Lincoln Academy Headmaster Jeff Burroughs leans against lockers at the school in Newcastle on Thursday, Aug. 22. In addition to being the schools headmaster, Burroughs is the boys varsity soccer coach and an avid fly fisherman. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Whether it’s a long pass down the soccer field, a student learning from their teacher, or the chemistry of a computer chip, Jeff Burroughs knows that nothing happens without the right connection.
However, creating those connections isn’t always as simple as flipping a switch, and that’s a lesson the former IBM semiconductor program manager, soccer coach, fly fisherman, and Lincoln Academy’s 44th headmaster has spent a lifetime learning.
“Everything in my life was ones or zeros, either on or off, it was computer chips, transistors, the light switch is either on or not and it’s just a massive complex of black and white. There’s no black and white in education, it’s incredibly gray, and that’s beautiful,” Burroughs said.
Burroughs, now a resident of Newcastle, grew up outside of Burlington, Vt., in Chittenden County on a farm of 60 acres that he said “had a few animals but wasn’t very active.” His mother was a librarian and his father was a country doctor and former IBM employee.
After graduating high school, Burroughs attended Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering while playing for the school’s soccer team. Afterward, he earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from University of Vermont in Burlington.
When Burroughs graduated he said he was a “semiconductor physics guy” who understood the chemistry of making a computer chip, but the prospect of moving to Texas, where many computer chip companies were located, wasn’t appealing.
“As a really insular New Englander the idea to move to Texas to take a job with Dell, or whoever, Intel, whoever it was that was looking for my skill set, I just didn’t want to do it,” he said.
Burroughs’ girlfriend at the time, Melissa, who is now his wife, was headed to a conference for those looking to teach independent schools and he joined her.
“She said ‘Let’s go to this conference,’ and I’m in love with her, so let’s go to this conference, right?” he said, laughing.
That conference became Burroughs’ foray into teaching. Burroughs was offered a job at Hyde School in Bath where he taught math and coached soccer for six years.
“Coaching soccer and living with teenagers, I just liked it. I was always the guy that babysat in my family, so I always had this appreciation for kids,” he said. “That’s how I got my first job in Maine.”
His family and upbringing had some of the biggest influences on how Burroughs approaches education. Both Burroughs’ mother and grandmother were librarians and he was one of the eldest of 18 grandchildren and spent a lot of his early life watching over children.
Burroughs said he thinks about the influence watching his mother return to her education after raising a family had on him as a youth.
“It was a really powerful moment for me to see (my mother) challenging herself in that way, and it was really important for me … to see her take that step in leadership,” he said. “I think about that a lot as how it shaped me as a young person: about relationships, in terms of partnerships, between people, but also, you’ve never too old to do something.”
Burroughs left Hyde to be more present in raising his kids and moved back to Vermont. Burroughs “hadn’t scratched the engineering itch,” so he got a job at IBM where he worked six years as a program manager overseeing the semiconductor program.
However, due to his success in his position with the company they wanted to move him to New York, which he knew he wasn’t interested in doing.
“We went from a team of 12 to 200 people and generated half a billion dollars for the company,” he said. “They said ‘You’re really good. We’re going to move you.’”
Burroughs returned to education at Hyde, where he became the director of admission and assistant headmaster, but he was looking for the opportunity to be a headmaster.
He got that chance at St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont as assistant headmaster for academics in 2009. The school has nearly 1,000 students, and shares a similar town academy structural and funding model with Lincoln Academy.
Ultimately, it was a combination of things that led Burroughs to take the job as headmaster at Lincoln Academy in 2019. He wasn’t looking for a new job, but with his kids in college, the school’s history, and the beauty of the area, it was hard to pass up.
“The thing that compelled me to come here was that (the school) had been here for a long time, was that this is a beautiful community, was that there was historical support at the school, but it was also a boat that was pretty built and no one was jumping ship,” he said.
The educational model of a town academy is something Burroughs believes is highly effective and plays to his philosophies in appreciating the “gray” in education, of which he said there is no black-and-white approach.
“You have the best of both worlds. I have to be responsive to this community, but I also get the freedom to do, and have the independence to be able to do, the things I think is right about education,” Burroughs said.
While Burroughs believes in the importance of assessments, he also wants to empower educators to approach learning goals in the ways they believe are effective for their students. It’s in this gray where Burroughs said the best educators “dance.”
“There’s obviously a science to learning, there’s a science to how you develop reading and math skills, but in that classroom it’s a real dance,” he said. “You see extraordinary educators understand that. They have an intuitive grasp of that line between what is the science of education, but they also care deeply about the craft and their subject and the intersection that we’re trying really hard to balance with.”
Burroughs, the current boys varsity soccer coach at Lincoln Academy, has coached soccer for 30 years. Over that time he said he’s had both good and bad coaches that shaped his approach and love for the game. The coaching philosophy Burroughs brings to his teams has always been the same.
“You’re a student athlete, this is an extracurricular activity, so work hard on the field, have some fun with it, know where you are and look to what you can contribute to a team,” he said.
Burroughs said he wasn’t a star player in college and high school. However, from the sidelines he said he grew to appreciate the role of the coach and felt not only what good chemistry does for connection within a team, but also a community.
“In terms of our community, it takes everybody, and we all got to be going in the same direction,” he said.
Burroughs was the 2022 Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class B boys soccer Coach of the Year. The same year, he coached his team to a KVAC Class B championship.
When Burroughs isn’t attending to his duties as headmaster or coach, he tries to get away and recharge by fly fishing.
“There’s a rhythm to it, it’s a cerebral activity, trying to trick the fish into biting it,” he said. “It’s the serenity of standing in a stream.”
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