ALUMNI
Lisa Sandine Schuba ’83 2013 Alumni Achievement Award Recipient Growing — vegetables, programs, and particularly children — is a passion for Lisa Sandine Schuba ’83, a longtime and award-winning educator whose positive karma would sprout any seedling. Yet when Lisa graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and moved back home to Connecticut, she had no plan to pursue teaching. Teaching ran in her family, certainly: her father, Bob Sandine, is a former Foote teacher and administrator. And she needed a job, some kind of job, so she accepted a position working with Foote’s mixed-age group, biding her time until she could figure out what she really wanted to do. One year in, she had fallen in love with teaching. Twenty-three years later, it is a love affair that is still blooming. Lisa also understands the essence of nurturing growth, even in the presence of what seem like insurmountable challenges. She was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was very young, and credits her family for regularly reminding her of her worth
and teachers at Foote for using savvy instructional strategies and shovelfuls of encouragement to overcome her disability. She won Foote’s Margaret B. Hitchcock Prize in ninth grade, given to students who overcome academic challenges through diligence and effort. That same motivation led to her being selected to the Liberty School’s Dyslexia Hall of Fame in 2009. “Because of this,” Lisa says, “I have always been sensitive to students and families who struggle with learning differences.” Lisa sees that teaching children is similar to growing a garden, and she is literal in her translation of that philosophy. While at Foote, she applied for entry into a master’s program through the Shady Hill School and Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and earned her master’s certificate in elementary education. She took a job in New Haven teaching third and fourth grade at the Barnard School on Derby Avenue, where she acquired enough
Reunion Chairs CLASS OF 1953 Robert Wing CLASS OF 1958 Eric Berger Barry Stratton Kerry Triffin CLASS OF 1963 Kathy Arnstein Judith Hull George Reigeluth Rusty Tunnard
CLASS OF 1968 Rob Clark Cathy Smith Cuthell Doug Davie Elizabeth Prelinger Leland Torrence
CLASS OF 1988 Amy Caplan Georgia Crowley Lieber
CLASS OF 1973 Peter Hicks John Persse
CLASS OF 1998 Kathleen Murphy Galo Elisabeth Sacco
CLASS OF 1978 Anne Brownstein Nell DeVane CLASS OF 1983 Brinley Ford Ehlers
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CLASS OF 1993 Abbie Paine
Lisa Sandine Schuba ’83
grant money to start an organic gardening program. The program took off, so much so that Barnard grew to become an environmental magnet school, with a greenhouse on every floor. She kept going. After teaching every grade but fifth in schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Colorado, she was promoted to principal of Animas Valley Elementary School in Durango, Colo. in 2008. There, she encouraged healthy eating — challenging when the number of students qualifying for free and reduced-priced lunch was increasing each year — by starting a food backpack program. She wanted to combat food insecurity, brought on typically by poverty — by filling up backpacks with good food and sending them home with the students who needed them. The program required hours of extra paperwork and checking in on the families, but Lisa knew it was helping. Foote Prints