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New EHS Leaders Announced for 2021-22

Episcopal Head of School Charles M. Stillwell announced new appointments to key positions on The Holy Hill that will be effective at the start of the 2021-22 school year. 

“We have selected individuals who are proven innovators with a deep commitment to excellence and our core values of integrity, honor, respect, leadership, and service,” Stillwell said. “I look forward to drawing on their talents and skills as the School moves away from the pandemic and reaches for new heights.” 

Two of the new appointments result from national searches to fill positions as assistant heads. Nate Ebel, the School’s Dean of Academic Affairs and a nearly 20-year veteran of teaching, will step into the role of Assistant Head for Academics. “I look at the coming years at Episcopal as a time of tremendous possibility,” he said. The disruption of the past year, he added, has brought with it “an openness to change and an institutional introspection that, if seized upon, can make the immediate future a time of meaningful innovation and progress.”

Ebel, who has been at EHS since 2009, oversaw all aspects of the academic program this past year as Dean of Academic Affairs, including College Counseling, the Academic Support Center, and the Registrar’s Office. He also developed the distance-learning and hybrid plans and schedules that the School followed during the pandemic. Previously, he helped lead the effort to design a daily and weekly schedule that will debut next year and, among other things, expand Episcopal’s engagement with learning opportunities in the Washington, D.C., area. 

Before coming to Episcopal, Ebel was a teacher, dorm head, and coach at Woodberry Forest School. He replaces Mary Fielder, who left Episcopal at the end of the 2019-20 year for a position at a school outside Chicago.

Phil Spears will join EHS next year as Assistant Head for Student Life. In his nearly 30 years in education, Spears has held a wide variety of roles. He is currently the Head of School at Canterbury School, a preschool-8th grade Episcopal school in Greensboro, N.C., where he has served since 2016. Before that, he worked for many years at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, where he was a Dean of Students and then Head of the Middle School. He also coached multiple sports, including varsity football, directed the Upper School’s a cappella singing group, and led community outreach and mentoring programs that partnered high school students from St. Christopher’s and its sister school, St. Catherine’s, with young public school students around the city.

Spears and his wife, Lauren, also spent two years living on campus at St. Catherine’s as boarding faculty, and prior to that Phil worked at Gilman School in Baltimore and enjoyed summer work as a Dean of Residence Life in the Johns Hopkins CTY program.   

Spears said he was drawn to Episcopal for many reasons, but in particular because of the opportunity to work in such a strong community, one that prizes teacher-student relationships and is devoted to honor and integrity, spiritual inquiry, academic excellence — and the teachers who give so much to sustain it — and a commitment to serving others.

Spears replaces Doug Dickson, who has served as the School’s Assistant Head for Student Life since the fall of 2017. During the past four years Doug has developed powerful relationships with students, faculty, staff, and parents, and will be sorely missed. He is stepping down from administrative leadership roles and will transition this summer to begin consulting work with a national search firm and will join his wife, Laurie, in Austin, Texas, where she recently took a role to lead a nursing program.

Jen Fitzpatrick, the School’s Girls’ Athletic Director, will oversee all boys’ and girls’ programs in the new position of Athletics Director. A skilled administrator with EHS since 2007, she has played a key role in the expansion of athletics facilities, including the construction of Hershey Athletics Center and the new track and field that will debut this spring. Just a year after her arrival, she began a partnership with St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School to create the Seminary Hill Cup, now a beloved EHS tradition and a rallying point for the whole School each fall. Fitzpatrick also has greatly expanded the social-media presence for athletics and helped Episcopal introduce live-streaming of games.

In the next couple years, she plans to continue developing resources for students who aspire to compete at the collegiate level. "We want to be thoughtful and creative about providing those athletes who hope to compete at the next level with what they need to both build their profiles and explore a wide variety of opportunities."

Fitzpatrick was a three-sport athlete at the University of Rochester, making the all-conference team in lacrosse and earning All-American honors in soccer. She has coached both soccer and lacrosse at Episcopal.  

Among other changes in the Athletics Department: 
  • Former EHS assistant football coach Kadeem Rodgers will return to Episcopal next year as head coach and Assistant Athletic Director. Since 2019, Rodgers has been head football coach at Millbrook School in New York, where he was also deeply involved in campus life as Associate Director of Admissions; Co-Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and dorm parent. At Millbrook, his team went 6-1 in 2019 in just its third year of competition following a nearly 40-year hiatus. Rodgers served from 2015-18 as Episcopal’s offensive and defensive line coach; the team went 27-9-1 over those four years and won two IAC championships. Rodgers replaces Mark Moroz, who left EHS to join a family business in North Carolina.
  • With the addition of Rodgers as an administrator in the Athletics Department, Jim Fitzpatrick will rejoin the Admissions Office, where he worked as an Associate Director from 2005-12 before becoming Boys’ Athletic Director. Fitzpatrick, who will continue to lead the boys’ basketball program, is excited to spend time working directly with our prospective families and helping our college-bound athletes to navigate the recruiting process.
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