Melissa Stanek ’90: Coming Home to Hackley

Melissa is a teacher, coach, dean, and campus resident, alumna, parent of current students, and faculty spouse. In the company of legendary teachers in Hackley’s past, she wears this legacy with a lightness, humor, and humanity that win her this hilltop’s warmest respect and appreciation.

Melissa—then McCaffery—came to Hackley in the 6th grade. “It wasn’t my choice,” she recalls. She liked her public school, but her mother didn’t believe Melissa was being challenged. Although she admits she was not initially enthusiastic about coming to Hackley, she quickly reversed her position. “Once I realized what the people were really like, how exciting the classes were, how funny and fun the people were, I came around. It was a place where it was okay to be smart, and I liked that.” The classroom setting, one in which “it was cool to learn, and socially normal to work hard,” appealed enormously to her.

At Hackley, Melissa also discovered her passion for sports. She played soccer. She tried track. She played basketball with “Mr. A” (the legendary Dave Allison, later her Varsity Soccer coach). When she tried to join the baseball team, “Mr. Dukehart [former Middle School head] said, ‘Why don’t you try lacrosse instead?’”

Prophetic words: Melissa later played Division I lacrosse at Princeton, was named Academic All-Ivy, and was part of the 1994 national championship Princeton team that defeated powerhouse Maryland. That year, Princeton Lacrosse won both the men’s and women’s national championships. Melissa recalls, “Very few people get to say they won the last collegiate game, a Division I championship, they ever played.”

She quickly notes, however, that Morgan Lathrop ’05—whom she coached at Hackley—went on to win four consecutive Division I championships at Northwestern, ending her career as Northwestern’s all-time top goalkeeper. Melissa’s great love—more than the game itself—is for the opportunity it presents to teach and coach kids.

As a Hackley Upper School student, she decided to be a teacher. “I was so inspired by the teachers. I loved all subjects, but began specializing in history. I took Civil War with Mr. Schneller, and Vietnam and Modern European History with Julie Lillis [then King], as well as Ancient European history—everything I could.” She also started student teaching, and remembers “how great it felt to be part of someone’s success going forward.” She wrote her college essay about wanting to be a teacher.

Much of her love of teaching came from her coaches. “My Hackley coaches taught me to care about dedicating myself to excellence, to success, teamwork and loyalty. These things now come naturally—but I had to learn to see sports as a commitment.” One of her coaches, Evelyn Scofield, was “the first woman coach I ever had who had actually played sports. She encouraged me to go to sports camps and to think I could actually play sports in college.” The trajectory built on sports and teaching at Hackley “is what led me back, 13 years later.”

After Princeton, she taught and served as Head Girls’ Lacrosse coach at Episcopal High School, a boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia, where she came to appreciate the great value of the boarding school environment with its 24/7 community. Accepted to the Master’s program in Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University (where she also coached Girls’ Lacrosse), Melissa filled the transitioning gap between the end of one academic year and the beginning of her graduate program working as a consultant for Classroom, Inc., a company that works to help disadvantaged students integrate technology into their classroom work. She reflects, “The teachers were wonderful and the kids were awesome. But it was torture to be in a classroom and not teach.”

After grad school, she spent four years teaching and coaching at The Pingry School, a day school in suburban New Jersey, where she found a community in many ways culturally similar to Hackley. But at a full “day” school, she realized, “there’s a sense that school is a place you go to work.” Pingry had wonderful faculty and fun kids, she recalls, and an engaged parent body, but “No one considered it ‘home.’”

Coming “home” to Hackley in 2003 was, on one level, a matter of practical reality. By now married with a young child, she was visiting family one weekend and ran into her former Hackley teacher, John Van Leer, in the parking lot at the Croton Grand Union. She mentioned that she was thinking of moving back to the area, where aging family members needed help. “He said, ‘Go talk to Phil [Variano]’” she recalls. “There wasn’t even a position open at the time,” but as luck would have it, Upper School history teacher Rebecca Zug soon after announced plans to move to Washington, DC. “I just slipped into her role! Her history course, her dean role, all of it.”

