By Becky Purdy

There is an interesting paradox in Jody Reilly Soja’s life and career in education, a journey that brought her and her family this summer to Loomis Chaffee, their new home, where Jody began her work as the new head of school on July 1. An accomplished school leader with deep experience as a teacher, coach, dorm faculty, dean, administrator, and head of school, Jody describes her career with disarming simplicity. “I guess my whole life story is ‘Nothing’s going to go according to plan.’ But it’s all worked out,” she says. 

The irony is that the ability to see an institution’s big picture and collaboratively plan for the future is one of Jody’s greatest strengths and favorite undertakings as a head of school. And it is one of the many qualities that stood out for the Loomis Chaffee Board of Trustees in its decision to appoint Jody to the post.

Nudge further at the paradox, though, and it dissolves, for while Jody couldn’t have predicted the path of her life and work, each step along the way has followed an overarching theme defined by learning, teaching, and community. 

From her earliest memories to the present, school has always been a centerpiece of Jody’s life. 

She grew up in the college town of Middlebury, Vermont, where her father was a legendary basketball coach at Middlebury College and her mother was a school teacher. Her mom, in fact, was her first teacher when 3-year-old Jody started preschool. Jody and her sisters spent much of their free time as children on the college campus playing sports and hanging out.

“I really grew up in the Middlebury College athletic facilities,” Jody says. “Just drop us off there with my dad, and we would hang out all the time. I traveled with his basketball team. I played sports with all the coaches there. We were total fac brats, and it was just part of our life.”

A curious student who liked to read, Jody attended public schools in Middlebury through high school. “I still have such fond memories of my elementary school teachers,” she says, naming a few in particular. “Those people were very instrumental for me.”

High school lit an intellectual spark in Jody, and she credits her teachers. “I was really blessed with teachers who felt scholarship was very important,” she says. “They challenged us, and they wanted us to think, and they wanted us to learn how to write.”

Jody attended Tufts University in Boston for her freshman year of college but says she was “quickly overwhelmed by city life, coming from Middlebury.” As a sophomore, she transferred to Bates College in Maine.  

She majored in political science at Bates, and a semester abroad through the School for International Training was one of the turning points in her life. “I studied for about five and a half months in Durban, South Africa, studying both at the University of Durban, Westville, and then University of Durban, Natal,” she says. “I studied Zulu language, but also my research was on political reconstruction after apartheid. It was a fascinating, life-changing experience.”

“My independent project [for the semester abroad] focused on women’s resistance and how they use their roles as mothers to be sort of a catalyst for garnering support for their rights,” she adds.

Graduating from college brought change, of course, but Jody continued to gravitate to school environments. She has spent her whole career in education, from her first job as an administrative assistant at Walnut Hill School near Boston to her years as a teacher, coach, advisor, and administrator at Indian Mountain School in Lakeville, Connecticut; Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York; and National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C.; and then as head of school at Indian Mountain since 2015. Her husband, Kevin Soja, also has devoted his career to schools, and the couple have lived and raised their two sons, Russell and William, on boarding school campuses.

“School has always been very much home to me,” she reflects. “Being in school, when I returned to it as a teacher, just felt very natural to me.” 

When she looks back on her career so far, Jody is struck by its serendipity. 

“If you had asked me when I was in high school or college if I wanted to be a teacher, I would have been aghast and said, ‘No way,’” she says. She had planned to pursue a career as a lawyer, but after college she wanted to work for a couple of years before going to law school. She took a summer job at the Wolfeboro Camp School in New Hampshire and then accepted a position in the Dean’s Office at Walnut Hill, an independent secondary school focusing on the arts. Her role was primarily entry-level administrative work, including tracking attendance, but she also was a gym teacher for the school of budding musicians, artists, and creative minds.

