Christine McCann ’15: Adam Lavalle, upper school math teacher and middle school football, basketball and baseball coach, will be leaving Episcopal next year to teach and coach at Berwick Academy in Maine. He will also be moving back to his home state of New Hampshire.
Berwick Academy is, according to Lavalle, “just like Episcopal.” It’s a coeducational independent day school located in South Berwick, Maine. The school is about two-thirds the size of Episcopal, with roughly 575 students total. It has students from Pre-Kindergarten through twelfth grade and offers a post-graduate program as well.
Regarding the decision to move, Lavalle commented, “Both my wife and I grew up there…Really the motivation to move back was to live near where I grew up… my whole family lives there and my wife’s parents are there.”
He noted that it takes roughly ten hours to drive from Philadelphia to New Hampshire to visit his family. Southern New Hampshire, where Lavalle will be living, is about an hour from both Boston and Portland.
Lavalle has been teaching at Episcopal for five years, since the new campus opened in 2008. Lavalle was an assistant baseball coach and summer math teacher at the Merion campus prior to accepting a job as a full time teacher.
At Berwick Academy, Lavalle will teach four math classes and possibly an economics course. Additionally, Lavalle commented, “There’s an opportunity for my wife to teach a couple classes at the school… she’s a dance teacher.”
“There are great opportunities there to coach baseball…They have a good team up there,” noted Lavalle. He hopes to have a large role in the baseball program at Berwick Academy.
Lavalle played baseball in both high school and college. He even took a break from teaching for a year to play minor league professional baseball. Lavalle stated, “I played in a professional league in Arizona. It’s an independent minor league team.. in Yuma, Arizona called the Sonora Pilots.” After leaving the Pilots, Lavalle moved to Pennsylvania to teach.
Reflecting on his time at Episcopal, Lavalle noted, “Whether it’s my middle school football players or baseball players or students in all my classes…. Being somewhere for five years you get really attached to students you have.”
He emphasized how much he has enjoyed working with all of his colleagues and will miss them next year but is very excited to pursue a career at Berwick. Lavalle stated, “It’s kind of bittersweet.”
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