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About Head of School Sam Schaffer
Sam Schaffer began his tenure as the 12th head of The Roxbury Latin School on July 1, 2024. Previously, Sam served as Head of Upper School at St. Albans School, an independent boys’ school in Washington, DC. He has spent his entire career on two related pursuits: boys’ education and academic excellence.
Valedictorian, class president, and three-sport athlete of his high school class, Sam was a Morehead Scholar and Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina where he majored in history with a minor in Latin. He spent a year teaching and coaching at the Groton School before moving to St. Albans where, in only his second year, the senior class awarded him the John F. McCune Prize for teaching. At St. Albans, Sam developed and taught courses on U.S. history, ancient civilizations, and race relations.
After six years as a dorm parent, history teacher, advisor, and varsity football and basketball coach, Sam left St. Albans to pursue a graduate degree in history from Yale, where he wrote his dissertation on Woodrow Wilson’s generation and the South from 1884 to 1920. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010, Sam was named the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Associate in Yale’s Department of History and the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. From 2007 to 2011, he served as a fellow and coordinator at Yale’s McDougal Graduate Teaching Center, organizing workshops for teachers across disciplines.
Sam returned to St. Albans in 2012 as the Assistant then Associate Dean of Faculty, while also serving as Assistant Director of College Counseling, teaching history, and coaching at various levels, before becoming Head of the Upper School in 2021. As Associate Dean of Faculty, Sam worked closely with the dean of faculty in all faculty hiring, and developed and implemented a new and highly successful teacher development program. Sam was also St. Albans’s representative at the Penn Fellows Teaching program where St. Albans, like Roxbury Latin, recruits and develops young teachers. In these administrative roles, and particularly in his role as Head of Upper School, Sam showed “a talent for seeing the potential in others” and has been known as a wonderful mentor who cares deeply for students “as well as for adults who care for students.” In the words of Vance Wilson, the former head of St. Albans and former Roxbury Latin trustee, “Sam’s natural role in life is to create loving bonds between people through mutual respect, kindness, compassion, and sincere hope for the children’s future.”
Sam is committed to the moral, intellectual, emotional, and physical growth of young boys from all backgrounds and walks of life. “My life as a teacher has been dedicated to boys from all paths and all places,” he said upon his appointment, “and Roxbury Latin’s commitment to access and inclusion, to empathy and care, speaks deeply to me.”
A devoted husband and loving father, Sam lives on Roxbury Latin’s campus with his wife, Dana, and daughter, Ernie.
Head of School’s Welcome
Founded in 1645 by The Reverend John Eliot, Roxbury Latin is not only the oldest school in continuous existence in North America, it is also the oldest boys’ school on the continent. For all of our 380 years we have offered a program explicitly designed for the students in our care. Our work has been steady and sure, and our boys have flourished.
Of Roxbury Latin’s singular qualities—and there are many, from our peerless faculty to our commitment to knowing and loving each boy—none contributes more powerfully to the life of our school than the background and nature of our boys. Long before other schools came to appreciate the power of diversity, Roxbury Latin pursued and welcomed a student body reflective of Greater Boston’s broad demographic. We offer admission without concern for a family’s ability to pay, and we provide whatever financial aid is necessary for a family to be able to send their son here and for him to take part in all the essential elements of our school program.
Roxbury Latin is a school dedicated to the education of boys. And because we have redefined accessibility and affordability in this way, boys from all socioeconomic groups have found a home here. We have a dramatically democratic student body in which boys are measured by and appreciated for their talents, their character, their contribution to the life of the school, and their vibrant, eclectic personalities. Roxbury Latin is a place where boys can thrive, where they can be inspired to a life of the mind, where they can sharpen their creative and analytical skills, where they can grow morally and spiritually, where they learn and sing and play and compete and laugh together.
Our graduates will readily assert that the array of perspectives represented, the bonds forged from experiencing together intense academic challenges, the opportunities to know boys of different backgrounds, the regular reminders of possibility and duty and moral character—all contribute to a climate in which boys come to love and respect each other. They are a band of brothers, and we are a community rooted in those values.
Whether you are already familiar with Roxbury Latin or new to our community, I invite you to learn more about us. I hope that you will observe and appreciate the truly distinctive character of our school.
