Celebrating an Era of Extraordinary Leadership

Celebrating an Era of Extraordinary Leadership at Beacon College

Dr. George J. Hagerty

Thirty-seven years ago, in Leesburg, Florida – a town once perfumed by the tang of citrus – a group of determined parents sowed the seeds of a rare school. One that would educate their kids and others like them who learned differently and give them the juice to compete for jobs with “neurotypical” counterparts who were hardly squeezed for college options. Further north, at that time, in North Easton, Massachusetts, Dr. George J. Hagerty was pulling doubles at his alma maters. He served as an administrator and associate professor at Stonehill College and as a lecturer at Harvard University, where as America’s oldest college the ivy had grown thick over its 350-plus years of history. Fast-forward 25 years. The ivy-steeped Dr. Hagerty fields a call from Beacon College, a school still sporting the new-college smell. His charge: grow the tiny school those visionary parents planted in the heart of Florida’s citrus belt into the full-bloom vision they dared for empowering neurodivergent students.

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