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Meet the Directors
Don and Sarah McMillan bring over 40 years of experience as educators at top independent junior and senior boarding schools and institutions of higher education. Their professional experience includes degrees and teaching and administrative positions at over a dozen New England prep schools and liberal arts colleges. Their commitment to nurturing adolescent academic achievement and overall wellbeing has been the defining characteristic of their work with students, families, and schools throughout their careers.
About Don McMillan
Don is an associate member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association and a member of the Small Boarding School School Association. He has served as Curriculum Director, English Chair, Faculty Mentor Supervisor, and teacher of French and English from the lower levels through Advanced Placement at Bancroft School, St. Mark’s Schools or Kimball Union Academy. He also conducted secondary school and college alumni admissions interviews, led campus tours for families, judged merit scholarship essays and applications, and written hundreds of college recommendations. He has authored articles on education and presented papers at regional and national educational conferences.
As a trained facilitator for All Kinds of Minds, a brain research-based educational institute, Don has shown students, parents and teachers how an awareness of children’s diverse learning styles can enhance performance and confidence. As a free-lance writer, his work has appeared in local and national publications, as have his award-winning short stories. An early draft of his novel Ice Out was named a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award. He is a graduate of St. George’s School in Newport, RI; he majored in both English and French at Colby College, then went on to earn an MA in French from Middlebury College and The University of Paris-Nanterre, and a MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. He and his wife, Sarah, have run boys’ and girls’ dormitories of every size and shape – and a household of two teenage sons.
About Sarah McMillan
Sarah is a graduate of St. George’s School in Newport, RI, and of Colby College, where she earned her BA in English. She also holds a master’s degree in History and English from Boston College, and is finishing a doctorate in Developmental Studies and Counseling at Boston University. Sarah was a teacher of English and Humanities at Kimball Union Academy, St. Mark’s School, where she was Chair of the English Department, and Boston University Academy, where she was also the Director of Studies, for over twenty years.
In addition, Sarah held the position of Head of Upper School at The Fay School, where she implemented a pioneering developmental school counseling program for independent boarding schools. This school counseling model was recognized by the National Association of Independent Schools for effectively meeting the increasingly complex needs of independent school students and addressing ethical and legal issues of counseling in independent schools. Sarah is authoring Principles of Good Practice: Counseling in Independent Schools (in preparation by NAIS Press) and regularly presents on the topic of counseling in independent schools at national conferences. In addition to running Educational Direction with her husband, Don, Sarah holds an adjunct clinical faculty position at Boston University, where she teaches graduate level courses in school and community counseling and educational and psychological testing and assessment.