Item 202000935 - Interview with Stephen Eilertsen 1994 - 1997 Staff

Interview - Stephen Eilertson – Staff 1994 -97
Stephen was teaching at Sandown High when Rod Smith, the former headmaster then teaching English at
St David’s, introduced him to the school. Gary Norton who was the then acting headmaster employed
Stephen to implement the building and opening of the first computer centre shared by both the prep and
high schools. Paul Edey was eventually appointed the headmaster with Malcolm Williams as his deputy in
1995.
The IT department was successful and Stephen implemented the first Computer Literacy classes followed
by Computer Science. Computer Science was not taken seriously enough and was only taught as a 7th
subject for matric. The genius of St David’s revolved around its sporting achievements.
Stephen remembers his notable pupils such as Daniel Wright, now with Google who wrote the algorithm for
the programme that handles all advertising for Google (Google adwords). This sophisticated world class
software brings Google 90%of its income. Daniel was one of the top 3 boys that Stephen taught, was an
extreme computer nerd but commanded respect in his own way participating in sport at his own level.
Daniel also wrote a DOS based programme identifying birds in 1996 just for fun. He now lives in Canada
with his family.
Another boy was Rafiq Sarlie, 1996 who headed a team competing in a South African schools competition,
sponsored by Microsoft to see who could make the best website. Stephen felt that Rafiq should possibly
have followed Gladwell’s ideas and become an entrepreneur and not necessarily followed the conventional
route of school, matric and university. He wonders what happened to this extremely talented pupil.
Some of the teaching staff he remembers well , Lesley Henning a focused academic; Mitchel who spent 4
years in jail as a conscientious objector and was tortured, he taught RE and started the “Saint of the Day”
focusing on martyrs of their time. He is now head of a school in Soweto. In 1995, Debbi Cameron and
Stephen organised a tour to Europe for 30 boys. One of the cities visited was Amsterdam where a free
evening was planned. He recalled Adriano Iorio’s leadership skills in averting a crisis when one of the boys
bought some dagga and Adriano and some of the other boys persuaded him to get rid of it. Also Adriano, in
consultation with other boys on the tour, decided it would be wiser to spend the night in the hotel than roam
the streets of Amsterdam.
There was an incident when Stephen’s son Michael was in standard 9 when, prior to a long weekend, he
took his son in full uniform to a world preview of Star Wars during the school day. Malcolm Williams was
absolutely furious and Stephen believes that this incident influenced whether Michael became a prefect or
not.
Stephen is justifiably proud of his son, also a St David’s pupil who recently was awarded second place in
Africa at the annual SMME awards and has been incorporated into a painting of the 100 greatest people,
past, present and future in South Africa.
Stephen left St David’s to head up Ambassador College which was later integrated into Boston City
Campus. He now runs a family business investing in the internet, marketing companies using search terms
and key words and graphic design. He deals with small to larger companies and also runs a course entitled
“Dead Men with White Collars”.
JE October 2012