The return to Hackley as a seasoned teacher and coach also reflected a matter of her educational philosophy, the choice of an environment that becomes “home.” “Hackley has this blend of day and boarding,” she observes. “Our kids go home at night but because of the boarding community and residential faculty, it is still a home, even to the day students because of the weird, wonderful blend of strong parental support and involvement and the close relationships of friends that grow up through campus life.” In this environment, she says, “more is expected of you than just teaching a subject. For me, that’s what I love.”

Now married to fellow faculty member and coach Fran Stanek, Melissa has two sons and a daughter. Happily settled on Allen’s Alley in the house once occupied by Dave Bridges and his family, the family continues one of the traditions most integral to the community as Melissa and Fran raise another generation of Hackley faculty children on campus. Melissa says, “Living on campus is awesome,” Melissa says. “My kids are so lucky.” Echoing other Hackley faculty families, she reflects, “It’s a throwback to an era when you could just run outside and play with neighbors who are extended family, practically siblings.”

Campus housing is more than just a place to live, she notes. “It means I see Hackley as more than my job, the people as more than my colleagues, the kids as more than my students. I see everyone as part of my life.” She observes, “It’s a safe place where you are surrounded by wonderful people. If there were more houses on campus, that many more faculty would feel that way.”

Teaching history is, for her, in part about telling stories, but it’s also about “helping students understand that there is never one story or one answer. You need to wrestle with the gray areas. I want my students to challenge themselves to see history in its complexity, and to help them hone the analytical skill to extract from their understanding a perspective they can believe and support.”

At the core of her teaching of history, however, is the recognition that she is also teaching writing. “As a Hackley alum, I realized I was a better writer than most of my peers in college, largely due to the practice I got at Hackley.” The tradition of “comp” certainly played into this, helping her feel comfortable with writing “on demand,” she says. Melissa also learned that “Writing is a process. Mrs. Siviglia and Julie [King] Lillis made me write and rewrite. And that’s how I teach writing now.” She mandates “one-on-one meetings with students if they want to rewrite a paper. It’s hard to teach writing to a group—the challenges are completely individual. The one-on-one conversations about what a student is trying to say, and how to do so most clearly, is essential.” She appreciates that Hackley, with small classes and a schedule that allows her time in her day to meet individually with students, enables and encourages this kind of teaching. “It’s how we see teaching should be,” she says.

In her 10th grade American History and 11th grade 20th Century World History courses, Melissa refrains from lecturing, hoping to engage the students’ own voices in the process of developing understanding. “When they present positions on their own and explain them to others, it pushes them to be sure they really understand.” Melissa wants students to gain the confidence to understand their learning styles and best study methods as well as confidence as budding historians. Ian Parnell ’13 was her student for two years and says “she was one of my absolute favorite teachers during my time on the Hilltop. She made her students push the boundaries of the topics at hand and brought a freshness to the material.” Looking back, he reports he really saw a progression of himself as a student and a person. “She is truly something special,” he says, “and will bring something out of you that you did not know you had.”

History department chair Bill Davies says he often turns to Melissa in department meetings, relying on her instinct for finding departmental solutions that never compromise student learning. He adds, “Melissa is the department member who I think of as able to ‘teach anyone.’ She has a superb grasp of history and can hold her own with any of us, but she is also able to teach the student for whom she has to repeat and explain again and find another door into the idea, with-out the student’s having a clue that she is exhibiting superhuman patience.”

That patience and generosity is evident to her students as well. Roya W., one of Melissa’s 10th grade students this year, notes, “She’s intriguing and passionate about what she teaches. I find it valuable how she’s always so genuinely kind and willing to meet with a student, no matter who they are.”

Her work in supporting students extends to her role as athletics coach and dean. As Assistant Girls’ Varsity Lacrosse coach, with Head Coach Jenny Leffler, she extends the lessons she learned at Hackley about commitment, excellence and character to her athletes, while providing the kids a female role model. In her first two years, 2004 and 2005, the team won consecutive NYSAIS championships, the first years that an NYSAIS tournament was offered for girls’ lacrosse.