Interested in being in the classroom, she applied for teaching jobs for the following year, and she discovered Indian Mountain School (IMS), a junior boarding and day school, where she was hired to teach history and English as a second language (ESL) as well as fulfill the myriad other duties that come with boarding school faculty life. “I totally fell in love with being in the classroom and coaching and dorm duty and all that good stuff,” she says. Thoughts of law school and a legal career soon faded. 

That’s not to say the move into the classroom was easy. 

“I arrived [at Indian Mountain] really having no idea what I was doing,” she recalls. “But the coaching part came naturally to me because that’s the environment I grew up in watching my dad coach. And then I just learned, figured out how to be a teacher.” 

She credits her fellow teachers, including her first History Department chair, with mentoring her through her initial years in the classroom. One experienced colleague “taught me how to write a lesson plan and taught me how to plan backwards and how to design a unit and just talked to me all about the planning part of being a teacher,” she says. The history curriculum had some built-in structure, but her ESL classes were more open-ended. “I was sort of on my own to figure out what to do” in teaching ESL students, she says. “One of those students ended up at Loomis, so I think I did all right. Some of it was trial and error, but I also had colleagues who took me under their wing.”

Among her closest colleagues to this day is Tom Stewart, who was a more experienced history teacher when Jody started teaching at Indian Mountain and who still works there, now as the director of sustainability programming & initiatives. “He and I shared an office for a number of years,” Jody recalls. “We just bounced ideas off of each other and in many ways co-designed the course that we taught. It’s really fun to have him as a thought partner and planning partner, and we still worked very closely together years later, which is kind of cool.”

Jody’s talent for considering the bigger picture also emerged in her early years of teaching. The IMS head of school at the time encouraged her to take on greater responsibilities, and she was appointed assistant athletic director, along with her teaching role, in her second and third years there.

After three years at the school, she took a year away to earn a master’s degree in education at Harvard, where she focused on adult growth and evaluation in school settings. 

When she returned to Indian Mountain in 2003, she found abundant opportunities to apply her master’s degree work and her interest in strategic planning. The school was merging with a local private elementary school, adding pre-K to fourth grade to the existing fifth-to-ninth-grade enrollment, and in the administrative reconfiguration that comes with such a change, Jody was appointed to the role of assistant director of academics. “That also was our reaccreditation year, so I was in charge of running the accreditation process, and I was redesigning the faculty evaluation process because that was my focus when I was in grad school,” she says. 

She was subsequently appointed head of Indian Mountain’s upper school, which is seventh through ninth grades, a role she continued until she became the overall school’s dean of faculty.

“I loved being the dean of faculty,” Jody says. “That’s what I was going to be for the rest of my life. I liked working on evaluations and seeing how adults grow in school communities. Also, I still was teaching, so I loved the balance of teaching and the administrative work. I loved feeling like I was teaching teachers and still had the kid balance. It was really interesting work to me. I thought, ‘I’m a career dean of faculty.’ But again, nothing has gone according to plan.”

In 2009, after Jody and Kevin’s second son, William, was born, the couple decided to simplify their family’s life on one campus. Kevin already was working at Millbrook School, a boarding high school about 20 miles away from Lakeville, and Jody went to teach history there as well as coach lacrosse and serve as a student advisor.  

The following year, Kevin was recruited to be dean of students at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, so the family moved south. After a year at home with baby William, Jody was hired at National Cathedral School, where she taught American government and English, was director of the middle school, and oversaw professional development of the full school’s faculty. 

She was working at National Cathedral when she heard that Indian Mountain’s head of school had announced that he was leaving at the end of the 2014–15 school year. “I had no desire to be a head of school, but I was just being nosy, and the search consultant, Chuck Burdick, lives in Middlebury. … I reached out to him, just to see what was going on,” she says. He asked her to meet him for a cup of coffee and to take a look at the position description, and she agreed. They met and chatted and didn’t talk again for several months, and then Mr. Burdick called her. “They’re starting semifinalist interviews. It’s now or never. Are you in?” she recalls him saying. She thought, “What’s the harm in going to a semifinalist interview?” She agreed to the interview, she recounts, “and really enjoyed the conversation with the search committee. I love talking about strategic planning, and I love [Indian Mountain]. Next thing I knew, I was head of school.”

