Alumni Elect Elizabeth Speers '86 to Middlebury Board of Trustees

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – The alumni of Middlebury College have elected Elizabeth “Bessie” Cromwell Speers ’86 to a five-year term on the Middlebury Board of Trustees.

Speers serves as the head of Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Del., and is the first woman to hold the senior leadership post at the 98-year-old independent day school.

Before coming to Tower Hill, Speers was head of the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut where she oversaw programmatic advancements, investments in technology, and a successful $50-million centennial campaign. Her previous appointments include: assistant head of school, dean of faculty, teacher, and coach at Episcopal Academy outside Philadelphia; director of placement and strategic planning at Calvert School in Baltimore; director of admission and financial aid, teacher, and coach at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore; and associate director of admission, coach, and advisor at Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut.

An English major at Middlebury in the 1980s, Speers was one of the undergraduates who successfully lobbied the administration to have a “ski-down” celebration at the Snow Bowl for February graduates. She went on to earn a Master of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University, and in 2014 she was a Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Speers is a past president of The Heads Network, a national organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of girls and women at independent schools. She is also active with the Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools.

She is one of the six Middlebury trustees elected by the alumni.