The student news site of Peddie School

The Peddie News

The student news site of Peddie School

The Peddie News

The student news site of Peddie School

The Peddie News

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Faculty members leave with fond memories

Alyssa Morreale, Hal Ebbott, Eva Shultis and Megan McNall are four of the nine faculty members who will not be returning to campus in the fall. (Photo by Jason Kim)
Alyssa Morreale, Hal Ebbott, Eva Shultis and Megan McNall are four of the nine faculty members who will not be returning to campus in the fall. (Photo by Jason Kim)
By Grace Gu
Staff Writer

In addition to retiring headmaster John Green and long-time drama teacher Jeffrey ‘Harry” Holcombe (see full coverage in Features), nine additional faculty members will not be returning to Peddie in the fall.

The English department will be los¬ing three teachers this year, most notably John Stahl, who has worked and lived at Peddie for 30 years. During his tenure, Stahl taught a variety of English and history courses, coached soccer and basketball, lived in the dormitories and raised two children who both graduated from Peddie (Frederick ’04 and Hollis ’06).

“Some medical issues involving vision [and my] eyes probably have accelerated this de¬cision [to leave], but I have been leaning toward a change, anyway. I will begin that experimenta¬tion in Rhode Island, and among my interests are youth athletics and adult education,” Stahl said.

“I have made life-long friendships from among my great colleagues at Peddie–some who left almost 30 years ago, others with whom I have overlapped for decades,” Stahl said. “I leave with some nostalgia but no regrets what¬soever about it being the right time to go and this having been the right place to be since 1983. Thanks, Peddie–very much.”

Alyssa Morreale is also thankful for the experiences she has had within the community. “Peddie is where I learned how to be a teacher. I met my husband here, and I raised my daughters here, so it has become home to me. I will always remember it as a special place that helps foster strong relationships,” Morreale said.

Although she has enjoyed her work as an English teacher, dorm supervisor, assistant swimming coach and newspaper adviser during her 10 years at Peddie, Morreale decided to leave for personal and professional reasons.

“I have two young daughters and a hus¬band who travels a lot, so it has been challenging for me to balance the untraditional work sched¬ule at Peddie,” said Morreale, who will be part of the founding faculty at Trinity Hall, a new all-girls day school in Monmouth County.

While Morreale continues teaching, Hal Ebbott will be pursuing a new career path as he moves to New York City to start a company that designs medical products for people with mobility issues. “I love teaching but it’s the only real job I’ve ever had, and I felt like it was impor¬tant to try something new. When you get older, it’s harder to start from scratch, but right now I don’t have to think about a family or a girlfriend or even a dog. It’s just me, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t waste the opportunity.”

After three years of teaching English and coaching novice crew, Ebbott had a few words of advice for his students: “It doesn’t matter what you major in in college…The most impor¬tant this is that you have energy. ‘Energy begets energy.’ I didn’t come up with that – it’s a quote from one of my favorite books, The World Ac¬cording to Garp.”

While Ebbott heads north, Megan Mc¬Nall will be heading south. After two years of teaching physics and calculus, supervising Mas¬ters Third dormitory and coaching softball, Mc¬Nall will be teaching physics at Durham Acad¬emy, a private day school in N.C., this fall.

“My boyfriend is finishing up his Ph.D. in Princeton right now. He was looking for his first job, and we ended up finding two really good of¬fers in North Carolina,” said McNall. “I enjoyed living in the dorm and getting to know girls bet¬ter through that. The softball team has been an¬other huge part of my life at Peddie. Just getting to teach the students and taking them to games has been fantastic,” McNall said.

Eva Shultis plans to pursue a Masters de¬gree in science education after she leaves Peddie, where she has taught AP and honors biology for three years.

“I want to go back to school because I came here straight after college. It was my first teaching experience, and I discovered that I care a lot about science education and I want to be [more] involved with it for the rest of my life,” said Shultis, who also had a message for her stu¬dents: “You are all so talented in so many areas… You shouldn’t feel pressured to decide [immedi¬ately] what your thing is because you have a lot of talents and you can do a million things.”

In addition, Director of Technology Tom Phelan and Spanish teacher Diego Panasiti who left during the school year will not be returning in the fall, and AP Psychology teacher Tabitha McKinley has completed her one-year replace¬ment term for Jim Harris, who will return in the fall.

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