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Principal:
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I am the son of two very talented and committed teachers who were both very invested in progressive and alternative education. Together, they started a school in Philadelphia just a few years before the first iteration of LACS was formed, and both share a similar philosophy and ethos. Growing up, I had many teachers and classmates predict that one day I would become a teacher. I resisted following in my parents footsteps, and explored various other career paths, but decided to partner with my father in co-founding a small democratically-run school in Maine, where I taught for several years before moving on to serve different leadership positions at schools in Portland, Maine and Vermont. In 2004, I was invited to come to Ithaca with my lovely wife Karen and our two sons, Aaron and Isaac, to assume the role of principal of Lehman Alternative Community School.
During my seven years at LACS, I have tried to build upon the rich legacy that my predecessor Dr. Dave (Lehman) helped create and have been very fortunate to maintain a close relationship with him, his wife Judy and their family. I am proud to be involved with a strong consortium of 28 other New York schools that worked collaboratively to gain a waiver from the high stakes Regents exams which enable us to instead provide our students with more rigorous and relevant performance-based assessments that require higher order thinking and creative problem solving skills. The school is now negotiating with State Ed. officials to secure an exemption from a mandate to issue numerical grades since the school has always had a philosophically grounded approach of providing qualitative narrative evaluations detailing students’ growth and experience.
I am very proud of LACS’s commitment to service learning, sustainability and social justice. I am fortunate to work among some of the most creative and dedicated colleagues I have known, and who embody what it is to be life-long learners. I am also routinely impressed and humbled by the conviction and class of our students and the ideals they possess to help foster a healthier and more peaceful, equitable world.
As principal of this amazing and special school, my hope is that that I am able to contribute in some way the positive impact on the lives of those involved with LACS, as well as within the wider community. There are times when I truly feel that I do some good work and make some differences that allow me to look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and see a face of integrity, and, of course, then there are other moments where I realize I have much to learn—but either way, I still always find myself eager to get up each morning and try to get it right and do what I do better than before.
Publications:
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