Jody wasn’t seeking a change last year, either, when she got a call from Isaacson Miller, the consulting firm helping Loomis Chaffee find a new head of school as Sheila Culbert neared retirement. 

“I wasn’t looking for a job,” Jody says. “But life presents opportunities.”

The consultant asked Jody if she was interested. “It’s a great school. Of course I have a little bit of interest,” Jody replied, and she sent her materials to the search firm. “At the time I thought, ‘Well, this is good professional development. Haven’t tested out my resume in a while, and why not?’” 

Soon she was invited to interview with the Head of School Search Committee. “The conversation with the Search Committee was so lovely and interesting and exciting that it definitely piqued my interest, just increased my interest in the work and in this new challenge,” she says. “I felt like the time was right for me personally and professionally, and also right for [Indian Mountain]. And again, next thing you know —”

Leaving Indian Mountain was bittersweet. 

“This is a place that really was formative for me in my educational career,” she said in an interview two months before she departed. “And so I think goodbyes are hard and change is hard. But also there’s new, great stuff to come.”

Anyone’s first few weeks on the Island are both head-spinning and exciting, whether as a new student, a new faculty member, or the new head of school. Jody and her family moved to campus the last weekend in June. For the first month or so, while the Head’s House underwent transitional renovations and maintenance work, the Sojas lived in a faculty house on Island Road, and Jody got the initial lay of the land while walking back and forth to Founders Hall. She got to know faculty and staff who work in Founders and across campus during the summer. She met with Trustees and administrators. And as she did during visits to campus in the spring, she listened. 

“I would like them to know that I’m curious about them. For alumni, I really want to hear about their experience at Loomis and what made it either very special or in some cases challenging for them. For students, what drew them to Loomis? What keeps them here? What do they most love about being a student at Loomis? I really am genuinely curious about it all.”

Jody Reilly Soja, when asked what she wants the Loomis community to know about her

“I feel like in my first year I’m a student of Loomis Chaffee,” she says. “I don’t think it works well when somebody comes into an institution with their own ideas of what needs to be done without really listening and learning first. I’ve been asked several times what my vision is, and it’s to take a great school and hopefully make it continue to be great. I don’t know enough yet about where some modifications could be made, and I don’t want to presume anything. So [I plan] to listen and learn and be a student of Loomis, and to try to get to know as many people as I can and try to start building relationships. For me, it’s all relational work.”

Asked what she wants the Loomis community to know about her, she says, “I would like them to know that I’m curious about them. For alumni, I really want to hear about their experience at Loomis and what made it either very special or in some cases challenging for them. For students, what drew them to Loomis? What keeps them here? What do they most love about being a student at Loomis? I really am genuinely curious about it all.”

She says she wants to be accessible “so that people feel comfortable sharing things and talking with me about what makes Loomis special to them. And where are some of the things that we can work on? What are some things that need attention? The school has come dramatically far under Sheila’s tenure, and it was already in a great place. … But there’s always more we can do.”

 

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Family Matters 

Jody’s husband, Kevin Soja, works in the Development Office at Berkshire School in Massachusetts, a job he will continue in a hybrid format, working some days from the house at Loomis and some days in the office at Berkshire. The family also is renting a house in Sheffield, Massachusetts, where Kevin will stay if he needs to be near Berkshire for special events and evening occasions. 

The couple’s sons will both be boarding students at Berkshire School. Russell, who began as a freshman at Berkshire, will be entering his junior year. William will be a freshman. “They are both very, very excited to be boarding students,” Jody says. “They’ve only ever lived on boarding school campuses, and they’ve always looked up to the kids who are boarding.” 
 

