“We lost more than a hundred years of institutional knowledge with those retirements, and there’s no way to replace it,” Hughes says. “No one is going to come in and teach ceramics the way Bob did, and so you can’t really think about replacing those people because it’s not possible. Instead, you want to fill those positions with talented people who are going to bring their own point of view to the classroom.”
PROMISING CANDIDATES Since 2013, SPA has recruited and hired 29 new teachers, many of whom have filled roles occupied by long-tenured faculty members. In the past two years, nine new faces have joined the Lower School, including new Principal Holly Fidler. The Middle School has also hired nine new teachers since 2013, and the Upper School has hired eleven. The 29 new arrivals represent close to 30% of the school’s entire full-time teaching faculty, which numbers around 105. To find the best candidates for teaching positions, SPA calls on its own independent school connections, alumni networks, and even nation-wide search firms to seek out talented teachers with just the right
combination of content mastery and classroom experience to meet SPA’s growing needs. The most promising candidates arrive on campus for a rigorous interview process that includes meetings with search committee members, department heads, faculty members, and in the Upper School, a panel of students. While every faculty job description is different, Roberts says SPA’s goal in the process is always the same. “We go into faculty recruitment greedy and ambitious on behalf of the children in the school, and that’s really critical,” he says. “We want people who have the intellectual mastery of their content, a deep understanding of children and the classroom environment, and a commitment to education as a profession.” SPA’s search efforts have resulted in a new generation of faculty members who come to the school from a wide variety of backgrounds. Upper School biology teacher Andrea Bailey, who joined the school in fall 2014, had been researching baboon behavior in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in preparation for a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota before she started at SPA. Grade 5 teacher Kristin Johnson (a 2014 hire), and Middle School math teacher Natalie McElligott (2013) got their first tastes of teaching through the Teach for America program, while Grade 1/2 teacher Margo Kurth came to the Lower School in 2013 with 14 years of teaching experience, most of it in communities with high rates of poverty. Several new hires have come from first careers outside of education: Max Delgado got his career start working in family therapy settings in California, while Middle School language arts and social studies teacher Bobak Razavi pursued a career as an attorney in a large law firm before turning to teaching. While the new faculty are a diverse group, Middle School Principal Dr. Jill Romans says they do have a critical characteristic in common: the ability to embrace and support change. “All the teachers we’ve hired in the last two years are coming into departments where there’s a lot of change in the curriculum and in the discipline as a whole, and they’re really jumping in and providing their own ideas,” she says. “This is a group of teachers who don’t just sit back and say what’s good is good enough—they’re bringing new perspectives to what we do every day.” Roberts says the experience these teachers bring from public
Clockwise: Amber Ruel, Philip de Sa e Silva, Andrea Bailey, Daryn Lowman, Ned Heckman, and Diane Mancini.