Dear UHS Community,
HEAD OF SCHOOL
As I navigate my final year at San Francisco University High School, I have been spending a lot of time reflecting on the entirety of my journey and the serendipitous circumstances of my start. Late in September of 1993, I got an unexpected phone call from Bill Bullard, then the Academic Dean of San Francisco University High School, urging me to take a twoweek position as a substitute physics teacher. I was reluctant to accept the offer, as I had never taught high school before, but Bill was very persuasive. I could never have imagined the profound impact that this phone call, and my first experiences in the UHS classroom, would have on the rest of my life.
I vividly remember the remarkable experience of my first days of my teaching here. I had never encountered a community like this one: thoughtful and caring students and colleagues who, even though none of them knew me, seemed to be fully invested in my success. It was so unlike any professional or academic experience I had had before that I eagerly signed on for any other subbing roles that became available. Now, 32 years later, I am still here, and still in awe of this school, the people it brings together, and the culture that emerges from that mix.
It has been an amazing privilege to be part of this community of scholars. I have had incredible role models here, both in my colleagues, who are passionate educators and leaders of remarkable skill, and in my students, who have been some of the most ambitious, courageous, and elaborate thinkers I have ever known. I have gotten to know many UHS parents, whose examples have made me a better parent myself. And there is so much joy here; people take great pleasure in what they dedicate themselves to, and genuinely enjoy each other. I can honestly say that I have laughed, and learned new things, every day that I have been at this school.
An important part of the culture of UHS that has kept me inspired and invested all of this time is the commitment to growth and improvement on all levels. Students are ambitious about their own learning, and there is a deep tradition of faculty professional growth. And the school is itself a learner, constantly striving to improve. UHS has grown and changed in wonderful ways over the last 30 years, and I am grateful to have been part of that evolution. The school’s commitment to equity and social justice, one of its founding ideals, has become even more explicit and central to all that we do. And I can say that we are now a better school for every student who joins us, and we serve a much broader diversity of students than ever before.
Two years ago, our school, like many, faced a significant challenge when the events in Israel and Gaza caused division within our community. In response, last year we developed comprehensive policies and frameworks to ensure everyone’s safety while maintaining our commitment to student learning on urgent and controversial issues. Rooted in our Statement
NASIF ISKANDER
on Equity and Community, this approach is fundamentally aimed at fostering thoughtful, productive discourse that encompasses a wide range of differing perspectives. By prioritizing student freedom of expression and providing teachers with robust scaffolding, our new framework ensures that students can explore diverse viewpoints and analyze information, ultimately supporting critical thinking and empathy, and continuing to foster the courageous and independent thinkers that UHS has long been known for.
Our campus has also been significantly transformed, with the opening of the beautiful California Street building, and the ongoing renovation work that our expanded footprint has made possible. A key element of the new campus design is the presence of comfortable spaces to gather in each building of the school, essential for developing the kinds of relationships that are part of the foundation of a UHS education. And as we upgrade our physical spaces, we are beginning to think more imaginatively about how we can use space and time to support deeper learning. In response to the profound changes over the last decade in both our concept of attention and our relationship to information, we are designing some experimental classroom and course structures. As we roll these pilot programs out, it will be exciting to discover what new opportunities they open up for our students and the school.
And I am thrilled to be welcoming in our next head of school, Max Delgado, who is so well aligned with the values, heart, and purpose of UHS. Max will start in July, and I believe that he is the perfect leader for the next chapter of the school’s evolution. He and I are already working together to ensure a seamless and successful transition, as he prepares to step aboard this fast-moving train.
As I prepare to step off the train, I will be forever grateful for my time here, and for all of the ways that UHS has shaped my life. This is where great role models and mentors helped me learn to be an educator and a school leader. This is where ambitious students have pushed me to understand the nature of the universe more deeply and clearly. It was even through the UHS community that I met my wife, and this is where I got to witness my talented co-workers guide my son through a truly transformational learning experience. I will always be proud to have counted myself among the faculty and staff of UHS.
Nasif Iskander P ‘22
Interim Head of School
REFLECTIONS ON NASIF ISKANDER
BY KATE GARRETT
Kate Garrett Director of College Counseling
A little more than 30 years ago, on the day before classes began in the fall, I ran into Nasif Iskander in the courtyard of Upper Campus. We had only met briefly at the opening faculty/staff retreat, but he immediately stopped and asked me how I was doing. I told him that I was fine, and excited to start teaching English the next day . . . but that I kept having this recurring nightmare where I was wandering around the school, unable to find my classroom. I intended the last remark to be funny, but Nasif must
have sensed the incipient panic beneath my light tone. This was the first of many times that I witnessed and benefited from Nasif’s uncanny ability to read people.