Pivotal Moments: Joys and Challenges as Head of Indian Mountain School

There were many gratifying moments and challenges over Jody’s nine years as head of school at Indian Mountain School. The proud occasions that stand out in Jody’s memory were big-picture moments, when she encountered a sudden vista of the school’s accomplishments and meaning. The challenges that stand out were just that: challenges to be overcome. Here are a few of both:

Feel-Good Moments

“I’m really proud of the two strategic plans that we did,” she says. The first took place early in her tenure as head of school. “We reached out to every constituency to try to get people re-engaged, to introduce me as a leader to the constituents, open up dialogue about what was working well and what we could improve on.”

“No disrespect to my predecessor, but it felt like … we were a school trying to be all things to all people, and we didn’t really have a sense of our identity. We couldn’t really tell our story very well. People would often say, ‘I don’t know how to describe it, but you just know it. When you’re on campus, you just feel it,’” she says. Discovering and defining the school’s identity was a crucial first step in the strategic planning process, and it drove the rest of the project’s work.

“It gave us direction and helped us to tell our story better and helped us to figure out what we were going to prioritize. I’m really proud of that. It took a lot of work, and I can’t imagine it ending up better than it did. It was a really useful plan and was a living plan.”

The second strategic plan, completed a few years later, followed a similar process and, while the plan offered new insights and made adjustments, it also reaffirmed the wisdom of the direction the school was taking. “It was gratifying in the sense that we all felt like this is still who we are,” she says. 

Indian Mountain School’s Centennial in 2022 was another proud moment for Jody, who was a frequent visitor to the IMS archives. “Knowing the history of a place, I think, is really important, and I have such an appreciation for that founding history, and it gave it a little more meaning to me to be [at IMS] on the 100th birthday, particularly as the first female head of school, just to think about how far we’ve come.” 

The most profoundly rewarding moments for her are when she sees students and alumni making a positive difference in the world. She recounts one such moment in a conversation with the head of a secondary school: “He started talking about how Indian Mountain School kids at secondary schools are known for being excellent community members, inclusive and engaged and kind. When he said that, I just started sobbing, so that might be my actual proudest moment. But there have been many.”

Meeting Challenges

When Jody arrived as head of Indian Mountain, the school was not hitting its enrollment goals. “That was a challenge to rebuild the brand and get people re-interested in IMS. In some ways it was a fun challenge, but it was hard work,” she says. “And then the financial piece that goes along with that is making sure that we were really sound financially through that process, so that was hard. You know, it’s hard when people are in disagreement about what’s best for kids. I’m always of the belief that we all want what’s best for kids, but we might disagree on what that is. And some of those moments can be very challenging. Usually you end up in a good place for everybody, but it can be difficult.”

Under Jody’s leadership, Indian Mountain did turn around its enrollment challenges, hitting record numbers of enrollments in the last two years. 

COVID-19, of course, presented daunting unknowns and difficulties for schools, with a unique subset of challenges for boarding schools. 

As was the case at Loomis Chaffee and most other boarding schools, Indian Mountain shut its campus in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic spread around the world. “And then we worked all summer to figure out how we were going to reopen in the fall of 2020, which we did,” Jody says. IMS reopened with a remote program and an in-person program, and the school created different entry points when students could switch from one program to the other. Few, if any, students chose to switch from in-person to remote, according to Jody, but the school did have students arriving onto campus throughout the year, with 60 to 70 percent of boarders back by the end of the year. 

“That was a scary year and challenging in some ways, but it also was an amazing year, and really joyful in some ways,” Jody says. The students and faculty who were on campus were thrilled to be there. “And the way that people came together and rallied around what’s best for kids and were willing to just roll up their sleeves and do what was needed was pretty spectacular to watch,” Jody says. “I don’t ever want to go through that again, and it was horribly tragic for so many reasons, but really we were our best selves in that time. It really came back to what was essential and important for working with young people. … Watching that and being part of that energy to do what we needed to do, what was best for the kids, it was so gratifying to be in this occupation and to remember that what was the most important was just being together.”