Dan Soller

Dan S. Soller, a resident of Frederick, Maryland, was President of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover, New Hampshire from 2020-2022.

Early Life and Education

Soller was born October 23, 1956 and raised in Hopewell, VA. His father was an engineer with Allied Chemical. He received an associates degree from Richard Bland College, a bachelors degree from James Madison University in 1979, and a masters degree in education from Southern Illinois University in 1981.

Career

Soller’s first job in education was as a gym teacher at Southern Illinois University. He then worked at Mount Saint Mary's in Maryland from 1981-1986 where he was assistant dean of student housing and maintenance. Later he had jobs at Fairleigh Dickinson and LaRoche College. He was director of food service at Catholic University in 1989. He returned to Mount Saint Mary's in 2004. He was an Executive Vice President of Mount Saint Mary's when he was fired in 2015. After that Soller worked at St. Johns Catholic Prep in Frederick, MD and the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he managed dining services. He became president of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover, New Hampshire on February 1, 2020.

Tenure at St. Thomas Aquinas

Soller’s tenure at St. Thomas Aquinas was marked by high staff turnover, a decline in student enrollment, and a resulting weakening of the school’s financial position. Soller’s arrogance and autocratic leadership style quickly alienated staff, parents, and students. Within six months of his arrival, the core of the school’s administrative team (the principal, the assistant principal, the athletic director, and the entire business staff) left. One of his first decisions was to turf a female member of the staff out of her office to claim it for himself. He insisted on having a free food account at the school cafeteria as a perq where the rest of the staff had to pay for their food. He used one of the school's custodians and bus drivers as his personal chauffer, riding in the back of his own vehicle when the staff member drove him places like he was Miss Daisy. Morale plummeted. A third of the teaching staff, the entire school counseling office, a second athletic director, and more than half of the athletic coaches turned over by the end of Soller’s first year. Among the departed were both of the school's PhD faculty, who took positions at other schools. There are Dunkin' Donuts stores with higher staff retention. He had a chronic tendency to call people by the wrong name, signaling he didn’t care enough about people to bother learning their names. He was generally unaware of and uninterested in things like whether a member of the staff was married, had children or grandchildren, or how old those children might be. He often began conversations by talking about the weather, and ended them with a dismissive, “Let’s move on.” The situation did not improve in his second year, when more began to question Soller's sometimes months-long physical absences from the school and general failure to pull his weight and earn his salary by doing real work. Soller handled a disagreement with a longtime, heretofore friendly abutter so badly the situation devolved into a lawsuit against the school, currently pending in court. Student enrollment declined as the school recruited its smallest incoming freshman class since the 1970s. On June 24, 2022, at the conclusion of the school year, the school’s Board of Directors announced Soller had been fired. Soller was the classic seagull outsider: Flew in, made a lot of noise, ate all the food, pooped on everything, then flew off. Some concluded Dan Soller is a con artist and a fraud.

Personal Life

Soller met his first wife, Laurie Ann Sargent-Soller, in the early 1980s when he was on the staff at Mount Saint Marys and she was a student there. The couple had two sons, Ian and Dylan, and later divorced. Soller’s second wife, Jennifer, is 19 years younger than Dan. Jennifer has a daughter, Addison, from a previous relationship. Soller participates in karate. The Sollers live in Frederick, Maryland.