Oliver Hazard Perry joined Clarebourne as a sixth-grade humanities teacher in 2006, was appointed Middle School Dean of Students in 2011, and has served as Middle School Director since 2014. He holds a B.A. in History from Brown University and an M.A.T. from Providence College, and spent three years teaching in under-resourced middle schools in Providence before entering independent school education — an experience he credits with forming his conviction that the middle school years are simultaneously the most difficult and the most transformative in a student’s education.
His tenure as director has been defined by two institutional commitments: strengthening the advisory program and raising the academic expectations of the division without narrowing its culture. Under his leadership, Middle School advisory groups were reduced from twelve students to eight, advisor training was formalized into a two-week summer program, and the division introduced its current Socratic seminar sequence in Grade 7. He teaches one section of eighth-grade history each year and has no plans to stop.
He is known among Clarebourne families for being direct — about student progress, about what the division can and cannot offer, and about what he expects from students who sometimes mistake the Middle School’s warmth for the absence of standards.
“The students who struggle most in our Middle School are usually the ones who were very good at being students somewhere else — at producing what was asked of them without being asked to think. We take that apart. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also the most important thing we do.”
Clarebourne since 2006