Hackley Girls’ Varsity Lacrosse has earned a reputation for high-level competition in the league and across the state, winning nine league championships and seven state tournaments in the last ten years. The victories are exciting, of course, but for Melissa, the most memorable lacrosse moments are those that represent the character and grit her athletes deliver. “We’re lucky to have a program that is successful, but the real highs come from when we have to work back from a low.” She remembers the NYSAIS championship win over Portledge, a team that had defeated Hackley 20–9 earlier that same season. “These girls have the grit and willingness to dig down deep and came together as a team. They learn how to work together to become something larger than themselves.”

Most rewarding, perhaps, is the way in which the devotion to this team lasts beyond the athletes’ Hackley years. “Our kids go on to college and beyond, but they still come back to cheer on HGVL in the tournament, even though they don’t know any of the kids. They still have this great love and sense of connection to the program, and an ongoing relationship with the team.”

It seems that loyalty comes in no small part from the leadership the athletes enjoyed. Meg Johnson ’07, for whom Melissa served as dean, coach and teacher, reports, “As an athlete, she was a great inspiration because she knew what it took to be successful and she could really show us how to play (and beat most of us!).” Meg recalls, “She showed us how to be fiercely competitive while also creating a positive sense of team. What made the largest impact on me was her investment in all of us not just as athletes or students, but as people.” Meg, now also an independent school teacher and coach, notes that Melissa “helped all of us to grow as athletes, students and people while also maintaining a sense of professionalism that made her a great role model for me in my current role.”

Head coach Jenny Leffler appreciates the coaching partnership with Melissa tremendously. “Melissa is brilliant in seeing the game and brings so much to our program,” she notes. Neighbors in Allen’s Alley, mothers of similar age children, and fellow teachers and deans in the Upper School, Jenny and Melissa share a good deal in addition to their love of lacrosse, and Jenny believes the quality of connection the Hackley community creates fundamentally shapes students’ experience. She observes, “We know each other so well and share the same core values, so there are a lot of things that don’t need to be said. It’s exactly the kind of relationship you want athletes on the field to achieve—the partnership that comes from instinctively knowing where your teammate will be on the field and how you can best work together.”

As Senior Dean this year, she is seeing her third group of Hackley students through four years of Upper School as their mentor and guide. She finds that staying with the same class over four years allows a certain trust to develop, so that even in challenging situations, there is openness and honesty. She recalls one particularly tough disciplinary situation in which, she says, “The first thing the students who committed the infraction said was that they were sorry. They felt bad for letting people down.” She notes, “I get to watch the kids grow as people into confident, caring, open-minded people, and that’s rewarding.”

Being a good dean requires a commitment of self. “My greatest challenge,” she notes, “is being a good dean, a good coach, a good teacher, good wife, good mother, and good friend, all at the same time. You sometimes have to pour everything you have into deaning, and then figure out how to do everything else.” That generosity of spirit — and the modeling of the honesty and commitment essential to the relationships students build — is what makes Melissa such an amazing asset to the Hackley community.

Recently, Melissa started helping the Admissions office interview candidates for Upper School admissions and is impressed to see “how many wonderful people are applying who we can say ‘yes’ to, which makes it possible to do what we do.” Laughing, she admits, “We red flag the parents who say ‘this is going to get my kid into college X’ in the meeting,” but also notes that she wishes Hackley had unlimited capacity to offer more financial aid. “If we had more money than there is need in our applicant pool, that would be really exciting.
While we as teachers don’t usually know who receives financial aid, the kids I know best who receive support from Hackley appreciate what Hackley offers them more than anyone else—and they give the most back.”

As Senior Dean, Melissa manages the Chapel Talk series, a tradition she invented. In her first year as Senior Dean, she invited other adults in the community to speak to the seniors about a topic of their choice.
Each person speaks from the heart, with wisdom and passion, reflecting the deepest values Hackley hopes to impart. Our seniors see that being an adult means negotiating emotional and moral challenges—and being willing to recognize shortcomings, failures, and justice. Chapel Talks are something our seniors look forward to—and it helps the kids think in new ways about what Hackley’s lessons really mean.

It’s no surprise that Melissa launched this popular tradition. Her singular commitment to the sharing of oneself that guides her teaching and coaching so well is the essence of what the Chapel Talks offer.

(Read more Faculty Profiles here.)