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About Loomis Chaffee

Message from the Head of School

Occasionally, some former colleague from the college world will still ask me, “Why did you leave an endowed professorship at a celebrated college to head an independent, secondary school?” My typical response is, “You don’t know much about Loomis Chaffee, do you?” This, in turn, is often followed by more than I expect he wants to hear about the special qualities that drew me to the school: intellectual rigor, institutional vitality and generosity of spirit. I won’t belabor these issues here, but I can’t resist a quick highlight tour of the school’s virtues.

We have a faculty that sparkles with talent and dedication. These are teachers who have instituted a dynamic curriculum that extends rigorous college preparation into opportunities for advanced study in all fields. These are seasoned professionals who love their work and their school; so much so that their average term of service to Loomis Chaffee is 13 years. And since most of our faculty live on campus, the boarding student-residential faculty ratio is a remarkable 4-to-1.


We are a school with the vitality and vision to build the facilities we need to compete for the best students in the country: a remarkable visual arts center, a cutting-edge computer network, six new international squash courts, and a new girls dormitory that establishes permanently a balanced gender representation throughout the student body.

We are also an exceedingly rare phenomenon: a boarding school with a large day student population. Consider the symbiotic potential: The diversity of experience represented in our boarders who arrive from 30 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and 15 foreign countries enriches the educational experience of our day students while they, in turn, anchor our boarders to local families in the community.

Finally, the warmth, support and honest goodwill of the Loomis Chaffee community cannot be overstated. So many participants in the life of this school—students, faculty, staff, administrators—have told me in words and actions how much they care about the school and how eager they are to sustain and enhance the quality of our collective experience. Much recent writing in anthropology and sociology, as well as in the popular press, has bemoaned the loss of extended family—those aunts, uncles, grandparents and neighbors—who traditionally contributed in important ways to successful childrearing through their capacities to teach and coach and counsel and care. But there really is no need to fret about the loss; we are the contemporary manifestation of the extended family. Come join us.

Head of School: Russell H. Weigel