Veteran educator takes helm at Huntingtown school

A woman’s well-traveled and diverse career in education has led her to the top. For Adrienne Forgette, the apex is her new job as Calverton’s head of school.

“I think I was preparing for this role my whole life,” Forgette told Southern Maryland News this week. “I have wanted to be the head of an independent school since I walked in the door of one. I wanted to come back to Southern Maryland to do this.”

A six-month nationwide search by a selection committee resulted in Forgette’s appointment to helm the 57-year-old, pre-school to 12th grade private school, which is located on a 150-acre tract in Huntingtown.

Calverton has had several school leaders over the last few years, including Jamey Hein, who took over in 2021, and Allison Trentman, who took the interim head position in July 2023.

Forgette, a New York State native, had been on track for a career in politics when she was a high school student in Buffalo. While doing an internship for her congressman, however, being assigned mundane office tasks like watering plants led Forgette to rethink her career path.

“I felt like there are other ways to impact a community positively,” she recalled. “I knew then that I wanted to be a teacher.”

After graduating from Colgate University, Forgette enlisted in Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits college graduates to teach in low income communities. She was assigned a school in south Louisiana.

“I had bullet holes in my classroom windows,” she recalled. “I had a paddle in my desk drawer and was encouraged to hit the kids with it since they practiced corporal punishment.”

While attending graduate school at the University of Maryland, Forgette met her husband, and after starting a family, stayed home during the day and taught at the College of Southern Maryland in the evenings.

Successfully applying for a teaching job with Calvert public schools, she was assigned to Northern High, where she taught journalism and English for five years.

A nationally board-certified teacher, Forgette received the Journalism Education Association’s Rising Star Award.

Under her guidance, Forgette’s students produced a video that grabbed the attention of of a national media fitness initiative.

While training for a triathlon, Forgette met another educator who told her about an independent boarding school in Rome, Ga., that was looking for a journalism teacher, which she applied for and got. That put her on a track that led her to leadership roles at other independent schools.

Forgette joined Calverton after serving as head of upper school of Hutchison School in Memphis, Tenn.

“I always wanted to come back here,” Forgette said of Southern Maryland. “There are a lot of connections here.”

What Forgette has heard from school officials, faculty, parents and students since her early July arrival is “the consistent message that this place is home.”

Parents, Forgette said, chose Calverton “for the culture of respect, philosophy of honor, their wanting a smaller experience for their child. They want the individuality of their child and their gifts to flourish.”

Forgette said the school’s international baccalaureate program is the way to deliver a world class education.

“We are offering something you can’t get anywhere else,” Foregette said, adding that the program challenges students to think globally and act locally.

“Values incorporated in the day-to-day education,” she said.

Her goals for enrollment at Calverton would be “to have two sections of every grade through upper school, which would make total enrollment of 375-400, a target goal with most of the growth coming in middle and upper school.”

The school’s current enrollment is about 320. Just under half of the school’s student body receives financial aid.

Forgette noted that Calverton’s early childhood program and lower school are “bursting at the seams.”

“The selection committee found that Adrienne has had a positive impact at every institution she has led,” Danielle Lico, Calverton’s board of trustees president, said in a press release. “She knows how to make things happen. I believe she is just what Calverton needs at this stage in our history.”