NEW HEAD OF SCHOOL
Path to Pingry Matt Levinson Becomes Pingry’s 16th Head of School
att Levinson P ’21 was a fast-rising New Jersey educator when, in 2007, he got an offer to head west. After a childhood and early adulthood on the East Coast—not to mention an entire professional career, until that point, spent in the Garden State—the invitation to serve in a leadership role at The Nueva School, a progressive, PreK-12 independent school for gifted learners, led his family and him to San Mateo, California. Suddenly, he was thrust into the heart of Silicon Valley at the very moment when social media and tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google were reaching stratospheric success. Not surprisingly, his students’ fluency in technology was light years ahead of most of their teachers, not to mention administrators. By his own admission, it was a fish-outof-water experience. In partnership with Nueva’s faculty and staff, systematizing the school’s approach to technology by building a 1:1 laptop program was an immediate priority. “We were building the bridge while we were crossing it,” he recalls. Embracing culture shock and challenge, however, exemplifies Mr. Levinson’s career trajectory. (To boot, he wrote a book during his time at Nueva—From Fear to Facebook: One School’s Journey— exploring his own learning curve and the ways in which parents
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