Elgin Academy boss guides a very old institution in an ever-changing world

Chartered just four years after Elgin was founded - a generation before the Civil War - Elgin Academy is one of the Fox Valley's oldest institutions of any stripe.

But Head of School Seth Hanford said that as the preschool-through-12th-grade private school continues to pursue an educational philosophy of small classes and "taking learning personally," it must deal with a world that's changing faster than ever before.

"I love when an 18- or a 14-year-old comes and tells me what they want to do" career-wise, Hanford said. "The reality is a lot of them will have jobs that didn't even exist when they were here."

Hanford, who has worked at the school since 2004 and been its boss since 2012, was this month's guest for the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce's CEO Unplugged program. Attendees grill the CEOs on questions ranging from philosophy of leadership to what they would like to have if marooned on a desert island.

Hanford said his own career turned out far differently than he envisioned when he was majoring in history at Penn. He had attended a private prep school himself, at the urging of three sisters who, he said, acted more like three mothers. But he hadn't really considered a career in education, much less one in private schools, until the head of school at his alma mater called him up during his senior year in college and invited him to apply for an opening in the school's history-teaching department.

That was followed by master's degree studies at Columbia in private-school leadership, which he said included subjects ranging from accounting to fundraising to "creating environments in which kids can learn."

He said the best kind of environment is one that has small classes, "meets kids where they're at" and is so challenging that children learn how to learn from mistakes. "I tell parents that I hope their kids experience some failure during the year. That's not the most popular thing I say. But it is the most heartfelt thing."

Outsiders often envision Elgin Academy as a haven for rich kids from places like Barrington and the North Shore. But Hanford said the school is committed to staying in the same campus at the edge of downtown Elgin, in a relatively low-income residential area, that it has occupied since the 1850s. He said 25 to 30 percent of the students come from Elgin and"we are committed to being accessible to kids from Elgin "even if their families are not well-off.

"Education is the civil rights issue of this age," Hanford added. "The inequity of how we educate kids is a tragedy."

And on that "desert island" question? Hanford said he would hope to have brought along a boat.