Q&A: Moorestown Friends School Headmaster Larry Van Meter

Bio: Laurence (Larry) Van Meter grew up in Moorestown on Kings Highway and attended from pre-K through 12th grade. He moved away after his 18th birthday and spent the first half of his professional career in various outdoorsy jobs, including a stint as a state forest ranger with the U.S. Forest Service and spent time in the maple sugaring research program at the University of Vermont (“not a typical thing for a South Jersey boy,” he said). He got back into teaching in the '80s and spent several years as headmaster of the Darrow School in New York before becoming head of school at Moorestown Friends in 2001.

Moorestown Patch: What made you decide to come back to Moorestown and Moorestown Friends School?
Headmaster Larry Van Meter: I had such a great experience here as a student. My sisters went to this school. My mother was on the board here years ago. I love Moorestown. So when the opportunity came up to be a headmaster at my old school, that was sufficiently tempting to pull me away from the school in upstate New York. It was wishing to be reinvolved with a place that meant so much to me as a kid.

Patch: Share a favorite memory from your time as a student at Moorestown Friends.
Van Meter: One that really stands out is—we do, and we still do this, a mock political primary, a primary election. Although back then it was a mock convention. It was a very big deal. And my senior project was to manage that whole process, which involved virtually the whole school. It was just an incredibly indelible memory.

Patch: Your bio on the website says you’re into woodworking. Where does your interest come from and what are you working on right now?
Van Meter: The interest started right here because we had, and still do, a very active woodshop program. So I took an interest in it then, although I sort of put it on hold initially cause I went off and get a regular undergraduate degree in history. But then ultimately I went back to it and got a degree in woodworking and furniture design … Right now I’m working on a coffee table that is of my own design. More typically, I have three of four things going at once and I end up not getting anything done.

Patch: Give us an update on the latest with the former Acme building on Chester Avenue.
Van Meter: Since we no longer need it for school purposes—since we were able to acquire the Greeleaf subsequent to our acquiring the Acme—we’re looking at proposals from various entities (nonprofit and commercial businesses) to rent the space, and we’re also considering possible school uses. And we’re also considering the possibility of selling it. So really just the whole array of possibilities is open at this point.

Patch: Each fall you sit down and talk to your seniors and ask them if they were headmaster, what would they do. What’s the best piece of advice you ever got from them?
Van Meter: I guess the best piece of advice I’ve gotten, and I do get this repeatedly, is, even as we need to change—and they embrace change, especially in technology—that the core values of the school remain the same. They want to be able to come back 25 years from now and feel that this is still the same school they went to. And they’re talking about values in that case more than anything else.