“Has anyone given you a tour of the school?” he asked. They had not. “Well, let’s do that right now!” Nasif said, dropping whatever it was he had intended to do in the faculty room. He spent the next hour leading me through the front and back hallways, explaining the quickest ways to get to and from All-School Meeting, and showing me the basement of Lower Campus, which bore a shocking resemblance to a parking garage (at the time, I didn’t know that’s exactly what the building had been in a previous life). In 1995, the classroom numbering system seemed completely random; if I remember correctly, what is now room U-205 was room 19, and today’s M-202 was room 12, or maybe it was the other way around? In any case, as our tour progressed, I realized that Nasif’s spontaneous act of kindness had probably saved me from seeing my recurring nightmare come true.
That day, I learned that Nasif is intuitive, generous, really fun to be with, and deeply knowledgeable about UHS. Over the ensuing decades, I’ve come to know his unshakeable integrity, his keen intelligence, and his fierce dedication to the mission, vision, and values of this school.
Nasif has always cared about building and sustaining community at UHS. As a Dean and Head of School, doing that has been the focus of almost every initiative he has spearheaded, from redesigning our approach to professional development to creating our mentoring program and more. But the seeds of this commitment were evident in the mid-’90s, too. In that era, when email hadn’t yet been invented and there was just one telephone in every shared office space, the faculty and staff devised an ingenious way of communicating. In our cramped lounge, near the ceiling, a thin pipe ran the length of the room, and we’d tape notices and updates to that pipe. When I encountered a flyer inviting anyone interested to
join “The Committee," it took me a while to figure out what on earth this vaguely named group could possibly do—especially with a 4 p.m. on Friday meeting time. The penny dropped when I read the small tagline at the bottom of the page: “The Committee: We don’t take minutes. We take hours.” This may well have been Nasif’s first role as a committee chair, though certainly not his last.
Nasif has been a senior administrator for the last 20 years, so most everybody has some sense of the enormous impact he has made as a Dean and Head. But many may be unaware of what we lost when we let him leave full-time teaching. Nasif is one of the most gifted educators I have ever encountered—creative, warm, unendingly patient, and possessing absolute confidence in every student’s ability to succeed. I saw all those qualities firsthand when I joined a three-week science program we piloted one summer, in an effort to shore up the skills of some of our struggling ninthgraders. Nasif led us through creative lessons and activities to break down the concepts and make what seemed ungraspable come clearly into focus. I remember us clambering up from the physics lab in the basement of Lower Campus to the gym on the top floor, and laying out sheet after
sheet of gridded paper so that we could ultimately comprehend just how enormous the number 1,000,000 is. A few years later, several of the same students who were in that pilot were seniors in Nasif’s astronomy elective. There, they figured out a solution to a challenging design problem and built a sundial that tells “civil time,” the time told by clocks, rather than solar time, as most sundials do. We believe it may be the only one in existence, and you can see it to this day in the courtyard of Upper Campus.
Much as we miss having him in the classroom full-time, I think we’d miss having him as a school leader even more. Nasif is a consummate big-picture thinker. He is not afraid to dream, to imagine what could be and then do the hard, often thankless work to bring a vision into reality. The results of Nasif’s leadership are woven into the very fabric of University; you can find traces of his genius and his tireless work in virtually every aspect of our school. But Nasif isn’t just a visionary. He is a practical problemsolver. No issue is too big, or too small, for Nasif to give it his full attention, most often coming up with an elegant and unexpected solution. More frequently than one might imagine, that solution involves data. Nasif absolutely
loves data, and one of his most consequential contributions to UHS is the way he continues to find innovative ways to use it in service of our mission.
But even more than data, Nasif loves people. When he interacts with you, he is so fully present that you feel like you’re the only person on earth, and like time is abundant. To be able to create that experience, day in and day out, for more than thirty years, in an environment as fast-paced as University High School, is nothing short of astonishing. But that’s what Nasif Iskander does— whether with a confused student, a concerned parent, or a brandnew teacher looking a little lost in the courtyard.
