Kate Meyer first stepped on the High Mowing campus as a first-year high school student eager to forge her own educational path.
What she found was a school that fostered an environment where all students had the opportunity to design how they wanted to learn.
“It was really the freedom for every student to explore themselves in how they best learn. We had the flexibility to decide what worked for us in the environment,” Meyer said. “I hadn’t experienced that before.”
And it made a lasting impact. Five years ago, Meyer returned to the high school that helped shape her into the person she is today, filling the role of director of finance and operations. She left the school late last summer to pursue a new opportunity in the banking world, where she had spent much of her career. But her time away didn’t last long as she was brought back in February to fill in as the interim head of school when Geraldine Kline had to step away due to illness.
“I knew I had the history with High Mowing and the skills to keep it going,” Meyer said.
After Kline passed away in late March, Meyer made it well known that she was ready to stay on as long as needed to help with the transition to a new head of school. As it turns out, Meyer will be staying a little longer than anyone could have expected earlier this year after being named the new head of school at High Mowing in May.
“My goal is to be here in some capacity as long as I can,” she said.
It was her mother Connie who sought out High Mowing to give Meyer the chance to be in charge of her education.
“I think my mother was looking for something that was a little more open, a little more creative, more aware of different learning styles,” Meyer said. When she graduated from High Mowing, one of 17 in her class, Meyer wasn’t sure what would be her next step. But the lived experiences she gained at the school provided the necessary tools that would allow her to pursue any path forward.
She took a few classes at the college level and “fell into banking,” landing a job at Shawmut Bank. Never in her wildest dreams did Meyer think banking would be a career she’d choose.
“Nobody grows up saying I want to be a banker,” she said. But it came with some perks. The bank actually paid for her to go to Franklin Pierce, and she chose financial management as her concentration of studies. She was fully entrenched in the world of banking “and that was going to be my career path,” she said. Meyer dipped her toes in a number of jobs in the industry – audit, compliance, security and general operations. She saw institutions she worked for go through a number of mergers, but for more than two decades she stuck with it, culminating with a position as a founding executive of Hampshire First Bank. But after six years and helping the institution grow from $30 million in assets to $260 million, she did not want to go through another merger when Hampshire First was acquired by NBT Bank.
“There’s not that many people who can say they started a bank,” Meyer said. “But at that point, I decided I was going to try something different.” She landed a job as chief operating officer at an online learning company and spent four years in that role. Then on a whim, she reached out to Kline about a position soon after the head of school had been brought on.
“High Mowing’s got a really strong pull,” she said. “When you’re a student, you don’t appreciate what you’ve got and where you are. But when you look back, you realize the impact.”
As the years went by, Meyer gained perspective on how truly extraordinary the Wilton Waldorf school actually was. It’s why she served as a trustee for both Pine Hill and High Mowing, predating the two schools’ merger, and why she sent her daughter Campbell to Pine Hill through eighth grade. And when she left for that short time from August to February, the special nature of the school really stood out and it’s why she remained a trustee.
“I realized two things: I wasn’t the same person when I left banking in 2006, and two, how much of a draw this place is,” Meyer said.
Meyer, a self-proclaimed “Army brat,” was born and raised in Germany, with her father Donald serving as a colonel and a combat-trained medic. While living overseas, the family did a lot of traveling to places like France, Belgium, Holland and Italy. She learned a number of languages in her early years – German, Dutch, English and French – all at the same time. While her parents were both fluent in German, Meyer lost much of what she learned along the way.
Her husband Andre is Swiss, so she is more geared toward Swiss German, knowing enough “that I can get around,” she said.
She moved to Massachusetts when she was seven and then to New Hampshire at the age of 14, where her mom owned a restaurant, Samuel Smith’s in Hudson. In an ironic twist, Andre’s parents also owned an eatery, the Greenhouse Cafe in Amherst.
The two have lived in Francestown for the last 20-plus years, building their home from the ground up. As a young couple, they desperately wanted a home of their own so they put an ad in the Milford Cabinet along the lines of ‘young couple looking for a buildable lot.’
“We had one person respond,” Meyer said. “And we fell in love with the lot.”
They had looked at a bunch of houses in the area, but nothing felt right “so we said let’s take a shot at this,” she said. It was a wide open field consisting of three and a half acres surrounded by conservation land. They fell in love with the location and the classic New England feel of Francestown itself. It was between where they were working at the time and within 20 to 30 minutes of anything they needed. Currently, the Meyers are putting an addition on their forever home.
The family is avid skiers, as Meyer enjoys backcountry skiing and skinning up Crotched Mountain. She likes to mountain bike, paddleboard and has participated in more triathlons – from sprint to Olympic lengths – than she can count. She’s also run half marathons, but never a full because “I’m only half crazy,” she said.
“Anything I can do to be outside,” Meyer said.
In August, Meyer will take part in a three-day fundraising climb up Grand Teton in Wyoming for SheJumps.
Cooking is another one of her passions, as she specializes in Swiss dishes.
“If I can feed people, I’ll feed them all day long,” Meyer said.
Meyer is a big believer in the Waldorf education model and she’s not the only one at High Mowing.
“There are still people here from when I was a student,” she said.
She pointed to the work that Kline did during her tenure and the impact that it had.
“Geraldine worked tirelessly laying the groundwork to where High Mowing was going,” Meyer said. “She had a real lifelong dedication to Waldorf education. She had started this forward motion, trajectory that’s moving us along.” And Meyer will work to the best of her abilities to keep things moving in the right direction.
From her third floor office, Meyer sometimes catches herself just observing – the view of Mount Monadnock, students on the soccer field and the faint sounds of the piano coming for another location in the building. It seems as though High Mowing was always her calling, it just took her a little time to find her way back.