Courage and honor. Two words central to the school’s identity. To focus on building these attributes vital to character growth, each student undergoes various lessons on leadership and manhood. And as Marksmen grow and mature, each generation teaches younger boys the lessons of life at and beyond the school. As a result, the school’s community is distinctly close-knit: it’s a family — a brotherhood.
But it was not always this way. Years ago, the school’s ideals were threatened by disciplinary issues, bullying and inadequate relationships between older and younger students.
Teachers and students alike wanted to solve this problem and change the community for the better, but they needed a way to make a real impact on younger students first.
That’s when Dr. Martin Stegemoeller, Malcolm K. and Minda Brachman Master Teaching Chair, stepped in and created the Telos Leadership Society with a group of seniors. The program offered a solution to the problem regarding the unhealthy interactions between boys.
“When we started Telos about 16 years ago, one of the goals was to unite the Middle School and Upper School,” Stegemoeller said. “At the time all there was was the little buddy program that met only twice a year. Middle schoolers were taunting upper schoolers as they walked past them in the hallways, then kids started talking back to the little kids and it was a disaster. It’s hard to imagine now, but upper schoolers and middle schoolers would not have any interactions at all.”
Stegemoeller recognized the problems in the community, but he also saw students who were distraught about the issues and saw the changes that needed to be made. Most students at the time were not exposed to the intensive leadership training that current students have, so Stegemoeller had a much larger role in Telos in its infancy.
“Telos was started before English 10 existed, which is a core place where leadership is taught,” Stegemoeller said. “We hadn’t done anything with Middle School Humanities either, and there weren’t any leadership loops.”
Telos Co-President Jordan Feldman believes that the student leadership has ramped up over the years, and he is grateful for the blueprint for leadership laid out for him by the previous senior leaders.
“George Genender ’23, Arjun Khatti ’23 and Winston Lee ’23 did such a great job revamping the program,” Feldman said. “The people have changed, though, and with new people comes new experiences and new lessons to teach kids.”
When Telos initially started, Stegemoeller was the primary force behind the group’s leadership, providing guidance for the students involved. He decided to root out the problem at its origin: Middle School.
“It was pretty clear to me that kids listened to other kids on stuff like this more than they would listen to an adult,” Stegemoeller said. “And so we started Telos Four, which began as mostly seniors going down and talking to the fourth grade. That worked really well and everybody really liked it, so then more and more kids wanted to be involved.”
Telos aims to instill younger Marksmen with values that Stegemoeller believes will help them throughout their time at the school and into their adult lives.
“Our goal here was that we should all be leaders,” Stegemoeller said. “Everybody should be a leader. To me, to get every kid here as early as possible with the idea of building yourself up by learning how to take care of your people — the ultimate goal of our whole program isn’t an ‘I lose, you win.’ It’s more so ‘I need to be a leader in my life as a man, so I need to learn how to do it now.’”
Stegemoeller says that the program aims to strengthen healthy connections between students across every walk of life at the school.
“We try to facilitate not just communication but actual bonds of care,” he said. “When you think of ‘head, heart and hands,’ you’re trying to get all three of those accomplished through Telos. So you’re gonna learn what to say, you’re gonna go care for these kids and you’re gonna need to coordinate — you’re gonna have to talk with lower school and middle school teachers, you’re gonna have to plan things and you’re gonna have to work with each other.”
Looking ahead to the long-term impacts of Telos, Stegemoeller envisions that the skills that the program helps Marksmen to develop aren’t relevant to only the school. These qualities go beyond high school, as they serve as a solid foundation for future success.
“The goal is that when you are, for example, a 35-year-old man, are you a good dad?” Stegemoeller said. “Are you a good husband? Are you a good friend? Are you a good boss? Are you a good worker? It’s not like you randomly decide at age 34 to snap your fingers and suddenly become a big leader, so the earlier you learn these skills, the better.”
