Invocation by Cam Hardy at the Installation of Paul Stellato, Princeton Day School
Mrs. Treby Williams and members of the Princeton Day School board of Trustees, students, faculty, parents; and the friends and family of Paul and Maureen Stellato. It is an honor to be here to invoke a blessing on this great celebration. Before I do so, though, I would like to share with you a few ways in which my family and I in the years we were together at Millbrook School had come to know Mr. Stellato (and bear in mind that when I talk about Paul; Maureen, Kate and Lauren are inextricably there). These are glimpses of Mr. Stellato’s life before PDS. If you or someone in your family is a news junkie like my husband, you may be aware of some recent documentary pieces on TV about our current presidential candidates. These programs are intended to show how the candidates responded to certain moments in their lives, how they formed relationships, to give us more of an idea of each candidate’s character and values; really, I think to give us greater confidence in our own choice of our next president. By giving you some snapshots of Paul’s life—and from here on in I will refer to Mr. Stellato as Paul, I intend in turn to reinforce your confidence in the unanimous decision to appoint him your head of school.
Paul sits in his beat up canvas director’s chair, parked next to the swing set in the common area between our dorm apartments. Maureen is down at the tennis courts coaching; Kate is probably in at the kitchen table double-checking that her first grade homework is perfectly completed; Lauren and my daughter Devin are playing in the sandbox making pies. Paul clips coupons from The Poughkeepsie Journal to edit the grocery list or he reads the last of the New York Times Book Review. A few students wander by and he greets them jovially, but with a formal, “Mr. Salvia and Mr. Downs” As Lauren and Devin begin a minor toddler fracas, he quietly turns the page of the paper, kindly ignoring my awkward first-time-mother attempts to intervene. When the girls really start to argue, as only toddlers can, he steps in, calmly asks for the item of controversy, while simultaneously calling upon Kate to come out and distract the girls out of their grumpiness. This same afternoon, he will have shared with me that W.H. Auden was the subject of his thesis, and Elizabeth Bishop is a true favorite poet; and that his dream job is to chair the English department (though that later changed); that his best advise for developing discipline in writing is simply to get up early and to write every day.
This is the same person with whom I sat, along with a terribly distressed parent and told her bluntly that she needed to listen to her daughter, to be present with her and to her, and to consider strongly not taking a vacation without her. This is the same person who made the decision to move the Northcross School headmaster’s office from the administrative wing to the front entryway of the Lower school—perhaps so that he could more easily slip into a classroom, sit in the little kindergarten chairs and read to his youngest students. You can draw your own conclusions from these glimpses, but what they tell me is that this is a man who draws deeply his vision for school life and educational leadership from his family, his students, and faculty and parent colleagues, from the course of our daily lives in all of its challenges, in all of its poetry.
And it is in this spirit that I ask us to call upon the One who we each claim as our Creator, our Sustainer, and our Redeemer. We ask for your presence as Princeton Day School embarks on the next chapter in its great history. With the Stellato family settled in, and with Paul already leading the school in new and exciting ways, we ask for your blessing that this community hold fast its values of creative engagement, intellectual as well as emotional courage, of generosity of spirit, of thoughtfulness and playfulness. We ask for your blessing upon Paul Stellato as he leads Princeton Day School in strengthening its resolve to maintain the home and school partnership that is its hallmark and sustenance and allow for this community to openly and enthusiastically celebrate the compassionate, humane leaders it clearly works hard to nurture and to send forth. For all of this we ask your blessing and we offer our abiding thanks. Amen.
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Paul sits in his beat up canvas director’s chair, parked next to the swing set in the common area between our dorm apartments. Maureen is down at the tennis courts coaching; Kate is probably in at the kitchen table double-checking that her first grade homework is perfectly completed; Lauren and my daughter Devin are playing in the sandbox making pies. Paul clips coupons from The Poughkeepsie Journal to edit the grocery list or he reads the last of the New York Times Book Review. A few students wander by and he greets them jovially, but with a formal, “Mr. Salvia and Mr. Downs” As Lauren and Devin begin a minor toddler fracas, he quietly turns the page of the paper, kindly ignoring my awkward first-time-mother attempts to intervene. When the girls really start to argue, as only toddlers can, he steps in, calmly asks for the item of controversy, while simultaneously calling upon Kate to come out and distract the girls out of their grumpiness. This same afternoon, he will have shared with me that W.H. Auden was the subject of his thesis, and Elizabeth Bishop is a true favorite poet; and that his dream job is to chair the English department (though that later changed); that his best advise for developing discipline in writing is simply to get up early and to write every day.
This is the same person with whom I sat, along with a terribly distressed parent and told her bluntly that she needed to listen to her daughter, to be present with her and to her, and to consider strongly not taking a vacation without her. This is the same person who made the decision to move the Northcross School headmaster’s office from the administrative wing to the front entryway of the Lower school—perhaps so that he could more easily slip into a classroom, sit in the little kindergarten chairs and read to his youngest students. You can draw your own conclusions from these glimpses, but what they tell me is that this is a man who draws deeply his vision for school life and educational leadership from his family, his students, and faculty and parent colleagues, from the course of our daily lives in all of its challenges, in all of its poetry.
And it is in this spirit that I ask us to call upon the One who we each claim as our Creator, our Sustainer, and our Redeemer. We ask for your presence as Princeton Day School embarks on the next chapter in its great history. With the Stellato family settled in, and with Paul already leading the school in new and exciting ways, we ask for your blessing that this community hold fast its values of creative engagement, intellectual as well as emotional courage, of generosity of spirit, of thoughtfulness and playfulness. We ask for your blessing upon Paul Stellato as he leads Princeton Day School in strengthening its resolve to maintain the home and school partnership that is its hallmark and sustenance and allow for this community to openly and enthusiastically celebrate the compassionate, humane leaders it clearly works hard to nurture and to send forth. For all of this we ask your blessing and we offer our abiding thanks. Amen.
