, “I know there’s potential here. I know with every child there is gold in there.” [STEVE] Waterford as a research school for WICAT was certainly key. But what did you want the school to be in addition to a research school?

[NANCY] I knew Dusty, and I knew he thought in leaps and bounds. Within our family, I was the one who took his goodness and insight and tried to create family. [STEVE] To make it practical, as it were. [NANCY] Right. Yes. And I think the Institute raced to try and translate what Dusty’s ideas were into courseware, and programs, and guiding principles over time. But taking it forward, I knew you couldn’t just say, “This is a school that is going to learn how to use computers.” I was appointed with the need to create context, create environment, create richness in the daily experience of the kids. The thing that was such a gift to me was being able to watch these teachers up close. That’s where my learning came. You figure out how to talk with parents and how to bring them aboard. You know how to work with students— not to teach them, but how to work with, how to organize. That’s a part of my makeup, right? The thing I discovered was, I loved finding a student who could be excited about learning. But I loved most of all finding a teacher. [STEVE] That idea is new to me, Nancy, that you were one part of this community of educators who all grew together in the development of this school. [NANCY] Oh, my. To be able to look over the shoulder of a young person and watch that person, to encourage and challenge in equal balance, to watch what that person would become in the classroom, on the playing field, in the corridors, in our conversations, that was what we were about. We had kids that we had to deliver for, right? And we couldn’t go to the back room and say, “Well write that off, that didn’t work.” [STEVE] [Smiling…] Or at least do that very often. But you had parents who were saying, “We’re invested in this.” [NANCY] That’s right. We needed to learn to educate about what we were trying to do, to teach them what it would ultimately be for their children. You can hold us to this, you can look for this in your child— your dinner conversation, the things they choose to read, the things they talk about when you’re on a walk, you should see a shift. Hold us to it. I had to scramble. There were things we were discovering, things we were reaching for that had to be translated into our agreement with parents. We were with great parents, oh, such great people. [STEVE] I looked recently at the photo of Waterford’s first graduating class, and looking into their faces reminded me of what rugged individuals, what brave children to come and participate through the end of their time at the school. And the teachers, it’s just … [NANCY] … unbelievable, unbelievable. [STEVE] It’s such a great story in which to play a part. Nancy, on behalf of all of us—teachers, students and parents—I thank you.