Ms. Jacobs Steps Into Role as New Academic Dean
By Leo Wan ’28
Most Milton students returned to campus this fall knowing little about the new Dean of Academics, Ms. Sarah Jacobs, who now oversees course scheduling, academic standards, and discipline. At the same time, however, Ms. Jacobs had already spent many months planning for the year ahead.
Joining Ms. Taylor and Ms. Mosher over the summer to build class schedules and resolve course conflicts, Ms. Jacobs worked to place as many students as possible in their preferred classes. When course requests overlapped, the administrators considered students’ broader interests and, when possible, adjusted a lower-priority choice to preserve students’ top choices. Ms. Jacobs summarized the goal as “trying to work with students to get a sense of what their priorities are and have them be taking the classes they’re really interested in.”
Beyond adjusting individual schedules, Ms. Jacobs also collaborated with faculty to resolve a longstanding problem: four-day week schedules. These shortened weeks often meant some classes had fewer total meetings than others. In addition to lost class time, she noted that the alternation between regular and special schedules increased the “cognitive load” of adjusting to Milton’s ten-day schedule rotation and left people “feeling drained.” To address these issues, Ms. Jacobs and other faculty jointly created the new four-day week schedule, which uses seventy-five-minute and forty-five-minute blocks. Through this schedule, “classes can still meet three times during four-day weeks,” a change she hopes might “create a little more consistency.”
Moreover, Ms. Jacobs had already discussed with the faculty community the potential that concentrating classes into fourdays would increase students’ nightly homework. She found that teachers hoped to adjust assignments to avoid overloading students, while the school plans to track students’ experiences throughout the fall. “If it turns out that the negative impacts are outweighing the positive impacts, we’ll shift gears and do something else,” she stated.
Even though Ms. Jacobs has already helped implement academic modifications in the first weeks of school, she still considers herself cautious about making changes in general. “I’m not someone who likes to deploy a solution until I’ve worked out all of the known challenges,” she said. Even when she has ideas of her own, Ms. Jacobs wants to first understand, “What are the other adults feeling? What are the students feeling?” Ms. Jacobs derives that caution from her hopes that Milton can maintain a “thriving academic program,” where students remain engaged and leave with the “competence, confidence, and character” she discussed at the Academic Dean Overview assembly.
Ms. Jacobs had set these goals based on the academic standards she associated with Milton before joining the school. Much of that understanding came from her wife, a 1998 Milton graduate, and her mother-in-law, who taught mathematics at Milton for twenty-five years. Her wife still describes how Milton taught her “not what to think, but how to think,” a standard Ms. Jacobs said she feels “a very deep responsibility to uphold.”
When asked about AI and academic integrity, Ms. Jacobs clarified, “I don’t think I’m ready to speak in specifics,” because she had not yet convened an Academic Discipline Committee. Instead, she explained what she believes disciplinary actions should accomplish. “I am a firm believer that the point of a consequence isn’t just to make someone feel bad, but it’s to change behavior,” she said. She wants adults to serve as “supports” and “partners” as students develop the skills to avoid repeating the choices that led to the violation. She also emphasized that students should not leave the process “feeling ostracized from the community,” adding that “ultimately what we want for you is to succeed.”
As she considers future changes, Ms. Jacobs has spent her first weeks learning more about teaching across Milton. After teaching science for much of her career, she set aside time during first-period blocks to visit other departments and observe their content and teaching methods: work she calls an “essential action item” for whatever decisions may follow. On one such visit, Ms. Jacobs observed an Advanced Computer Science class, in which she watched students debate different approaches and collectively contribute ideas toward a solution. After the visit, Ms. Jacobs recalled that she “could have stayed all day” and described the visits as “the most fun things I’ve done since I got here.”
As she continues her first year as the Dean of Academics, Ms. Jacobs plans to keep visiting classes and learn how Milton’s departments approach teaching and learning in order to inform her future policy decisions.