Alva Belmont has spent her entire independent school career at Clarebourne, arriving in 2004 as an Upper School English teacher fresh from a doctoral program and rising through department chair, Dean of Academic Affairs, and into the directorship in 2013. She holds a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in Nineteenth-Century American Literature from Tufts University, where her dissertation examined the rhetoric of self-improvement in antebellum reform literature — a subject she describes, with some amusement, as unexpectedly useful preparation for working with adolescents.
As Upper School Director, she oversees the full academic and community life of Grades 9–12, including the college counseling program, which she restructured in 2016 to integrate counseling into the academic advising relationship rather than treating it as a separate administrative process. She is also the architect of the Senior Thesis requirement, introduced in 2018, which she designed in response to what she saw as a gap between the intellectual ambitions of the Clarebourne program and the work students were actually being asked to produce in their final year.
She is one of the most widely respected Upper School directors in the region’s independent school community, sought out regularly by peer institutions for consultation on curriculum design and college counseling practice. She has stayed at Clarebourne, she says, because she has never found a better answer to the question of what a secondary education is supposed to accomplish.
“I want our graduates to leave here with two things: a body of serious work they actually did — not performed, not optimized for an audience, but genuinely made — and the experience of having their ideas challenged by people who took those ideas seriously enough to push back. If they have both of those things, they’re ready. The college list is secondary.”
Clarebourne since 2004