Alumni News & Notes 2005 Jarrett Bauer was featured in Forbes magazine on March 10 after his remote patient monitoring startup, Health Recovery Solutions (HRS), closed $70 million in Series C funding. HRS’ technology allows patients to record their vitals and share them directly with their clinicians via video or messaging.
2014 Harper Clark (pictured second from right) has been working for nearly two years as a public relations assistant at the Yunus Emre Institute in Washington D.C. The Institute is a Turkish cultural center under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and it serves as a cultural bridge between the Turkish and American people with events like concerts, art exhibitions, movie screenings, and language classes. Prior to this position, Harper graduated with his bachelor’s in international studies from Dickinson College. Harper believes Windward influenced him tremendously and fostered his passion for writing, language, and history. He said, “I simply must credit my amazing teachers at Windward who helped me work through my dyslexia and turned my learning difference in middle school into a learning advantage throughout my adulthood.” Harper continued on crediting Windward for spearheading his education which allowed him to be successful in high school, college, and his work at Yunus Emre. “To be a Windward alum is to be a lifelong learner with the mental skill set to not just see problems as challenges but also to tackle them from any angle.”
Stephen Flaxman ’88 Proudly Supports Windward as Alumnus and Alumni Parent of Natalie Flaxman ’25 In the early 1980s, a middle school boy in Long Island was “falling through the cracks” of the North Shore public school system. His school could no longer support his learning disability, and he would need to move away from his mom, stepfather, and brother and his native Nassau County to Harrison, NY. “Back then when I lived on Long Island, anything past Throgs Neck Bridge was considered upstate, and I didn’t know a soul,” recalls Stephen Flaxman ’88. Nearby the house he now lived in with his father, stepmother, and two stepbrothers was “a small school that could help him.” Little did he know, he would return to this now much larger school 30 years later with his daughter in tow. “There was a stigma about going to Windward in the 80s, so when I told someone I was going to Windward because I had a learning disability, they thought I was an idiot,” said Stephen. “Right now, if you tell a family that your kid is at Windward, they say ‘that place is amazing!’ But back then, that wasn’t the case for a school for kids with learning disabilities like me.” Stephen entered his first day of school nervously, knowing no one. As a newcomer to Windward’s high school [Ed. Note: Windward phased out grades 10-12 in 2004 to prioritize early identification and remediation], Stephen was one of seven students in the entire ninth grade and an entire school of 100 students in grades 1–12. Occupying the basement level of the first Windward campus at 13 Windward Avenue, high school students were in mixedage groupings and were taught by some stillfamiliar names, such as former Director of Admissions and Assistant Head of School Maureen Sweeney, who was Stephen’s math teacher, and Director of Health, Physical Education, and Athletics Marilyn Hunt, who was his PE teacher. “Windward really understood all of us, and the teachers knew our strengths and weaknesses,” recalled Stephen. “Everyone at Windward really put in great effort to get us all where we needed to be, and the attention was amazingly individualized.”
Note: At Windward, a student’s class year is the same as their high school graduation year.
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The Compass Spring/Summer 2021
