faculty PROFILE
Lucy Yeager BY HEATHER LAMBIE
to Canterbury. I traveled all over the world, studied with the best professors in my field, and I attribute that to Canterbury. So do I want that for Hayden?” Yeager says, of her 4-yearold son now enrolled in PK4 at Canterbury, “Yeah. Yeah I do.” Post-college, Yeager had several career shifts, moving to Virginia and then back to St. Pete to work for Pinellas County as an intern in Affordable Housing. She then spent five years doing race relations and youth empowerment work all over the country, but based out of St. Pete. Through that work she met with different groups of young people every day facilitating intense conversations. “I wanted to build relationships over time and work with the same kids,” Yeager said. “I felt I could have a stronger effect that way. The natural fit for that was teaching.”
When the announcement of Lucy Yeager’s promotion to Middle School Assistant Principal was posted on Canterbury’s Facebook page this summer (see right), the comments said it all. Yeager, who came to Canterbury first as a student in sixth grade, puts her all into her lessons and her students. “I was a scholarship kid at Canterbury,” says Yeager. “I never would be where I am today if it wasn’t for the generosity of the school.” Yeager graduated Canterbury in 1989 and attended Colby College. She credits Canterbury with opening her eyes to the world’s possibilities. “Here, it’s like, ‘The sky’s the limit! Figure out where you want to go and we’ll get you there.’ I went to one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation on a full scholarship thanks
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St. Petersburg being the small town that it is, it wasn’t much time before Ed Rawson, who was Dean of the Middle School at Canterbury at the time, heard about some volunteer work Yeager was doing locally, and that she was thinking of teaching. He reached out to her, and in 2000 she began teaching seventh and eighth grade Social Science at Canterbury. She also developed a Leadership class “which has since gone away,” she says. When asked whether she’d like to bring that class back she answered, “Our programs always change, and that’s OK. They should be based on the strengths of the people we have, on educational trends and on the needs kids have. Economics is one of the classes that replaced it. Our Middle School students need a strong foundation for economics. And we do talk about [leadership] as part of our culture through advisory and CAP.” Even more important to her than the