About the Founder

Stephen Hussey was raised in New Jersey and attended public schools throughout his education. He graduated from Bates College in 1978 with high honors in History. For the next eight years he worked in commercial fishing while periodically doing part-time teaching. In 1986 he was selected as the science teacher at Linden Hill School in Northfield and moved there with his family.

Linden Hill is a school for dyslexic boys, with a renowned program for improving students' language skills. No curriculum, program or texbooks exist for teaching middle school science to students with learning disabilities. In response, Mr. Hussey developed a curriculum and a methodology that made basic scientific principles comprehensible and taught students to work "scientifically" on their own.

The class groupings for science were not set on the basis of their language skills. Both a non-reader and a child reading at an eighth or ninth grade level were often in the same science class. Each student had Mr. Hussey as their science teacher daily for as many years as they attended the school.

To address these challenges, Mr. Hussey relied most importantly on the students' innate curiosity rather than skill level. His methodology began with the students framing the questions pertinent to their inquiry. In the next step, Mr. Hussey worked with the students to identify appropriate resources to explore in pursuit of their individual projects. Mr. Hussey honed this program and teaching process throughout his ten years at Linden Hill.

In 1996, he took a position at the Bement School in Deerfield teaching fifth grade. Bement's strong academic program allowed Mr. Hussey to gain further experience in teaching the basic skills. His experiences at these two diverse schools were integral to the development of the program now offered at Four Winds School. This unique curriculum has an emphasis on rigorous, individualized training in basic skills that is balanced by the need to cultivate the native curiosity of each child as the engine for their learning about the world.

As a further testament to Mr. Hussey's reliability, despite having spent eight years as a fisherman followed by ten years as a science teacher, he still has all ten fingers!